A man who is sick and sad day after day and year after year, and conscious of his impotence to amend his state, is in no mood for moral reform. Much of the sickness might be averted if the medical treatment at the outset of disease were such as to encourage the patients to avail themselves of advice. But each man, as he comes up in the sick line every morning, is met with indifference or insults; he is presumed to be a malingerer unless he can prove himself genuine on the instant; the only other recourse is to become so sick as to be beyond help of medicine, and then, taken belated to the hospital, to die outright. The consequence is that the men will suffer silently in their cells rather than appeal to the doctor; and many diseases become ineradicable from this cause. Even a convict, when he is miserable and weak from illness, shrinks from facing rough and unsympathetic handling and words in the doctor's room, with a good chance of being sent to the hole if he remonstrates. The doctor of a prison could be its good angel, if he would. XIV THE POLICY OF FALSEHOOD The subterranean brotherhood waxes curiously indignant over being lied to by prison officials. For why should criminals, whose success in their trade must depend largely on lies either spoken or acted, be resentful when they are paid back in their own base coin? I am inclined to think that the anomaly may be due to some survival in prisoners of the old belief, that honor and fair play do, or should, exist in officers of justice; although their own experience should admonish them that officers of prisons, at least, cultivate the art and practise of fighting the devil with fire (as we say), and so far from ever thinking of keeping faith with a convict, study the art of deceiving and hoodwinking him, and appear to derive no small amusement from their results. Indeed, any tendency on the part of a guard or other official in a prison to deal honestly and above board with their charges would at once awaken suspicion of his loyalty to the "system," and his superiors would be apt to improve the first opportunity of getting rid of him.