ROYALIST PRISONERS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 288, 28 April 1913, Page 3

ROYALIST PRISONERS.

IX PORTUGAL. j "SHAMEFULLY AND CRUELLY ( TREATED." ( -Air. Aubrey F. G. Bell writes as fol- , lows in the Spectator of March 8: | At about the same time as an important letter on this subject appeared in j the Spectator (February 8, 1913), the , Portuguese Legation in London issued a Note to the English press, stating that certain prison reforms had been effected. It may be well, therefore, to point out that, except for the fact that the convicts in the "Penitenciaria"—criminals and Royalists alike —now no longer wear the hood, which by all the laws of civilisation should never have been inflicted upon political prisoners, the miserable situation of the Royalist prisoners remains unchanged. Moreover, those benefiting by the "reforms" do not include the hundreds of Royalists who are not confined in cells, but crowded with every kind of criminal fn the Limoeiro and other prisons. They have, indeed, seen the "Penitenciaria" —a carefully prepared visit after which it was stated in the -official press that "their impressions could not have been more favorable." Yet, even were this statement true, it ; would not alter the fact that political prisoners ought not to have been condemned to ;i prison system hitherto reserved for criminals. The remainder of the arrested Royalists are kept for six months, a year, two years, without a trial in -prisons the condition of which the Republic only excuses by throwing the responsibility on the Monarchy. When last August a British subject was arrested upon vague accusations (to which the majority of arrests are due), the case collapsed in four days owing to the intervention of the British Minister, Sir Arthur Hardinge. The two accusers were shown to be men of worthless character—one of them was actually in prison at the time for theft—and completely failed to substantiate their charges. The case threw a vivid light on the methods and justice of the arrests. Another lady, Dona Constanca Telles de Gama, daughter of the Count of Cascaes, and a descendant af Vasco de Gama, was arrested at about the same time. But she is a Portuguese subject, and she is still in the Aljube fortress waiting her trial. Were the daughter, say, of the Duke of Wellington to be arrested, not on any direct charge of an attempt to dethrone the King, but on the vague suspicion that she was by conviction a Republican, were she confined in a common prison and kept there for seven months without a trial, people in England would have some idea of what is felt on this subject in Portugal. The authorities have accepted all accusations without demur, and this alone give unscrupulous accusers a pleasing sense of power. Hitherto, indeed, the Republic can only have had a pernicious effect, on the character of the people. It has shown itself to be not only anti-clerical, but opposed to religion, and this is especially disastrous in a country where the gTeat majority of the inhabitants are devoutly Rornam Catholic, living in small towns and villages in which the Church is the only education and restraint. Those who have the sincerity to avow their political or religious convictions have been clapped into dungeons, while' false accusers, if not actually rewarded, have gone scot free. Most often they are "Carbonarios" in the pay of theState. To persecute, calumniate, starve or kill a Roj'alist is regarded as a patriotic action, and what wonder if this is the view of the Lisbon mob when the Republican press has found no name too vile to apply to those of Royalist opin-' ions, and when the regicides are publicly and officially praised! The arrest of innocent persons because they were Royalists, or religious, or aristocrats, the extraordinary sentences of the courtmartial, the attacks by the mob on defenceless prisoners, the cold-blooded murder of a naval lieutenant by "Carbonarios" in the streets of Lisbon, the assaults on the offices of the independent press, the gratuitous insults heaped upon religion—these and many other oxitrages have evoked no word of protest.

. ... So unfair has been the treatment meted out by this minority of extremists to the Royalist prisoners that a mere alleviation of their sufferings will now hardly meet the case; only by the immediate .propjaipatipn of a general amnesty can the Republic hope to clear itself of a reputation for cruelty and injustice.