Prisons mean social selfishness, the disowning of our own flesh and blood. They segregate visible consequences of social disease; but the disease is invisibly present in all parts of the body corporate, and can no more be healed by cutting off the visible part than we can heal small pox by cutting out the pustules. Prisons are not the right remedy; they inflame and disseminate the poison we would be rid of and prevent any chance of cure. The soul of all crime is self-seeking in place of neighborly good will; we send men to prison to get them out of our way, and that is criminal self seeking and ill will to the neighbor--delegating to hirelings our own proper business. In attempting thus selfishly to extirpate crime, we commit the crime least of all forgivable--the denial of human brotherhood and responsibility. For that crime, no law sends us to prison; yet it is no sentimental notion, but the truth, that it is a crime worse than those for which we imprison men. Prisons are brimful of men less guilty before God than is the society that condemned them. You and I are not excused because we are not society--we are society. Society is not numbers but an idea--a mutual relation; we cannot shift our blame to people in the next street. "Am I my brother's keeper?" was an argument used long ago, and its reception was not encouraging. Thoughts like these pass through a convict's mind when he discovers that he is on the last leg of his disastrous voyage. He then begins to see the whole matter in its general relations; what use was served? who is the better for it? "Prisons make a good man bad and a bad man worse," is the way I often heard the men at Atlanta put it. The situation, entire and in detail, is preposterous and futile. Grown men, from all ranks of life, or all degrees of intelligence and education, are herded promiscuously, and treated now like wild beasts, now like children. Discipline, in any condition of life, is a good thing, and no people need discipline more than we do; but in prison, discipline means punishment, and there is no discipline in the right sense of the word. A man is "disciplined" when he is starved, or clubbed, or put in the hole, or deprived of his good time.