At first sight it seems almost a miracle--the change that is being wrought under Superintendent Riley and Warden Rattigan in Auburn Prison. But in truth there is nothing really extraordinary about it--it is no miracle; unless it be a miracle to discard error and to replace it by truth. The results of a practical application of faith and hope and love often seem miraculous, but as a matter of fact such results are as logical as any geometrical demonstration. When a man, treated like a beast, snarls and bites you say, "This is the conduct of an abnormal creature--a criminal." When a prisoner, treated like a man, nobly responds you cry, "A miracle!" What folly! Both these things are as natural as two and two making four. The real miracle is when men who have been treated for many years like beasts persist in retaining their manhood. A prisoner is kept for half a generation in conditions so terrible and degrading that the real wonder is how he has kept his sanity, and then he asks only for a chance to show where Society has made a mistake, begs only for an opportunity to be of service to his brethren. Donald Lowrie and Ed Morrell, laying aside their own wrongs and making light of their own sufferings, as they arouse not only the state of California but the whole nation to a sense of responsibility for the shocking conditions in our prisons; Jack Murphy, turning his back upon the chance of a pardon, asking nothing for himself, seeking only how he can do the most good to his fellow-prisoners; these are the real miracles; when the spirit of God thus works in the hearts of men. I have talked with no sensible person who proposes to sentimentalize over the law-breaker. Call the prison by any name you please, yet prisons of some sort we must have so long as men commit crime; and that from present indications will be for many generations to come. So far from setting men free from prison you and I, sensible people as I trust we are, would, if we could have our own way, put more men in prison than are there now; for we should send up all who now escape by the wiles of crooked lawyers, and we should include the crooked lawyers. But behind the prison walls we should relax the iron discipline--the hideous, degrading, unsuccessful system of silence and punishment--and substitute a system fair to all men, a limited freedom, and work in the open air.