y road stretched out
before him; who, not taking the thorns for roses, is not disappointed at
finding few roses among the thorns.

Those, however, who are determined to see the rough side of prison life
may easily do so; the appliances are there and they will certainly be
accommodated. An English prison is a vast machine in which a man counts
for just nothing at all. He is to the establishment what a bale of
merchandise is to a merchant's warehouse. The prison does not look upon
him as a man at all. He is merely an object which must move in a certain
rut and occupy a certain niche provided for it. There is no room for the
smallest sentiment. The vast machine of which he is an item keeps
undisturbed upon its course.

Move with it, and all is well. Resist, and you will be crushed as
inevitably as the man who plants himself on the railroad track when the
express is coming. Without passion, without prejudice, but also without
pity and without remorse, the machine crushes and passes on. The dead
man is carried to his grave and in ten minutes is as much forgotten as
though he had never existed.

The plank bed, the crank, the bread-and-water diet, unauthorized but
none the less effectual clubbing at the hands of warders, the cold in
the punishment cells penetrating to the very marrow of the bones,
weakness, sickness and unpitied death are the certain portion of the
rebel.

Some are found idiotic enough to invite such a fate, though fewer now
than formerly. The progress of education in England during the last
twenty years, and the philanthropic efforts of many societies and
private persons, but above all the covert but successful efforts of the
authorities to deport them to this country instantly after their
release, have had an immense effect in thinning the ranks of prison
inmates. The Judges, too, have been forced by public opinion to be much
less severe than they used to be, and that counts for much even in the
inside of prisons.

Nothing can be more capricious than the sentences they pass. In very few
cases does the law set any limit. "Life or any term not less than five
years" is the usual reading of the statute books, and the consequence
naturally is that one Judge will give his man five years, while another
will condemn his to twenty years for precisely the same crime committed
under precisely the same circumstances as the first one.

Another great blot on the English judicial system is that no court of
appeal e