My heart was so heavy I did not know what to say to such an assembly of the miserable.  I asked the chaplain what I should say.  “Just what you please,” he replied.  Thinking they had probably heard enough of their sins, their souls, and the plan of salvation, I thought I would give them the news of the day.  So I told them about the woman suffrage amendment, what I was doing in the State, my amusing encounters with opponents, their arguments, my answers.  I told them of the great changes that would be effected in prison life when the mothers of the nation had a voice in the buildings and discipline.  I told them what Governor Bagley said, and of the good time coming when prisons would no longer be places of punishment but schools of reformation.  To show them what women would do to realize this beautiful dream, I told them of Elizabeth Fry and Dorothea L. Dix, of Mrs. Farnham’s experiment at Sing Sing, and Louise Michel’s in New Caledonia, and, in closing, I said:  “Now I want all of you who are in favor of the amendment to hold up your right hands.”  They gave a unanimous vote, and laughed heartily when I said, “I do wish you could all go to the polls in November and that we could lock our opponents up here until after the election.”  I felt satisfied that they had had one happy hour, and that I had said nothing to hurt the feelings of the most unfortunate.  As they filed off to their respective workshops my faith and hope for brighter days went with them.  Then I went all through the prison.  Everything looked clean and comfortable on the surface, but I met a few days after a man, just set free, who had been there five years for forgery.  He told me the true inwardness of the system; of the wretched, dreary life they suffered, and the brutality of the keepers.  He said the prison was infested with mice and vermin, and that, during the five years he was there, he had never lain down one night to undisturbed slumber.  The sufferings endured in summer for want of air, he said, were indescribable.  In this prison the cells were in the center of the building, the corridors running all around by the windows, so the prisoners had no outlook and no direct contact with the air.  Hence, if a careless keeper forgot to open the windows after a storm, the poor prisoners panted for air in their cells, like fish out of water.  My informant worked in the mattress department, over the room where prisoners were punished.  He said he could hear the lash and the screams of the victims from morning till night.  “Hard as the work is all day,” said he, “it is a blessed relief to get out of our cells to march across the yard and get one glimpse of the heavens above, and one breath of pure air, and to be in contact with other human souls in the workshops, for, although we could never speak to each other, yet there was a hidden current of sympathy conveyed by look that made us one in our misery.”