The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1885-01-03 00:00:00

PRISON METHOD: EXTRAORDINARY
STATEMENT.

The attention of the Home Secretary ought to be
called to a statement in Mr. Davitt's book as to the
means employed at " C Convict Prison "(which
must mean Chatham) for detecting prisoners who are
believed to be simulating lunacy. According to Mr.
Davitt, a mess-tin full of filth is put into the prisoner's
cell at dinner time, and if he does not eat this filth it
is assumed that he cannot he mad, and he is reported
to the governor for a flogging. Now this, if true,
would be simply monstrous. Everybody having ex-
perience of the insane is aware that certain lunatics
are extremely fastidious and suspicious about their
food. It is only in the last stages of general paralysis,
when all the senses have been nearly destroyed, or in
some cases where there has been organic injury to the
brain, causing a perversion of the sense of taste,
that the patient will eat filth; but the patient
labouring under melancholia—a very common variety
of brain disease—is generally under the delusion that
people are trying to poison him, and anything unusual
in the taste of his food will be enough to make him
turn from it. A doctor who should get a man flogged
as a " shammer " because he was not mad to the point
of bestiality, would therefore be exhibiting gross
ignorance and committing a most brutal action. What-
ever may be thought of Mr. David's politics, his
private character places him above any suspicion of
fabricating stories to damage prison officials, so that
his statements demand investigation. If substan-
tiated, they would make it the duty of Government to
take very serious action against the officials impugned;
if unsupported by evidence, they should receive a
prompt contradiction.—Graphic.

MR. C. J. KENNARD AND MR. BRIGHT.

Mr. Coleridge J. Kennard, M.P., on Saturday
replied, at Salisbury, to Mr. Bright's recent letter on
Protection. He accused Mr. Bright of raising the
cry of "No rent." This proposition was a wild one,
and one was driven to cast about after some excuse
which should in some degree palliate the otherwise
unpardonable offence against honour and morality.
He was afraid that it was in a mere fit of anger that
Mr. Bright had bounced out the suggestion, which
would necessarily recoil upon him if the transfer of
his mill and machinery to an occupier rent
free was required of him. Why did we find
our Mundellas at Chemnitz and our Isaac Holdens
at Roubais if England were so advantageously
situated among protecting communities, as it was
asserted by Mr. Bright and others that she was.
These capitalists, who had deserted our Free Trading
shores, were shrewd people and knew what they were
about, and they subscribed large sums of money to
the Cobden Club exchequer with their tongues in
their cheek, knowing that the Free Trade craze must
be kept going long enough to allow of their dis-
engaging their dead capital from the confusion which
would ensue upon the imposition of a duty on the
goods they are supplying us with from abroad at a
ruinous cost to working men. Let Mr. Bright
before he advocates "No rents" hand over his mill
to a co-operative band of workmen rent free, and
come into Wiltshire with clean hands and a conscience
purged by fire.