But can we afford to trust ex-convicts? Must we not keep a strict eye on them? If the strict eye were also a friendly one, it might be of some avail. But our hand is against them, and we need not wonder that theirs is against us. Not only are we their enemies when they emerge from jail, but (as has been repeated interminably by every investigator who has been qualified to speak on the subject) jails are the best and only schools of crime. In other words, we first educate men to be criminals by putting them in places where they can learn nothing else, and then we keep them criminals by shutting against them, when freed, every opportunity to earn food and lodging in legitimate ways. And then we complain that they are not to be trusted. Neither can men fed on poisons be trusted to be well. Jail life is poisonous; I think it was Judge McLeland who said, last summer, "Our million dollar reformatories offer university courses in bestiality and crime; it is as logical to send a man to jail to make him better as to shut him up in a garbage-can to improve his digestion. Forty per cent. of those who go to jail, go back again," he added; "one man went back one hundred and seventy-six times. Others are sent because they are poor and cannot pay a fine, and they are there made real criminals." An instance of this occurred in a Georgia chain-gang while I was in Atlanta. A man was sentenced for playing cards for money. He could not pay the $45 fine demanded, and in default, was sent to the chain-gang for eight months. He wore stripes, night and day, and if contumacious, was whipped by the guards. His work was in a stone quarry, a deep hole, into which the summer sun poured an insufferable heat. He was forced to do his work with a 49-pound hammer in that funnel-shaped pit, at a hundred degrees in the shade--if he could find any shade. One day he told the guard he was sick, and could not work any longer. The guard shifted the quid in his mouth and remarked that he ought to have said so that morning. But the man meant what he said, and proved it by dying a day or two later. Probably you may have played cards for money at some time in your life. Did it ever occur to you that you merited torture and death for it? Or do you think that, after such an experience (if you survived it), or after being twice arrested for the same crime and kept in jail five years three times over, or after doing time for a crime you never committed--that you would come out at the end of it all, smiling, full of energy and enterprise, loving your neighbor, eager for honest toil? Would you embrace Mr. Moyer (or whomever your jailer was) and tell him, with tears of gratitude, that you could never repay him for his warm-hearted, big-brained care of you--the starving, the dungeoning, the clubbing, and all the rest of the university course?