ed in prison in old Babylon;
and, trust me, I speak the truth when I say that in that ancient day we
prisoners wove more efficiently on hand-looms than did the prisoners in
the steam-powered loom-rooms of San Quentin.

The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the
guards a score or so of more efficient ways. I was reported. I was
given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. I emerged and
tried to work in the chaos of inefficiency of the loom-rooms. I
rebelled. I was given the dungeon, plus the strait-jacket. I was spread-
eagled, and thumbed-up, and privily beaten by the stupid guards whose
totality of intelligence was only just sufficient to show them that I was
different from them and not so stupid.

Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a
man to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid brutes of guards were
rats, and they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed all the fine nerves
of the quick of me and of the consciousness of me. And I, who in my past
have been a most valiant fighter, in this present life was no fighter at
all. I was a farmer, an agriculturist, a desk-tied professor, a
laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the increase of the
productiveness of the soil.

I fought in the Philippines because it was the tradition of the Standings
to fight. I had no aptitude for fighting. It was all too ridiculous,
the introducing of disruptive foreign substances into the bodies of
little black men-folk. It was laughable to behold Science prostituting
all the might of its achievement and the wit of its inventors to the
violent introducing of foreign substances into the bodies of black folk.

As I say, in obedience to the tradition of the Standings I went to war
and found that I had no aptitude for war. So did my officers find me
out, because they made me a quartermaster's clerk, and as a clerk, at a
desk, I fought through the Spanish-American War.

So it was not because I was a fighter, but because I was a thinker, that
I was enraged by the motion-wastage of the loom-rooms and was persecuted
by the guards into becoming an "incorrigible." One's brain worked and I
was punished for its working. As I told Warden Atherton, when my
incorrigibility had become so notorious that he had me in on the carpet
in his private office to plead with me; as I told him then:

"It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your rat-throttlers o