The Cairo bulletin., 1912-04-08
BOOK CHAT


York World, who recently di3d, leay-
ing a fortune OF twenty cr Iwen,y-
five million dollars, The ait,cle =
by one Of Mr. Pulitzer's secretaries
and Is accompanied hy seegal un
PUBLISHED photographs taken en-
the ys ut "lite-tr," wAage for
years and years 3Tr. palitzer lived
and worked NEST q the time, as
sist3d by a tcIEs Ct leaders and se2-
retaries whose Inhined intelleC ual
vigor and c1qacity scarcely matched
that Of their chief, who has been
called the most amazing creature
In the world" II would take a Rob
ert Louis Stevenson TO imagine such
yacht and such a crew as Al
leyne Ireland the author of this
remarkable article, describes.
In the same issue OF The Ameri-
can Senator LaFollette continues
his autobiography, and Ida NJ Tar
hell writes of The Homeless Daugh-
ter" Julian Leavitt contributes an
other prison article in which he pre-
sents some astonishing facts about
the spread OF disease through Ameri-
can prisons.
lneg Haynes Gilmore writes an
N4h "a Ia Esvy n.&r
Edna Ferber contributes a new
Emma McChesney story, and Jones
Oprenheim, Clifford s. Raymond,
zona Gale and Mary Austin present
interesting fiction.
The four departments which help
to distinguish this periodical are, as
usual, full of fresh facts and ideas
In an extraordinary article on
prisons in the April American Maya
zine, Julian Leavitt presents some
astonishing facts about the amount
of tuberculosis that Is carried from
prisons to various parts of our coun-
try:
Only twenty-one OF our prisons
make any special provision for the
consumptives The army of the
tuberculosis behind prison walls
numbers according to the best esti-
| m a toa uaarlv 1E mat
yet the victims themselves help
less though they be TO remedy their
own state, do, nevertheless, retaliate
upon us, In their own weak way.
Here is an extract from an affidavit
made by Patrick McManus. a former
inmate of the Maryland peniten-
tiary. 1t has been incorporated in
the hearings of the House commit
tee on labor Subcommittee on
Competition of Penal Labor for
1908, and its truth has been vouch-
ed for publicly by former chaplain.
the Rev. ]. ] Rurkhart, and private
~ to me. by the former physician,
DR.. Cooke.
Anyone who calls at the Mary
land penitentiary,' runs this affi-
dayit, and requests to see several
negroes could name, will find them
covered over with running sores,
and he may well shudder from fear
that perhaps the shirt he is wearing
was handled over and over again by
these men in different operations
Then again there are many con-
sumptiye inmates engaged as oper-
ators, etc. / have personally seen
the dried sputum scraped of shirts
In the packing department before
shipment, and | have witnessed men
ground to their machines until two
days before death, which was Off
cially pronounced by the peniten-
tiary physician as due to tuberculo-
sis. Men suffering from these dis
eases are not isolated, even In the
dining room, and never in the shops.
Now this prison alone sends out
about four million shirts IA year,
which are sold all over the country
under hundreds of different labels
How many messages of disease and
death do these four million shirts
carry into unsuspecting homes?
Last December | saw, in dark,
unventilated cell In the Eastern
penitentiary at Philadelphia, three
consumptiye looking negroes fever
ishly licking the wrappers on cigars
that they were making.
mo one can possibly estimate,
accurately. the quantity of prison
made goods shipped to various mar
kets of the country. and capable of
carrying with them the prison dis
eases; but | figure, roughly, that in
l895--the last year for which we
have any federal records-the lead
ing prisons sent out about seven mil.
lion pairs Of shoes of every descrip-
finn tWentv-oua million niyarc tan