The wardens and guards do not prevent these companionships; whether or not they try to prevent them cannot be affirmed; but to my mind it is plain that they could not prevent it, try as they might. It is an evil inherent in prisons and ineradicable. As long as we have prisons, we shall see judges like Thomas Baker's sending boys to jail for such "crimes" as his, there to stay for fifteen years, more or less, and there to be changed from innocence into diabolism. But Thomas was not innocent, you say, but guilty. What is guilt? I find him innocent of the guilt of standing inactive by and seeing that cruel fist strike his blind mother's beloved face. Anything unnatural seems unreal. I remarked some time ago that when I was sitting in the court room being tried on charges sworn to by certain postoffice officials, the dull and sordid scenes would sometimes vanish before me, and I would say to myself, "It is an illusion--what is really taking place is very different from this appearance." This thought often recurred while I was in prison. At meal times, the men would file in and take their places at the tables; anon, the meal over, they would rise and file out--men whom I knew, creatures like myself, slaves of an arbitrary power acting in accordance with principles long since known to be false and mischievous. And I would see men whom I knew, men like myself, jeered, insulted, clubbed, dragged to the hole. I would see the dead bodies of men whom I knew, men like myself, rattled out of the gate to the dumping ground and dropped there and forgotten--men with wives and children still living or dead in poverty and shame, their pleas unheard and their wrongs unrighted. I would contemplate the long rows of steel cells, cages for me and men like myself, locking us in for months and years and lifetimes, for an example to others and for the protection of society against our menace. I would glance, as I passed, at the aimless toilers in the workshops, standing or squatting in the foul atmosphere under the eye and rifle of the guard. I would consider that this dismal and inhuman pageant was going on age after age as a cure for crime--while crime, all the while, was increasing by percentages so astounding that we seek through immigration statistics and records of increase of population to account for it--and in vain. And I would tell myself, once more, that the thing must be an illusion; it was inconceivable that an intelligent nation should tolerate it. If you found that you were taking bichlorid of mercury by mistake for a sleeping draught, would you go on taking it? or would you clamor for an antidote, waylay doctors for help, and disturb the discreet serenity of hospitals for succor? But the nation, made up of such as you, continues its prison nostrum, which slays a million for bichlorid of mercury's one.