"Could this happen in any other city in Spain? If the inhabitants found themselves rubbing shoulders with the scum of the earth, with the worst malefactors, with criminals guilty of the most heinous offences, would they have enjoyed one moment's peace? Could they overcome the natural repugnance felt by honest and respectable people for those whom the law has condemned to live apart? The fact is that at Ceuta no one objects. The existing state of things is deemed the most natural thing in the world. It has been too long the rule and it is claimed seriously that no evil consequences have resulted. The utmost confidence is reposed in these ex-criminals whose nature has been seemingly quite changed by relegation to the African presidio. They wash and get up linen without losing more pieces than a first class washerwoman, they wait on the children with the tenderest concern, they perform all sorts of household service, go to market, run messages, polish the floors and the furniture with all the zeal and industry of the best servants in the world. The most cordial relations exist between employers and their convict attendants and cases have been known where the former have carried the latter back to Spain to continue their service. One was a Chinese cook who was excused ten years' supervision to go back with his master."
It is claimed by the champions of Ceuta that
despite the freedom accorded to the convicts their conduct is exemplary. "I can certify," says Relosillas[12] "that during a whole year there were but three or four instances of crime amongst the convicts employed in domestic service." Others however are not so laudatory. An independent witness, Doña Concepcion Arenal, has little good to say of the prisons. "In them justice is punished or rather crucified," she wrote, "and with it hygiene, morality, decency, humanity, all, in a word, which every one who is not himself hateful and contemptible, respects. It is impossible to give any idea of the cuartel principal or chief convict barrack in the place. We can only refer to its terrible and revolting demoralisation." Yet she is inclined to contradict herself and argues that the convict when trusted will behave well. His life on the whole is light and easy; he has sufficient food, congenial company, and can better his position by steady industry; he wears no chains, performs no rude or laborious tasks and is driven neither into insubordination nor crime.
The statements just quoted are hardly credible and cannot be reconciled with the reports of others, from personal experience. Mr. Cook, an English evangelist, who has devoted himself to extensive prison visitation, has drawn a dark picture of this ideal penal settlement as he saw it in 1892. At that date general idleness was the rule. Hundreds hung about with no work to do. Criminals with the
worst antecedents were included in the prison population. One had been a bandido or brigand who had been guilty of seven murders; another had four murders to his credit and one assassin was in a totally dark cell, confined hand and foot, condemned to death and daily expecting to be shot. No fewer than one hundred and twelve slept in one large room without more supervision than that exercised by their fellows discharging the functions of warders. Mr. Cook expresses his wonder that they did not break out oftener into rebellion. As a matter of fact and as against the statement given above, outbreaks were not uncommon with fierce attacks upon officers and murderous affrays among the prisoners. Crime and misconduct are certainly not unknown in Ceuta.
A gruesome description was given by a correspondent writing to the London Times in the year 1876. When he visited the citadel prison he found from eight hundred to one thousand convicts lodged there in a wretched condition, clad only in tattered rags, the cast off uniforms of soldiers, generally insufficient for decency. They tottered in and out of the ruinous sheds supposed to shelter them, quarrelled like hyenas over their meagre and repulsive rations, which were always short through the dishonesty of the thieving contractor, and fought to the death with the knives which every one carried. Each shed contained from one to two hundred where they lay like beasts upon the ground. Vermin crept up the wall and dirt abounded on all sides. "No words of mine," said this outspoken eye-witness, "can paint the darkness, the filth, the seething corruption of these dens of convicts, dens into which no streak of sunlight, divine or human, ever finds its way, and where nothing is seen or heard but outrage and cruelty on the one hand, misery and starvation and obscenity on the other." There was a worse place, the "Presidio del Campo," or field prison in which the hard labour gangs[13] employed on the fortifications were housed in still filthier hovels, with less food and more demoralisation. This same correspondent when he enquired his way to the presidio was told by a Spanish officer: "They are not presidios but the haunts of wild beasts and nurseries of thieves." Obviously there is much discrepancy in the various accounts published.
The true state of the case may best be judged by examining and setting forth the conditions prevailing. On the surface the convicts may seem to abstain from serious misconduct, but even this may be doubted from the facts in evidence. "It is a wild beasts' cage," writes one well informed authority. It may be to some extent a cage without bars, or in which the wild beasts are so tamed that they may be allowed to go at large and do but little harm, but