many weeks. The insufficiency of this ration is so well realized by the prison officials that a regular system of feeding from the outside has grown up. Daily the friends and relatives of prisoners bring them baskets of food, in order that they may live through their term of confinement. Of course it is a terrible drain on the poor, but the system serves its purpose—except for those hundreds of unfortunates who have no friends on the outside. These starve to death without a finger being raised to help them.
"Within three days after entering Belem," a Mexican prison physician informed me, "every inmate contracts a skin disease, a terrible itch which sets the body on fire. This disease is entirely the result of the filthy conditions of the place. Every year," he continued, "the prison goes through an epidemic of typhus, which kills an average of at least ten per cent of the inmates. Within Belem there is no system of order among the prisoners. The weak are at the mercy of the strong. Immediately you enter as a prisoner you are set upon by a horde of half-crazed men who tear the clothes from your back, take away your valuables, if you have any, and usually commit nameless crimes upon your person, while officials of the prison stand grinning by. The only way to save yourself in Belem is to turn wild beast like the rest, and even then you must be strong—very strong."
Should I give the name of this physician every official at the national capital would instantly recognize him as a man of high standing with the government. I shall not name him only because if I did he also would go to Belem as a prisoner. Such stories as his I heard from too many widely different sources to be able to doubt them. The stories of the Belem epidemics always get
