According to two more Associated Press despatches, even women and children were not excepted by the Bolsheviki who have been so much extolled by our American Socialists and recognized as their brethren:
"Stockholm, April 17, 1919.--The Bolsheviki are carrying out a rapid and systematic annihilation of all the bourgeois elements in Riga, according to reports from Libau to 'Svenska Dagblast.' The victims of the Bolsheviki terror are taken to the Island of Hasen, in the Dvina river, and are said to number 70,000, including women and children. No one is permitted to take food or money to the island."
"London, April 17, 1919.--Eighteen hundred persons, including 400 women, were murdered by the Bolsheviki at Ufa, according to a dispatch from Omsk, received in official quarters here."
The "Northern Commune" published the following report in which the horrors of the Bolsheviki prisons were described by the Bolsheviki themselves:
"The presiding officers of the Soviet of the Viborg district decided to send a delegation to the prisons of that district when they heard that terrible scenes were occurring there. The prisoners were starving. Many of them who had been held eight months had not yet been tried, for the Commission entrusted with the investigation of their cases had not yet been in session.
"The delegation consisted of Dr. Petropavlovsky, the Military Commissionary, Vasilyevsky, and the President of the Soviet, Frilisser. The latter handed in the following report: 'Comrades, what we saw and heard in visiting the prisons of the Viborg district cannot be described....
"'The cells are repulsively dirty. There is neither clean linen nor pillows. The prisoners are being punished for the least offence.
"'But what is most terrible is the scene we witnessed in the prison hospital.
"'Comrades! We found there no people! We found there living ghosts who had no strength to talk, for they were starving.
"'When somebody dies, the corpse remains for several hours with its living neighbors, who say: "That is nothing. We shall all soon die of hunger."'"
"Dyelo Naroda," in its issue of April 26, 1918, thus describes the cruelties of the barbarous Bolshevists:
"In Kirensk County the people's tribunal ordered a woman found guilty of extracting brandy, to be enclosed in a bag and repeatedly knocked against the ground until dead.
"In the Province of Tver the people's tribunal had sentenced a young fellow to freeze to death for theft. In a rigid frost he was led out, clad only in a shirt, and water was poured on him until he turned into a piece of ice. Out of pity somebody cut his tortures short by shooting him."
The British High Commissioner, R. H. Bruce-Lockhart, in his telegram to the British Foreign Office, November 10, 1918, thus describes one of the methods of torture and the taking of hostages as practiced by the followers of the "gentle" Lenine:
"The Bolsheviki have restored the barbarous methods of torture. The examination of prisoners frequently takes place with a revolver at the unfortunate prisoner's head.
"The Bolsheviki have established the odious practice of taking hostages. Still worse, they have struck at their political opponents through their woman folk. When recently a long list of hostages was published in Petrograd, the Bolsheviki seized the wives of those men whom they could not find and threw them into prison until their husbands should give themselves up."
When the Bolsheviki were forced to evacuate Riga, in May, 1919, they left behind them in the [**] prisons 1,600 hostages who were found to be in a state of unspeakable misery and starvation.