In prison, and only in prison, the veil is lifted or rent in twain, and men are revealed as they are. As they stand before their Creator, they stand now before their fellows. They are helpless--so warden and guards think--but they have gained a power beyond any physical might of man. They are voiceless, but they challenge mankind. They endure every indignity and outrage; but an account will be required of those responsible for it. I wish to emphasize this dropping of the mask--this stop put to posturing and pretending--this going forth in rude nakedness before one's fellows. The man in the church pew chants out with the rest of the congregation, "We are sinners, desperately wicked, and there is no health in us;" but he says it with his tongue in his cheek, and fitting his mask on only the more tightly. Or the man "convinced of sin" on the anxious seat at the revivalist meeting frenziedly accuses himself of all the sins in the decalogue, but finds protection in the very generality and promiscuity of his confession, which includes and at the same time conceals the particular fact that he robbed the till and got away with it. We seldom hear of a penitent of this kind being indicted by a Grand Jury, tried, convicted and jailed on the basis of his salvation outcries. He talks figuratively. There is nothing dramatic or hysterical in the attitude of the felon in his cell. He robbed the till, he admits to you; but he does not drag in the rest of the decalogue to divert your attention. And his penitence, when he feels any, is not, in nine cases out of ten, prompted by the expectation of getting a clean bill of health on his entire life-account (the empty till included) from a good natured Savior not too keen about details. He tells you, as a rule, "I was foolish and took too many chances!" or, "If I'd handled the thing by myself, instead of admitting a partner, it would have been all right;" or, "Oh, of course, I was a damned fool; what's the use of bucking up against the fly cops!" In the case of a murder, it might be, "I'm sorry I killed him, but I guess any fellow would have done the same in my case." Duration of confinement does not modify this attitude; the man of ten years says the same as the man of ten months, except--and the exception is worth noting--that the former's moral sense, whatever he originally had of it, has been blunted or discouraged, and he has conceived a settled animosity against human authority, and disbelief in the justice and sincerity of its administrators. He has been the subject, during his incarceration, of such numberless acts of gratuitous tyranny, outrage and cruelty, and has seen so much of "the way things go," in general, that though he may concede that honesty is the best policy, he can find no other recommendation for it, and is prone to the secret conviction that honesty itself is somehow only a cleverer way of cheating.