appeared in _The Daily Chronicle_ a letter more than two columns in
length, pleading for the kindlier treatment of little children in
English prisons. The letter was written because Warder Martin[8] of
Reading prison had been dismissed by the Commissioners for the dreadful
crime of "having given some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child."...

I must quote a few paragraphs of this letter; because it shows how
prison had deepened Oscar Wilde, how his own suffering had made him, as
Shakespeare says, "pregnant to good pity," and also because it tells us
what life was like in an English prison in our time. Oscar wrote:

"I saw the three children myself on the Monday preceding my release.
They had just been convicted, and were standing in a row in the central
hall in their prison dress carrying their sheets under their arms,
previous to their being sent to the cells allotted to them.... They were
quite small children, the youngest--the one to whom the warder gave the
biscuits--being a tiny chap, for whom they had evidently been unable to
find clothes small enough to fit. I had, of course, seen many children
in prison during the two years during which I was myself confined.
Wandsworth prison, especially, contained always a large number of
children. But the little child I saw on the afternoon of Monday, the
17th, at Reading, was tinier than any one of them. I need not say how
utterly distressed I was to see these children at Reading, for I knew
the treatment in store for them. The cruelty that is practised by day
and night on children in English prisons is incredible except to those
that have witnessed it and are aware of the brutality of the system.

"People nowadays do not understand what cruelty is.... Ordinary cruelty
is simply stupidity.