Under Salnave and Domingue the spy system was much employed, and it appears likely that, under the present Government, it is rampant, if we may judge by the series of military executions which have marked this Presidency. The jails, as might be expected in such a country, are filthy places. I have often visited that of Port-au-Prince; it is a cluster of low buildings, surrounded by a wall perhaps ten feet in height, so insecure that no European could be kept there a night except by his own good-will. The ordinary negro prisoner, however, has no enterprise, and, rather liking the lazy life, lies down to sleep out his sentence. Prisoners condemned to death, and too often political suspects, are confined in cells, and are manacled to a bar running across the room. I looked into one, and saw five men fixed to the same bar. As I knew that there were only four condemned to death, I asked what was the crime of the fifth. “Oh, he is a military defaulter, and we did not know where else to put him.” In President Geffrard’s time a little attention was paid to the cleanliness of the jails, but during Soulouque’s reign and after Geffrard’s time everything was neglected. A friend once visited the prison, to find nine negroes manacled to the same bar, lying naked on the floor on account of the stifling heat, and the jailer admitted that he had not freed them from the bar for above a week, nor had he thought of having the cell cleaned out. The horrible odour issuing from the place when the door was opened fully confirmed the latter assertion. I knew a general, still living, who had been confined from political motives in one of these cells, I believe for seven years, and his manacles were only occasionally secretly removed by the jailer. Murderers serving out their sentences, thieves, unimportant political prisoners, imprisoned sailors, are all indiscriminately confined in regal rooms opening on a court, and receive their food from friends or relatives. Unhappy would be the wretch who had no one to care for him, as the pitiful allowance for the prisoners, irregularly paid, rarely if ever reaches them.