was hope for all of them. Of course, in any effort to help them,—and our efforts were not always perhaps wholly wise,—we encountered that most formidable and fundamental obstacle to prison reform, the desire in the human breast for revenge, the savage hatred which is perhaps some obscure instinct of protection against the anti-social members of society: it stands forever in the way of all prison reform, and of ameliorations of the lot of the poor. It is that which keeps the barbarity of capital punishment alive in the world; it is that which makes every prison in the land a hell, where from time to time the most revolting atrocities are practiced. Out of those experiences, out of the contemplation of the misery, the pathos, the hopelessness of the condition of those victims, I wrote "The Turn of the Balance." I was very careful of my facts; I was purposely conservative, and, forgetting the advice of Goethe, softened things down; as for instance, where I had known of cases in which prisoners had been hung up in the bull-rings for thirty days,—being lowered to the floor each night of course,—I put it down as eight days, and so on. And the wise and virtuous judges and the preachers and the respectable people all said it was untrue, that such things could not be. Since then there have been investigations of prisons in most of the states, with revelations of conditions far worse than any I tried to portray. And such things have gone on, and are going on to-day; but nobody cares.
