When jails are razed and their inmates let forth, they are not to be left to shift for themselves. They are to be taken heartily and unreservedly into the community, made a part of us, protected against want and against their sinister propensities, given work to do, taught how to work, compensated for it, and shown by constant example the wholesomeness and beauty of good and decent living. Will they rob and murder their hosts? Such calamities will no doubt occur here and there; there have been martyrs in all great causes, and will be in this. But blood so shed will not be wasted. And if the nation, or a considerable part of it, turns resolutely and persistently to its mighty task, it will not fail in the end. There is nothing original or startling about the Golden Rule as a proposition; but it will seem to tear us to pieces when it is put in practise. But that will do us no harm; we have been long enough compacted together in error and selfishness. The revolution will come; it is still for us to say whether it shall be outward and terrible, or spiritual and benign. Penal imprisonment and all that it implies is not sane nor safe; and the cry, To the lions--serves him right!--belongs to the dark ages, and not to the future.--_Reprinted by kind permission from Hearst's Magazine for February, 1914_. THE WALL The long, high wall that shuts out life-- That death-in-life holds in its coil-- Its height and reach cannot prevent The sky, nor check the immortal strife We wage with hungry Fate, nor spoil Our desperate hope, nor circumvent Dreams, that redeem our aimless toil! What Fear and Ignorance have built Shall pass, with Ignorance and Fear, Before the breath of Love; and men, Casting aside the mask of guilt That baffled, mocked and cursed them here, Shall know each other once again! --And must we die, release so near! _Written in Atlanta Penitentiary, October, 1913_.) End of Project Gutenberg's The Subterranean Brotherhood, by Julian Hawthorne