"The food supplied to prisoners is entirely inadequate. Most of it is
revolting in character. All of it is insufficient. Every prisoner
suffers day and night from hunger....

"The result of the food--which in most cases consists of weak gruel,
badly baked bread, suet and water--is disease in the form of incessant
diarrhoea. This malady, which ultimately with most prisoners becomes a
permanent disease, is a recognised institution in every prison. At
Wandsworth Prison, for instance--where I was confined for two months,
till I had to be carried into hospital, where I remained for another
two months--the warders go round twice or three times a day with
astringent medicine, which they serve out to the prisoners as a matter
of course. After about a week of such treatment it is unnecessary to say
that the medicine produces no effect at all.

"The wretched prisoner is thus left a prey to the most weakening,
depressing and humiliating malady that can be conceived, and if, as
often happens, he fails from physical weakness to complete his required
evolutions at the crank, or the mill, he is reported for idleness and
punished with the greatest severity and brutality. Nor is this all.

"Nothing can be worse than the sanitary arrangements of English
prisons.... The foul air of the prison cells, increased by a system of
ventilation that is utterly ineffective, is so sickening and unwholesome
that it is not uncommon for warders, when they come into the room out of
the fresh air, and open and inspect each cell, to be violently sick....

"With regard to the punishment of insomnia, it only exists in Chinese
and English prisons. In China it is inflicted by placing the prisoner in
a small bamboo cage; in England by means of the plank bed. The object of