DISGRACE TO FRANCE

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 131, 1 December 1930, Page 9

DISGRACE TO FRANCE

A PRISON HORROR

AWFUL DEVIL'S ISLAND

LONDON, 29th November. "In the name of humanity, should this horror go on1?" asks a writer in the "Daily.Express" in commenting on tho announcement that'the cages on the French convict ship, La Martiniere, aro again being filled up with a human cargo for transportation, to Dovil's Island. "Such barbarism still lingers in France despite the abolition of public executions and its claim that Paris is a city of light/ says the writer, who describes, the boiling steam-pipes encircling the cages, which are turned on in the event of unrest on board. The ship's average quota is GOO. Many have- to bo carried ashore at the destination, half-dead from the hardships of the voyage. The writer estimates that an average of thirty-six are dying each month in the hospitals on the island, or nearly CO per cent, of the annual arrivals. CRYING FOR MERCY. "I have spent a night in hospital on Devil's Island with a convict holding his head in his hands and sobbing his heart out," says the writer. "Words cannot depict the awful, horror of the place. There is a look in the eyes of the convicts which I cannot eradicate from my mind. Their very souls seem to start from, their eyes crying to humanity for mercy. "I walked through with the Governor, and the majority of the convicts lowered their eyes. Here and there a convict bared his teeth and snarled behind the Governor's back. Had he made any other move he would havebeen taken back to the cells for punishment, or sent to work in the forests, bootless and sockless. ' "I have seen men who have fallen at work lying on the ground, shaking from head to feet with fever, begging for aid which never comes. Even when they have finished their sentences they aro unable to leave tho island, because there is a tacit understanding with the civilian population that no ex-convict is to be allowed .to earn enough money to take him back to France." ' FRANCE DOES NOT KNOW. The writer concludes: "This is 1930, and still this monstrous thing goes on. The French are a brave, chivalrous people. What is tho explanation? They live in their own fair land, flowing with milk and honey, and they do not know what is happening in the colonies." ■