More, there was at least one man among my companions there who contrived, by devices which I never sought to fathom, to pass the immitigable outer gates themselves every day, attend to his business in the outer world for as many hours as might serve, returning quietly in time for last roll-call. He took a keeper with him, of course, but only in order to assuage possible anxiety on the part of those responsible for his security; and one cannot help suspecting that as soon as the two found themselves under the free sky, the keeper betook himself to some friendly saloon, moving-picture palace, or other inviting retreat, and only saw the other again when they met by appointment in their trysting place. It was safe enough no doubt; the prisoner would hardly think it worth his while to attempt actual disimprisonment; he was content to sleep at night in his cosy and comfortable cell. But the Moral Powers who live in white waistcoats and saintly collars might have been restless in their innocent sleep, had they known what things are practicable under the austere name of incarceration in the City Prison. Revolving these matters, I could only come to the conclusion that they pointed in one direction, namely, toward the anachronism and absurdity of our whole theory of punishment by imprisonment. As I shall have plenty of cause to give full discussion to this subject later on, I will only touch it here; but the fact is that we imprison malefactors or law-breakers (not always synonymous by any means, since there are a score of artificial crimes for one real one) not because we believe that to be the right thing for them, but simply by reason of our inability to imagine anything more suitable and sane. Moreover, there are the steel and stone jail buildings themselves, which cost much in money and more in graft; what shall be done with them? The wardens and guards, too--all the fantastic appanages of these institutions--are they to be cast incontinently upon a frigid world? The law, in short, lags leagues and ages behind the moral sense of the community, so encumbered with its baggage train that it can never fetch up lost ground. We know perfectly well that the only punishments that can improve men are punishments of conscience from within, and of love from without--which is practically the same thing; and that punishment by imprisonment is punishment by hate in fact, whatever it may be in theory, and therefore diabolical and destructive. It can only inflame and multiply the evils it pretends to heal; and this is no theory, but a certified and established truth. Everybody who has been through it, knows it, everybody who dares to think may know it.