They were led through steel-barred doors, and along dark, steel-barred passages to one of the “tanks”.  A “tank”, you discovered, was one floor of this four-storied packing box; on each side of it were a row of a dozen barred cells, each with four bunks, so that the total maximum population which might be crowded into the central space of the “tank” was ninety-six; however, this only happened on Monday mornings, when the “drunks” had all been brought in, and before the courts had had time to sort them out.

After you had lain down on your bunk for a few minutes, or had leaned against the wall of the “tank”, you felt an annoying stinging sensation somewhere on you.  You began to rub and scratch; before long you would be rubbing and scratching in a dozen different places, and then you would observe your neighbour watching you with a grin.  “Seam-squirrels?” he would say; and he would bid you take off your coat, and engage in the popular hunting game of the institution.  Jimmie remembered having heard a speaker refer to the city jail as the “Leesville Louseranch”; he had thought that a good joke at the time, but now it seemed otherwise to him.

It was splendid to stand up in court and to take your stand as a martyr; but now Jimmie discovered, as many an unfortunate has discovered before him, that being a martyr is not the sport it is cracked up to be.  There were no heroics now, no singing.  If you even so much as hummed, they took you out and shut you up in a dark hole called the “cooler”!  Nor could you read, for there was no light in your cell, and perpetual twilight in the central gathering place of the “tank”.  Apparently the only things the authorities of Leesville wished you to do were to hunt “seam-squirrels”, to smoke cigarettes, to “shoot craps”, and to make the acquaintance of a variety of interesting young criminals, so that when you were ready to resume your outside life you might decide whether you wanted to be a hold-up man, a safe-cracker, a forger, or a second-story operator.

Jimmie Higgins, of course, brought a different psychology from that of the average jail-inmate.  Jimmie could do his kind of work just as well in jail as anywhere else; and barring the torment of vermin, the diet of bread and thin coffee and ill-smelling greasy soup, and the worry about his helpless family outside, he really had a happy time-making the acquaintance of tramps and pickpockets, and explaining to them the revolutionary philosophy.  A man who went in to remedy social injustice all by himself could never get very far.  It was only when he realized himself as a member of a class, and stood as a class and acted as a class, that he could accomplish a permanent result.  Some of the workers had discovered this, and had set out to educate their fellows.  They brought the wondrous message, even to those in jail; holding out to them the vision of a world made over in justice and kindness, the co-operative commonwealth of labour, in which every man should get what he produced, and no man could exploit his fellows.