Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu/96

62 such men as these,—before any creature made in God's image and likeness.

The work was hard enough at best. It was wantonly made more repulsive by the inhumanity of the jailers; and the jailers did not act without authority. The putrefying bones—refuse of the prison—had to be pounded into dust; and the place chosen for this offensive work was a shed on the brink of the prison cesspool. The floor of the "boneshed," as it was called, was some three feet below the outside ground, and on a level with the noisome cesspool. The stench of this work-room and the foul air of the cells, combined with the bad and insufficient food, tended to undermine the health of the wretched prisoners; for, observe, they were set to work on the wet moors outside, during the cold winter, and in the foul bone-shed during the stifling summer days! Siberia may have sharper tortures, but none more revolting in cold, deliberate cruelty, than those of Dartmoor.

There was other work, plenty of it, in the Dartmoor institution, delving, building, and toiling in various ways. The men were not allowed to be idle as long as they were able to lift a hand or foot. When Davitt came out of Dartmoor, having entered prison a healthy man of normal weight, he weighed 122 pounds. "Not, I think," he says, "a proper weight for a man six feet high and at the age of thirty-one."

McCarthy came out to die, and Chambers to linger a wreck for the remainder of his wasted life.

In short, the political prisoners were systematically subjected to harsher treatment than the hardened criminals with whom they were associated; and this was done as a fixed policy of the Government, to make treason odious. Being men of natural refinement, they felt more keenly than the common felon the indignity of having to strip and be searched four times a day; and, as they were unwise enough to show this reluctance, the coarse warders of the prison took an especial delight in inflicting it upon them.

O'Reilly was a "good" prisoner; that is, he took care