According to Chinese law, theoretically, no prisoner is punished until he confesses his crime. He is therefore proved guilty and then by torture made to acknowledge the accuracy of the verdict. The cruelty shown to witnesses as well as culprits is a distinct blot on the administration of justice in China. The penal code is ferocious, the punishments inflicted are fiendishly cruel, and the prisons’ pig-stys in which torture is hardly more deadly than the diseases engendered by the most abominable neglect. The commonest notions of justice and fair play are continually ignored. The story is told of a wretched old man who had been detained years in the filthy prison of Peking, dragging out a weary existence in the company of criminals of the worst description. According to his own account, he had been living on his land with his wife and family. One night he took out his gun to scare crows and trespassers off his ripening crops, in the execution of which innocent design he let off his weapon two or three times. On the following day a man was found murdered on the far confines of his land. Immediately he was apprehended, not as one might suppose, to give evidence or relate what he knew, but to be made to confess that he himself was the author of the crime. To extort this confession he was cruelly and repeatedly tortured. “Of course,” he said, “I shall never leave this prison alive, for they will keep me here until, reduced to the last extremity by torture, I confess myself guilty of a crime of which I am entirely innocent, and when I do confess they will cut off my head on the strength of that confession.” This is founded on unimpeachable fact, and the case is constantly recurring under different forms. “In China it is not the prosecution who prove a prisoner guilty, but the prisoner who has to prove that he is not guilty.” In this same prison of Peking a visitor once was permitted to enter a chamber in which was a barred cage eight feet by eight, and in it twenty-six human beings were incarcerated, of whom six were dying of gaol fever. He asked that they might be taken out of the cage “in order that he might medically examine and if possible relieve them. The gaoler opened the door of the cage and seizing the six by their pig-tails, or by any other portion of their bodies that happened to present itself, dragged them out one by one over the pavement into the courtyard outside. No doubt several of these men were innocent of the crimes imputed to them and were waiting to be tortured into a confession of guilt.”