Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1893 — A MOORISH PRISON. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

A MOORISH PRISON.

A Horrible Dungeon Where Human Beings Are Confined. Of all the places where human beings are confined for punishment, there are said to be none so horrible as the prisons of Morocco. The one presented in our illustration is situated at Fez, and was, a short time

ago, visited by a traveler who gives the following description of it: You ascend by a narrow staircase, he writes, and come out on a flat roof bathed in the glorious spring sun. At your feet is a square opening with a heavy wooden grating. It is hell’s hatchway. You look down and instantly turn sick with the horrible stench which arises. You look again and you see down there upturned faces, white, passionless, despairing, and up from the depths comes the clank of chains. Dark, foul, damp; a den of filth and fever, where mind is destroyed and body packed with ague; a pit off destruction whence the most fervent prayer that comes up must be the prayer for swift death. “What are these prisoners?” I asked the guard who accompanied me. “They are all bad people,” he said. “Murderers?” “Thev are robbers many of them, and there are many of the tribesmen who made the trouble recently at Wazzan and attacked the town; others are debtors, men who owe money to Jews and others.” “And they are all kept together down there —murderers, and robbers and rebels and debtors?” “Yes.” “And when will they be tried?” I might as well have asked the man the exact day and hour of the next total eclipse of the sun. He knew nothing about trials, and his ideas as to the meting out of justice to the wretches below began and ended right there in the pit—that was justice. They were bad people, and there they were. There is no fixed term of imprisonment; the murderer and the robber and the rebel stay in the hole till they die; the debtor stays there till he pays, and if he doesn’t pay he dies, too. No writ of habeas corpus runs in Morocco. And these things are done within six days’ steam from Charing Cross; within twelve hours’ ride from the residence of all the ministers plenipotentiary and envoys extraordinary and consuls of the great powers! And is nothing ever done? Has the opinion of Europe found no expression? Have the reports of Executive Committees of philanthropic societies availed naught? Oh, yes! Once in a while the Moorish authorities give the prisons a coat of whitewash.

EXTERIOR OF A MOORISH PRISON.