Prison officials, in their treatment of prisoners, are not actuated by love, but by indifference to suffering, or by animosity and brutality, or by desire of profit, and therefore their work is impious and wicked. And the longer they hold their office, the more hardened do they become to the spectacle of suffering and outrage; the more heedless of justice and mercy do they grow. They grow to disbelieve in any human truth and goodness; all men are to them criminals actual or potential; breathing and dwelling amidst crime, it enters into their own blood and temper. They will have their debt to pay; but neither may those escape who ignorantly or carelessly appointed them to office and hold them there--the Government, and the nation which creates Government as its representative. Ignorance does not excuse; knowledge on these subjects is a sacred duty. Man cannot break the bonds of his brotherhood with man; the blood shed will be required of him, and the usury of misery and tears. "Throw him to the lions!--serve him right!" Most of us have joined in that barbarous cry upon occasion. But some of us have sickened at the slaughter, and are for paring the lions' claws, or at least exhorting them to roar less savagely, and to devour their prey in secret. But the lions, with their attendant hyenas and jackals, have so long been accepted as indispensable to the order and majesty of the State, that no one likes to stand up to his God-given intuitions, and demand the abolition of the whole prison circus. We hardly realize that the harm criminals do society cannot equal the harm that society does to itself by its handling of them and attitude toward them. The circus must go on, of course; but--let us ameliorate its coarser features! Let us make our prisons hygienic--larger cells, drainage, air, exercise; let us select nice, kindly persons for guards and wardens; let us give the convicts useful industrial occupation, which will not only keep them happy and sane, but pay the cost of their keep to a tender-hearted but economic state; let us even be very venturesome, and--with reasonable precautions--put the men on their honor, suffer them to run out a little way and labor in the free sunshine, upon their promising to remember that they are not really free, and to return at night to their cages. And after they have served their terms, and the souls within them are moribund or dead, let us get or solicit jobs for them, and at all events keep a sentimental eye on them for a while. All this--only let us keep our prisons! For think what would happen if those terrible creatures were let loose upon us, to keep on murdering and robbing us with impunity! Remember that they are a class apart, unlike ourselves, whose perverted nature, though it may be lulled by gentleness and tact, can never become truly human.