ENGLISH PRISONS

Evening Star, Issue 15480, 30 April 1914, Page 7

ENGLISH PRISONS

BY ONH WHO HAS BEEN TN THEM. One of the most noted of the English militant suffragists is Lady Constance Lytton, a sister of Earl Lytton, who for conscience' sake has been imprisoned no less than four times. It is indifferent flattery to say of Lady Constance Lytton that she naa been one of the real heroine* of her cause, for she has endured in it above most of her sister suffragettes. Failing to taste either at Holloway or at Newcastle the true rigors of imprisorttaent, she went to Liverpool, disguised herself, was arrested as " Jane Wartoji," tried and convicted, and imprisoned in Walton Gaol • entered on the hunger strike, and was fed by force. —"Playing the Game!"— To learn that some of your companions in the cause are being submitted to the steel gag and the feeding tube, to ba persuaded that this is very painful and infinitely humiliating (com* pliments to His Lordship of London!), and then to decide that you will go through the experience yourself in the only way that is possible—well, this is playing the game! And this is precisely what "Jan© Warton " did. Note that whereas Lady Constance Lytton had twice been placed in the Second Division, "Jane Warton 'Wa figure of fun in outrageous clothes and taclea—-was promptly relegated to the Third. Lady Constance Lytton received the best medical aid that Holloway could bestow on her, and was declared to have a quite unsatisfactory heart. At Walton Gaol an airy young medico pronounced " Jane Warton's heart to be " rippin' good," so several wardresses held her down on the bed while she was fed until she vomited. The horror of it was more than I can describe- ... As the doctor left he gave me a slap on the cheek, not violently, but, as it were, to express his contemptuous disapproval, and he seemed to take for granted that my distress wap assumed. At first it seemed such an utterly contemptible thing to have done Jhat I could only laugh id my mind. Then suddenly I saw Jajie Warton lying before me, and it seemed as if I were outside of her. She was tha most despised, ignorant, and helpless prisoner that I had seen. When she had served her time and was out of the prison no one would believe anything she said; and the doctor, when he had fed her by force and tortured her body, struck her on the cheek to show how he despised her! That was Jane-Warton, and I had coma to help her.

The ruse of "Jane Warton " is not without an element of grim humor, but we may more fittingly regard it as. a brave woman's contribution .to a discreditable chapter of prison history. Readers, when they hare finished Lady Constance Lytton, may turn for confirmation of her statements to a very curious, vivid, and pathetic little pamphlet, 'The Prisoner: An Experience of Forcible Feeding,' by Miss Helen Gordon. But it seems idle at this day to pretend that forcible feeding is anything other than a modified form of torture. One need not seek to compare it with the "torture by water," which was common in the old French and English prisons and in the dungeons of the Inquisition ; but it is probably very like the early and less excruciating stages of that process. Deliberately to place oneself in circumstances in which the trial of such a process becomes compulsory (with the knowledge that the state of one's heart is not exactly " rippin' ") seems to me a fair measure of earnestness in a woman's effort for the women's revolution. But Lady Constance Lytton would in no way thank me to continue in this strain^ for 'Prisons and Prisoners,' a fascinating, poignant little work, is not one of selfadvertisement. As much as this may be said at once of all suffragist literature, and of the whole suffragist movement. . ...

To live comfortably is to live in obedience to the law of inertia that governs the social and political worlds. To live in some degree uncomfortably is to oppose oneself to this, as a pioneer in something that is always and everywhere unpopular. In the case of the militant suffragettes it lands thim sooner or later in the arms of the police, and very glad the worn and weaker sisters sometimes are when they find themselves in that embrace. Would you, in obedience to orders—and to down Piccadilly with your hammer in your pocket—and your heart in your mouth P At the present stage of the revolution there is really nothing more at the back of it than the certainty of prison, the probability of the feeding tube, and mQst people's assurance that you would Have been bettor employed in washing your own or someone else's clothes or baby. There are all kinds of experiences in political revolutions, and of these experiences my own unimportant notion is that the suffragettes have not had the rosiest. ' " Indirectly, Lady Constance Lytton? s book, simple and unaffected and appealing on every page, is the most important criticism that we have of the present state of prisons and pf the women in them. It will, I thmk, assist the can's* of suffragism. It must inevitably assist at not too far a day tie #««(« °f ortizen. r '"* - • '