We believe they are fed improperly. Sick people ought to have light diet and these poor creatures get their beef water and meal for soup, as we are informed, with coarse meat and cabbage—such diet as they cannot eat. One poor fellow burst out crying and said he was literally starving to death. We actually saw live vermin crawling over their faces, and the little bedding and clothing they have is in tatters and stiff with filth.
We call the attention of the Board of Control to these matters, but under the law we know they can do but little to remedy these evils. We believe they will do the best they can. We are not to be understood as condemning the lessees in person for these things, but we do inveigh against the principle and system of this great State taking a poor creature’s liberty and turning him over to one whose interest it is to coin his blood into money.
As a fair sample of this system, on January 6, 1887, two hundred and four convicts were leased to McDonald up to June 6, 1887, and during this six months twenty died, nineteen were discharged and escaped and twenty-three returned to the walls disabled and sick, many of whom have since died. God will never smile upon a State that treats its convicts as Mississippi does. After a full examination and conference with the kind-hearted prison physician, Dr. Johnston, we find the following persons in the hospital almost in a dying state, some of them with hopelessly incurable diseases and others badly afflicted, and all of them confined for minor offenses, comparatively speaking, and who have long since suffered the full penalty of the law in being beaten and so cruelly mis-treated, and whom we here earnestly beg the Governor to pardon immediately, so that they may at least die free.
Then follow the names of twelve persons, all colored, who, in consequence of the abuse to which they were subjected in prison, are now suffering from incurable diseases. Oh, for some John Howard to arise in the South and become in God’s hand the instrument of wiping this terrible evil out of existence.
FORTY-FIRST ANNUAL MEETING
of the
American Missionary Association.
The Forty-first Annual Meeting of the American Missionary Association convened in the Second Parish Church at Portland, Maine, on Tuesday, October 25th, at 3 o’clock P. M.
Owing to the recent death of its President, Hon. Wm. B. Washburn, of Massachusetts, the Association was called to order by one of the Vice-Presidents, Alexander McKenzie, D.D., of the same State, who, after the singing of “Coronation,” read the Scriptures—Mark vi, 30–56—and led in prayer.