men busy. The University of California

is doing some extension work among the prisoners, and those used on road building make a good return to the commonwealth, besides being better off themselves. "The California road camps," observes the report, "are the only places in American prisons where compensation is on a proper basis." The workers are paid $2.10 per day, and all maintenance costs are charged against their wages. This begets responsibility and puts the prisoner on an economic parity with free laborers. Only about half of the 3,284 prisoners are actively employed.

Nevada has the smallest prison in the country and the greatest proportion of idleness. "The method of execution by lethal gas," observes the report, "which is employed here, has excited wide attention. The inconvenience and danger attendant on this process do not seem to be balanced by any advantages." Punishment cells were found to be infected by mice and gopher snakes-cause and effect. The warden reports that this feature has been eliminated since the inspection.

New Hampshire convicts make furniture under contract. Wages 10 cents a day, plus a piece-work system. The morale of the institution is praised as very high.

New Jersey needs a modern prison at Trenton. Men working on the roads get 75 cents per day. A great improvement in morale is noted. Something over 1,500 convicts are housed. Meals are served on the cafeteria plan. The diet is better than in most prisons.

Ohio comes in for sharp criticism. Prisoners under punishment stand eight or more hours a day in a close-fitting, semicircular steel cage. It is cruelly constructed, in the interest of guards, should a prisoner go insane under the torture. The inference is that some do. A suicide's cell is allowed to bear the reputation of being haunted and used as a scare for convicts of low mentality. These are also threatened with a prodigious paddle, though it is said to be no longer used. The investigators found idle convicts, sometimes as many as eight hundred in number, marched into a big room, to sit there silent and miserable all day long. The report concludes:

"The Ohio prison, compared with better prison standards of to-day as regards the prison plant and its upkeep, industries, ideas, and methods of discipline, as well as morale, cannot possibly be rated higher than the lowest group. What are the reasons for the retarded development of the prison in a State that ranks fourth in population and wealth and very high

in many important respects? Do the people of the State want the kind of a prison they have or do they think the prison is different from what it really is? Who is responsible for this condition of affairs both within and without the prison?" No answer appears.

ing of automobile license plates as a profitable remedy.

The contract system prevails in Connecticut. Its Prison Board is praised for close attention and it is credited with possessing the best bathroom. Considerable educational progress is visible. Insane prisoners are kept in the penitentiary until the end of their terms. This fault exists in a few other States. The chief industry is shirt-making, which "lacks vocational value."

Indiana affords a pleasing contrast to her sister State. The prison dormitories are the largest and "most livable" found. Prisoners are paid, and in a single year sent $44,248.32 to their families. To a "large degree" the "evils of the old prison system have been done away with." It now appears to lack only social and constructive education. Iowa manages to find work for but Indeed, the investigators find in this

From Prison

to Park

Next week

Don C. Seitz

who conducted a tour through the American prisons in this week's issue of The Outlook, will take his readers with him to visit the site of the proposed Shenandoah National Park.

half of its convicts. It pays the schoolteachers a novelty much commended. The State is fast improving its plant and seems to be moving in the right direc

tion.

Kansas prison industries are "apparently profitable." One of these is a coal mine. The library is a poor one and there is no system of education in force. Punishment cells "never fit for human beings" have been improved. An unusually high percentage of men seem to undergo punishment, and for longer periods than elsewhere, with a bad effect on mentality. The parole system has been under suspicion, and charges of selling liberty were made against the then Governor.' This has slacked up paroling and is leading to overcrowding.

Maine has an overcrowded prison at Thomaston, in a plant entirely modern. The industrial situation is called bad and there is much idleness. The investigators recommend road work and the mak

1The former Governor has since been acquitted of these charges.-THE EDITORS.

Though a fine piece of architecture and well administered, the Maryland State prison "still gives a feeling of repression." This "reacts" on the morale.

prison "few, if any, factors that are calculated either to build up or maintain a high morale."

The old cell block at Sing Sing continues to be a disgrace to New York State. New construction is under its slow way. One block is in use. The hospital completed two years ago is yet unoccupied. The report does not tell why. Great Meadow, the "honor" prison, is being walled in. It lacks industries and there is much idleness. Its medical service is poor. Auburn is commended. Life for the prisoners of both Auburn and Sing Sing "is more normal, and there is less of unnecessary and unnatural restraint than in most prisons of the country." The report credits this condition to the much-criticised Mutual Welfare League, worked out largely by the prisoners themselves.

These are the high spots in the survey. Michigan, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, have no death penalty for capital crimes. Connecticut, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Vermont prescribe this sentence absolutely. In all other States life imprisonment may be substituted.

There are surprisingly few women convicts. New York had but eightythree confined in the special prison at Auburn. California had sixty in duress. The ball and chain is used in a few penitentiaries, notably Colorado. A number of wardens keep packs of bloodhounds.

To make penitentiaries humane, without becoming popular as places of residence, would seem to be the main problem. Legislatures in most States are prone to neglect prisons. To fully employ the convict on a non-competitive basis, to instruct him in usefulness, to restore him to society as honest men, with no further desire to do wrong, are the desiderata. Of these only a small percentage appears to have been achieved.

T

HE biplane locust from the commercial flying-fields drones through the Kansas heaven singing its song of heat. On the earth below Topeka takes its afternoon siesta, upsmiling in its sleep through clustered trees that make an atoll in a corn Pacific. North and south and east and west long yellow swells of corn and wheat, crested by darker patches of woods, undulate calmly away to even ocean horizons, as though the lazy sirocco raised green-caps now and then along the ridges of rolling agricultural seas. Monotonously splendid as some more substantial ocean, hot, and fertile, Kansas lies out there in the meridian sunshine yielding up her increase. More placid is she than the blue sky above her fertility because the heatwaves generated in her leagues of corn make "pockets" in the air, unseen hollows and surges over which bumps drunkenly the big cicada humming, diminuendo and crescendo, its sultry song.

So from the clear air behold, as soaring, unprejudicial birds may supervise, the capital of Kansas. There flows the winding Kaw, a silver ribbon through the yellow and the green, on its way eastward to join the Missouri at Kansas

The City Most Kansan By GEORGE MARVIN

City, and near its banks rise the smokes of two of Topeka's major industriesthe shoe factory and the flour mill. The third-farm-bloc journalism-you cannot see from this height of seventeen hundred feet. That factory undistinguishably stands at the corner of a housetop huddle, and its principal product goes forth daily quantity-distributed as

THE TOPEKA DAILY CAPITAL

By Arthur Capper

The important word in the trade-mark is "By." Some Topekans will tell you that "of" and "for" must also be understood in the context, and that is why Senator Capper is losing some ground in the free-thinking capital of the free State as the constituency begins to surmise one-man politics and personal ends in the chain-store operation of farm newspapers.

About midway on the broad, treebordered axis that is Topeka Avenue stands Senator Capper's house, just across the intersecting street from the house of Senator Curtis, floor leader of the Republicans at Washington. Capper and Curtis are as close neighbors in their home town as they are in the Senate, home town as they are in the Senate,

but Topeka sees more of the farm journalist than of his absentee colleague. The same postman delivers many times more Capper mail than Curtis.

From this height the dome of the Capitol is a big mushroom growing out of the green meadow of its park. Capitols of the forty-eight United States must, it seems, at least architecturally conform. It isn't a capitol without a dome; St. Paul, Austin, Madison, Boston, Lincoln, Providence, Indianapolis, Topeka they are all in general effect alike, all variations on the central theme at Washington. About Topeka's Capitol there is nothing superlative, no thrill in it, but good enough in kind for its purpose, dignified and substantially American, very Kansan. The machinery of State administration, however, has overflowed its space and bills are asking for extension-building appropriations.

Somewhere under the dome sits Governor Ben S. Paulen, unobtrusively directing the Kansas moving picture. One day the commercial fliers, by way of inaugurating their new service with a bang, invited him to survey his dominions from the air; but he declined

because of a previous engagement to take his wife to the circus. You can fly over Kansas any day, but the circus comes to Topeka once a year. Down there you can see it, another growth of whiter mushrooms with a swarm of Kansas ants milling around them and big black motor bugs swarming near.

That high white façade across from the Capitol is the home office of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad. The Santa Fé was born in Topeka, conceived in the mind of Cyrus K. Holliday, its father and founder and prophetic advocate, who, looking beyond sectional and local interests, saw as early as 1850 the inter-State and National value of a railroad following the route of the Santa Fé Trail from the Missouri into Mexico, connecting the agricultural and manufacturing wealth of the Mississippi Valley with the mineral wealth of the Rockies and the markets of the Southwest and the Pacific coast.

With common calicoes selling in Santa Fé for $3 a yard and stage-coaches creaking in from Mexico with gold and silver freight and big tales of cattle country and markets and climate, the scheme might have seemed sound enough, particularly in view of the Indian hazards of the wagon trail. But Holliday's big Topeka idea got no further than the dream stage until after the Civil War and until Phil Sheridan's winter campaign in 1868 took most of the Indian risk out of insurance. Those were the days of railway booming and building in many parts of the reconstructing Nation. Many of these schemes

were projected with millions of capital stock and no cash, and entirely in the proposed and supposed interest of one. locality. These remained in the dream stage and, like dreams, faded away.

Holliday's dream grew bigger all the time. His project included, besides big hauls of freight, immigration, settlement, and the development of the country traversed by his life-bringing artery into the Southwest. In November, 1868, his dream began to come true with the breaking of ground for the first construction.

"The child is born," announced the Topeka "State Record" of that date, "and his name is success. Let the capital city rejoice. The A. T. and S. F. will be built beyond peradventure. Please inform the good people of Topeka and Shawnee County of the brilliant future awaiting them."

But when Colonel Holliday, naturally eager to say, I told you so, took this opportunity to forecast what has since become the recorded history of a great railroad, he met nothing but ridicule from his fellow-citizens of the State that is farther West than Missouri. It was ever thus with prophets, even in their own Kansas. The road was adventurously built "beyond peradventure," beyond Kansas, just nosing out the Denver and Rio Grande to and through the Raton Pass and the concomitant uproar of the courts, across Colorado, and, forty-five years ago, plumb into the old city of the Holy Faith. So the big idea that Holliday dreamed in Topeka came exactly true in the New Mexican terminus of the historic old trail that it

killed. Historically the Santa Fé means a lot to Topeka. Right now it means something more tangible to the 5,000 Topekans on the local pay-roll. Moreover, although it seems here in the sky a flat enough thing, very close to the earth, the standardized thinking of Topeka, regarding the white cliffs of the Santa Fé offices from the ground, view with pride "one of the biggest sky-scrapers in the State." From this bird's-eye point of view, gained by courtesy of commercial flying, the city with its trees and streets and plants, its homes and its houses and its hotels, its serpentining river and it sky-scrapers, is just one little lot in the midst of boundless real estate. Hundreds and thousands of its environing acres, just as conveniently situated for rail or water or highways, and obtainable at low sales prices or rents, are available for building. With all this flat, good world for the asking, Topeka

-in common with hundreds of other American municipalities-must needs scrape the sky! All Kansas to build in, but the capital of a free State has to follow the real estate example of the Chicago Loop and the island of Manhattan! Queer, quaint, American obsessions fostered and fed by those who most profit by them; prosperity, progress, "civilization," counted by collections of plumbing and elevators boosted up in the air!

From the fair perspective overhead how flat the excrescences look merged with the whole of Topeka in their real proportion! Other sky-scrapers indent the Topeka landscape, but you only no

tice them from the ground. Broad values up here catch your eye-broad streets of unpretentious shaded houses homing quiet citizenship; Washburn College and Bethany School spread out broodingly in their groves; the wide acres planted with visible signs of kind thoughts by the National Benefit Association on the city's edge. Topeka the unstandardized, honest-to-goodness Kansas part of Topeka-still thinks too freely to estimate its eventual prospering in terms of vertical building materials. Topeka's importance to itself does not yet consist in beehive offices and lofts piled on top of one another in gratuitous congestion.

Among the unpretentious roofs down there under the shadow of the Santa Fé may be descried the top of the State Historical Society of Kansas, the Memorial Hall built by money from the settlement of Civil War claims, where you may learn, if you do not already know, the National import of Kansas. The custodian of the archives and presiding genius of the place himself embodies the less obvious spirit of Topeka, the spirit that comes up now with the fragrant heat of the fertile earth to the sixthsense registration of personality. Sitting with him there, you glimpse the great

The State Capitol, Topeka, Kansas

kindness of Kansas. In his leisure moments he has fashioned a musical instrument that you had always held in thought sacred to Kubla Khan:

She was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

A dulcimer of Topeka wood and strings making sounds as though a harp and zither had combined. Echoes of the dulcimer strings come back faintly now as an undertinkle to the theme of the elderly historian of Kansas in five vol

umes.

"No American," says he, "can rightly understand the history of his country until he has some exact knowledge of the history of this State. The struggle for the organization of this Territory caused the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, led to the overthrow of slavery, and precipitated the Civil War. In this soil grew the roots of the Republican soil grew the roots of the Republican Party."

Topeka stands for all that. No region in the Union suffers more from the reputation of virtue and overweening righteousness, but from these counties came the draft of the most brilliant fighting division of the Argonne cam

paign. Topeka stands for that latent quality of fiber. Prohibition was not imposed upon this people. It grew up out of the soil with its breadstuffs, out of the acres of red Russian wheat brought over by the home-seeking Mennonites with whom the Santa Fé colonized its iron trail, out of the more sporadic crop of churches that spire and tower the land below, out of the average longing for well-being.

Thoughts such as these ascend like emanations from Topeka down below while the big machine wheels slowly round the fringe of Shawnee County, bound homing back to its well-marked landingfield. From the fields of the Old Dominion you may see, on just such hot middays, big buzzards wheel their planing flight with never the flap of a wing as they reconnoiter down on an older terrain of the same Americanism. Speaking of his own State, Governor Ben S. Paulen said, "Kansas is one big family." From the air or from the ground, Topeka's main impression on a sojourner is that of a family town with all that characterization implies of squabbles and recriminations, of domesticated thoughts and habits, of substantial unworried worth, of folded wings.