I read hastily back through the many lives of many times and many places.  I have never known cruelty more terrible, nor so terrible, as the cruelty of our prison system of to-day.  I have told you what I have endured in the jacket and in solitary in the first decade of this twentieth century after Christ.  In the old days we punished drastically and killed quickly.  We did it because we so desired, because of whim, if you so please.  But we were not hypocrites.  We did not call upon press, and pulpit, and university to sanction us in our wilfulness of savagery.  What we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding, and we faced all reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did not hide behind the skirts of classical economists and bourgeois philosophers, nor behind the skirts of subsidized preachers, professors, and editors.

Why, goodness me, a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, five years ago, in these United States, assault and battery was not a civil capital crime.  But this year, the year of Our Lord 1913, in the State of California, they hanged Jake Oppenheimer for such an offence, and to-morrow, for the civil capital crime of punching a man on the nose, they are going to take me out and hang me.  Query:  Doesn’t it require a long time for the ape and the tiger to die when such statutes are spread on the statute book of California in the nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth year after Christ?  Lord, Lord, they only crucified Christ.  They have done far worse to Jake Oppenheimer and me. . . .

* * * * *

As Ed Morrell once rapped to me with his knuckles:  “The worst possible use you can put a man to is to hang him.”  No, I have little respect for capital punishment.  Not only is it a dirty game, degrading to the hang-dogs who personally perpetrate it for a wage, but it is degrading to the commonwealth that tolerates it, votes for it, and pays the taxes for its maintenance.  Capital punishment is so silly, so stupid, so horribly unscientific.  “To be hanged by the neck until dead” is society’s quaint phraseology . . .

* * * * *

Morning is come—­my last morning.  I slept like a babe throughout the night.  I slept so peacefully that once the death-watch got a fright.  He thought I had suffocated myself in my blankets.  The poor man’s alarm was pitiful.  His bread and butter was at stake.  Had it truly been so, it would have meant a black mark against him, perhaps discharge and the outlook for an unemployed man is bitter just at present.  They tell me that Europe began liquidating two years ago, and that now the United States has begun.  That means either a business crisis or a quiet panic and that the armies of the unemployed will be large next winter, the bread-lines long. . . .

I have had my breakfast.  It seemed a silly thing to do, but I ate it heartily.  The Warden came with a quart of whiskey.  I presented it to Murderers Row with my compliments.  The Warden, poor man, is afraid, if I be not drunk, that I shall make a mess of the function and cast reflection on his management . . .