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 of guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite in my brain.  The whole organization of this prison is stupid.  You are a politician.  You can weave the political pull of San Francisco saloon-men and ward heelers into a position of graft such as this one you occupy; but you can’t weave jute.  Your loom-rooms are fifty years behind the times. . . .”

But why continue the tirade?—­for tirade it was.  I showed him what a fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless incorrigible.

Give a dog a bad name—­you know the saw.  Very well.  Warden Atherton gave the final sanction to the badness of my name.  I was fair game.  More than one convict’s dereliction was shunted off on me, and was paid for by me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being triced up by the thumbs on my tip-toes for long hours, each hour of which was longer than any life I have ever lived.