stood waist deep in water unable to rest or sleep without drowning. Buoyed up by hope of release, some endured this torture of "La Fosse" for fifteen days; but that was nature's limit. None ever survived it longer. The _oubliettes_ of the Conciergerie, recently revealed by excavations below the level of the Seine, vividly confirm the story of Masers de Latude, long confined in a similar one in Bicêtre. He says: "I had neither fire nor artificial light and prison rags were my only clothing. To quench my thirst, I sucked morsels of ice broken off from the open window; I was nearly choked by the effluvium from the cellars. Insects stung me in the eyes. I had nearly always a bad taste in my mouth, and my lungs were horribly oppressed. I endured unceasing pangs of hunger, cold and damp; I was attacked by scurvy; in ten days my legs and thighs were swollen to twice their ordinary size; my body turned black; my teeth loosened in their sockets so that I could not masticate; I could not speak and was thought to be dead." Perhaps the refinement of torture, however, had been reached under the cowardly and superstitious Louis XI, whose iron cages were of such shape and size that the prisoners could languish in them for years unable either to stand upright or to stretch full length upon the floor. One feels the grim humour of fate that condemned the Bishop of Verdun, their inventor, to be the first to suffer in them. Life-long confinement under such conditions was the so-called "clemency" of rulers desiring to be thought merciful. Supported first by hope, then deadened by despair, men endured life in these prisons for years only to leave them bereft of health or reason. The famous names of those who languished in them is legion. Fouquet, the defaulting minister of Louis XIV, whose magnificence had rivalled that of the king himself, was punished by such captivity for twenty years. The "Man with the Iron Mask," whose identity, lost for three centuries, has been proved beyond a doubt after careful comparison of all theories,—pined his life away in one of them, accused, like Dreyfus, of having sold a secret of state. Records of like cruelty and indifference to human suffering blackened the pages of English history until the merciful ministrations of John Howard and of Elizabeth Frye aroused the slumbering pity of Great Britain, and alleviated the conditions of prisoners all over the world. In all lands, in all ages, in all stages of civilization, man has left grim records of vengeful passion. No race has escaped the stigma, perhaps no creed. It would almost seem that nations had vied with each other in the subtlety of their ingenuity for producing suffering. The stoical Indian, the inscrutable Chinese, the cruel Turk, the brutal Slav, the philosophic Greek, the suave and artistic Italian, the stolid German, the logical and pleasure-loving French, the aggressive English,—all have left their individual seal on these records of "man's inhumanity to man."