Would you feel like that? Or would you stare out upon the world into which you were contemptuously tossed with dull, hating, revengeful eyes, suspicious of all men, hopeless of good, but resolved to get even, so far as you might, by plying the evil trades which your life of slavery had taught you? Would you behave like Christ upon the Cross, or like an ordinary man? Convicts are ordinary men, except that they are often, to begin with, diseased men, or hemmed in by conditions so untoward as to make an honest life ten or a hundred times harder than it ever was for you. But you did not scruple to put this diseased or unfortunate version of yourself into the jail cauldron, to stew there with others like or worse than himself, for doing what, in most cases, he actually could not help doing; and when at last he was ejected like stale refuse, you were indignant because his looks did not please you, because he bore upon him the stains and the stench which the cauldron had fastened on him, because he did not, in the teeth of the secret service, the postoffice inspectors, the detective bureaus and the police, at once begin to lead an honest life and support the commonwealth. Do you say that none of this was your doing? But it is your doing, in just so far as you have not striven in every way open to you to extirpate the doing of it by this representative government. The wonderful thing--the unexpected and pathetic thing--is, that so many convicts come out of jail in a kindly and inoffensive state of mind. They are men who were born weak, humble and yielding, never esteemed themselves, were always ready to take a back seat and give precedence to others. They do not understand the rights of the matter, but suppose it must be all right, that penal servitude is the proper thing for them, that laws were made by wise men and must be enforced. They admit their stealings and their trickery, and blame themselves, observing regretfully that they didn't seem able to help it. Next time--if they get a next time--they will try very hard to be straight, and perhaps they will succeed after all! There was little J., in the barbers' gang, a cheerful, smiling, sweet tempered fellow, who had served I know not how many terms for small larcenies and turpitudes. "I've always been such a damned little fool," he would say to me, as he smoothed off my chin. "The boys would get round me and rope me into some scheme, and I didn't seem able to keep clear of 'em. But I'm goin' to be let out again next July, and I've made up my mind I'll never be seen here again! No, sir! Oh, I've been talkin' with the chaplain, too, and I've been reading the Bible, and all that, and I'm going to be a good man. Yes, sir! I've had my fling, and I'm through with it; when the boys get round me and tell me of some easy job, I'll tell 'em, No! Not for J."