This writer's statements seem a trifle emphatic, do they not? May we not surmise that they are motived by some personal grudge? have we not heard an old adage--"No thief e'er felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law?" Would it not be prudent to take all this with a grain of salt? Shall we be driven to rash measures by the objurgations of an ex-convict? Of the right or wrong of my conviction and sentence I am not to speak here, nor do they specially interest me now, except as illustrations of the working of the machine. But personal grudge against officials of my prison I have none. I was treated with consideration and lenity. I came out in better condition upon the whole than I went in, both of body and spirit, though nothing would have been easier than to murder me under the forms of routine prison discipline. What was the reason of this? I was never informed; I might guess at it, but I don't know. Nevertheless, the sweetness and light of the prison dispensation as regarded myself did not blind my eyes or stop my ears to what was being done to others, not elected to dreams thus beautiful. I saw men beside whom I sat at meat or labored in the vineyard, fading and failing day by day; I saw some of them die of broken hearts or broken bodies; I heard their stories and was certified of their truth; I saw the cart rattle out of the gate with the pine box containing the body of the man who could only thus find freedom; I visited the graves of those who had been needlessly and sometimes wantonly slain. I could not ignore these things because I myself escaped them. After a few months of durance, I went forth free, leaving behind me men as good as I or better, sentenced to serve years, lifetimes, under treatment which I cannot imagine myself as surviving at all. My grudge is deep, but no personal one. I shall not at present discuss Government measures of so-called mitigation--suspended sentence, parole, indeterminate sentence. In the intention of their originators they may have appeared beneficent; in practise, they proved sinister and abominable means to cruelty and despotism. There can be no compromises with hell. But can I pretend to solve the age-long problem of the right handling of crime in the community? I am not wiser than my fellows, but I have felt and known at first hand more of certain grievous wrongs than most of them have, and even those who have known and felt may not possess the opportunity or facility to speak that I have. I must say what is in me, and leave to the collective judgment of the nation, and to the further teaching of time, what shall be changed, abolished, and done.