For much of the most important work of the Commission, therefore, we must fall back on such experience of life and knowledge of human nature as its members may possess. And it is with a desire to extend my own knowledge and experience in the service of the Commission that I ask your help in carrying out the plan to which I have referred. When a man wishes to understand as fully as possible the temper and character of the people of a foreign country--England or France, Germany, India, China--he can consult a great deal of printed matter; but he will not be satisfied until he has made a personal visit to the country itself. For instance, I have but the merest smattering of the French language, and I have been privileged to know socially but very few Frenchmen, yet my visits to France have given me an infinitely better idea of the country and people than I could ever have received from books. The actual sights and sounds of a country seem to provide the foundation for a far better understanding of its history, a more thorough appreciation of all that can be read and heard of it thereafter. If this sympathy and understanding, coming from a vivid personal experience, is desirable in the case of a foreign country, it is even more necessary in the case of a group of men set apart by society, such as this community of the prison; for in your case the conditions under which you live are more unnatural and less easy for most people to grasp than those of a foreign country. Moreover, most of the books that have been written about you by so-called penologists and other "experts" are written, so far as I can determine, from such an outside standpoint and with so little intelligent sympathy and vital understanding that I am inclined to the belief that very few of them are of any particular value. Indeed many are positively harmful; for they are based upon the false and cruel assumption that the prisoner is not a human being like the rest of us, but a strange sort of animal called a "criminal"--wholly different in his instincts, feelings and actions from the rest of mankind. I am curious to find out, therefore, whether I am right; whether our Prison System is as unintelligent as I think it is; whether it flies in the face of all common sense and all human nature, as I think it does; whether, guided by sympathy and experience, we cannot find something far better to take its place, as I believe we can.