he red
disc of shame. But I want to say to you, and to the rest of the
world, that although society looks upon me as a creature unworthy of
sympathy, as one whose life has been a waste, as one not fit to
associate with the people at large, yet I still have left within me a
little spark of gratitude.

I have watched with careful eye and keen interest this self-imposed
imprisonment. My cell was very close to Tom Brown's, and at night I
could look straight from my cell into the window opposite and see
there reflected the cell of Tom Brown, No. 15 on the second tier, and
its occupant. I know that everything he went through was real. I know
that there was no fake about his imprisonment. And I know this, that
he went through a great deal more hardship and mental torture as a
voluntary prisoner than he would had he been regularly committed to
the prison. With his education and knowledge he would have been put
to work in a clerical capacity, instead of making baskets, and his
labor would not have been so hard. His incarceration in the cooler
was real. I know this for a positive fact. I heard him coming from
the cooler early Sunday morning in his stocking feet, so as not to
wake up his fellow prisoners.

The editorial in the A-- is unjust. It speaks of Jack London and
others writing about prison conditions. It says that the convicts in
the penitentiary "cannot get out," and that "they are locked in at
night." Granted that all this is what you want to ridicule it to be,
the man that wrote this editorial would be accused of being inhuman
if he were to put his dog through what Mr. Osborne went through
during his week of imprisonment.

There is one thing I want to emphasize, and it is this. Mr. Osborne
has seen with his own eyes, heard with his own ears and felt with his
own feelings just what it is to be an outcast, even for so short a
time as a week--just what it is to be deprived of your liberty for
even so short a period, and your editorial writers and no one else
that has not gone through the actual experience are qualified to
criticise his efforts.

These papers would not believe a prisoner who came out of prison and
told you of these facts; you must believe Mr. Osborne--you can't do
otherwise.

I want to say that this self-sacrifice is goi