WILL SPEAK ON PRISONS

Mr. Roger Nash Baldwin '05 and Mr. Thomas O'Brien, Penal Commissioner of Boston, will speak at a dinner, held at 6.30 o'clock this evening in the Trophy Room of the Union under the auspices of the Student Liberal Club. Mr. Sanford Bates, Penal Commissioner of Massachusetts, will also give a short talk.

The subject of the two main addresses is "The Failure of Our Prisons", and while both speakers agree on the word "failure", they ascribe it to different causes and will probably suggest different remedies, Mr. Baldwin being in favor of abolishing prisons altogether and Mr. O'Brien advocating nothing more radical than reform.

Was Conscientious Objector

Mr. Baldwin is a director and the moving spirit of the Civil Liberties Union, which was founded in New York shortly after the beginning of the war in 1914. Its avowed purpose is to preserve the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly. At the entry of the United States into the war Mr. Baldwin declared himself a conscientious objector and denounced the draft. For this he was imprisoned in Newark, N. J., under the provisions of the Selective Service Act. It is practically from this experience only that he has gained his knowledge of prison systems that Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne acquired by voluntarily entering Sing as a convict.

Spoke at Liberal Convention

Mr. Baldwin was one of the speakers at the Intercollegiate Liberal League Convention that took place in Cambridge on April 2 and April 8, in the talk which he delivered at the dinner on the second day, he declared that Thomas Paine, for his marvelous, stirring articles, deserved the credit for freeing this country, rather than George Washington, said that true liberals must not be satisfied with thinking and talking about the questions of the day, but must catch the spirit of revolt as the I. W. W. has done, and deal in the forces that are today red-hot." Mr. Baldwin is of liberal tendencies.

Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Bates are expected to present the more conservative point of view as regards the prisons.

Places at the dinner are reserved through invitation cards, and the charge is $1.25 per plate.