More than this: at the other prisons a more or less sympathetic public was near at hand which kept the prisoners in touch with the free life without, even if many of its members were merely curious gapers and gazers, or purchasers of manufactures. At Dartmoor the natives who came to the prison gates, came only to sell their produce. Being natives of a remote district, they were generally prejudiced against the prisoners, and Farmer Newcombe’s speech in Mr. Phillpotts’ _Farm of the Dagger_, accurately reproduces the sentiments prevalent among them: ‘Dartymoor’s bettern they deserve anyway. I should like to know what’s too bad for them as makes war on us. ’Tis only naked savages, I should have thought, as would dare to fight against the most civilized and God-fearing nation in the world.’ Finally, it is much to be feared that the jacks-in-office and petty officials at Dartmoor, secure in their seclusion as they thought, were exacting and tyrannical to a degree not ventured upon in other places of confinement more easily accessible to the light of inspection, and unsurrounded by a desert air into which the cries of anguish and distress would rise in vain. All the same, it was not long before the condition of prison life in Dartmoor became known, even in high places. In July 1811, the _Independent Whig_ published revelations of the state of Dartmoor which caused Lord Cochrane, member for Westminster, to bring the facts before the notice of the House of Commons, but he expressed his disappointment that his exposure had been without result, asserting that the Government was afraid of losing what little character it had. He declared that the soil of Dartmoor was one vast marsh, and was most pestilential. Captivity, said he, was irksome enough without the addition of disease and torture. He asserted that the prison had been built for the convenience of the town, and not the town for the convenience of the prison, inasmuch as the town was a speculative project which had failed. ‘Its inhabitants had no market, were solitary, insulated, absorbed, and buried in their own fogs.’ To remedy this it was necessary to do something, and so came about the building of the prison. The article in the _Independent Whig_ which attracted Lord Cochrane’s attention was as follows: ‘To foreigners, bred for the most part in a region the temperature of which is so comparatively pure to the air of our climate at the best of times, a transition so dreadful must necessarily have fatal consequences, and indeed it is related that the prisoners commonly take to their beds at the first arrival, which nothing afterwards can induce them to quit.... Can it bear reflection, much less inspection? Six or seven thousand human beings, deprived of liberty by the chance of war ... consigned to linger out probably many tedious years in misery and disease!