These revelations compelled some removals and a few reforms; but they too failed to bring home livingly to public knowledge and imagination the whole ugly, sluggish, vicious truth. Then, only yesterday, an amiable, naive and impressionable young gentleman underwent a week of amateur convictship in one of our jails, and came forth tremulous with indignation and astonishment; though, obviously and inevitably, he did not have to endure the one thing which, more than hardship or torture, is the main evil of penal imprisonment--the feeling of helplessness and outrage in the presence of a despotic and unrighteous power, from which there is no appeal or escape. The convict has no rights, no friends, and no future; the amateur may walk out whenever he pleases, and will be received by an admiring family and friends, and extolled by public opinion as a reformer who suffered martyrdom in the cause. Yet what he has experienced and learned falls as far short of what convicts endure, as the emotions of a theater-goer at a problem play (with a tango supper awaiting him in a neighboring restaurant) fall short of the long-drawn misery and humiliation of those who undergo in actuality what the play pretended. Meanwhile, scores of animated humanitarians, penologists, criminologists, theorists and idealists have consulted, resolved, recommended, and agitated, striking hard but in the dark, and most of their blows going wide. Commissioners and inspectors have appeared menacingly at prison gates, loudly heralded, equipped with plenipotentiary powers; and the gates have been thrown wide by smiling wardens and sympathetic guards--tender hearted, big brained, gentle mannered people, their mouths overflowing with honeyed words and bland assurances, their clubs and steel bracelets snugly stowed away in unobtrusive pockets--who have personally and assiduously conducted their honored visitors through marble corridors, clean swept cells, spacious dining saloons, sanctimonious chapels, studious libraries and sunny yards; and have stood helpfully by while happy felons told their tales of cheerful hours of industry alternating with long periods of refreshing exercise and peaceful repose; nay, these officials will sometimes quite turn their backs upon the confidences between prisoner and investigator, lest there should seem to be even a shadow of restraint in the outpourings. "Is all well?"--"All is well!"--"No complaints?"--"No complaints!" What, then, could inspectors and commissioners do except bid a friendly and apologetic adieu to their ingenuous entertainers, and go forth bearing in each hand a pail of freshest whitewash? And if, during the colloquies, any malignant prisoner had happened, in a burst of reckless despair, to venture on an indiscreet disclosure, the visitors were allowed to get well out of earshot before the thud of clubs on heads was heard, and the groans of victims chained to bars in dark cells of airless stench,