‘While we declaim against the injustice and tyranny of our neighbours, shall we neglect the common duties of humanity? If we submit to crowd our dungeons with the virtuous and the just of our country, confounding moral guilt with unintentional error, and subjecting them to indiscriminate punishment and the most inhuman privations, though we submit to this among ourselves, do not let us pursue the same system towards individuals thrown on our compassion by the casualties of war, lest we provoke a general spirit of retaliation, and plunge again the civilized world into the vortex of Barbarism. Let us not forget that the prisoner is a living trust in our hands, not to be subject to the wayward fancy of caprice, but a deposit placed at our disposal to be required at a future hour. It is a solemn charge, involving the care of life and the principle of humanity.’ ‘Humanitas’ wrote in the _Examiner_, commenting upon Whitbread’s defence and laudation of Dartmoor as a residence, and amazed at the selection of such a place as the site for a prison: ‘The most inclement climate in England; for nine months there is no sun, and four and a half times as much rain as in Middlesex. The regiments on duty there have to be changed every two months. Were not the deaths during the first three years 1,000 a year, and 3,000 sick? Did not from 500 to 600 die in the winter of 1809? Is it not true that since some gentlemen visited the prison and published their terrible experiences, nobody has been allowed inside?’ The writer goes on, not so much to condemn the treatment of the prisoners as to blame the Government for spending so much money on such a site. The Transport Office took counsel’s opinion about prosecuting these two newspapers for libel. It was as follows: ‘In my opinion both these papers are libellous. The first is the strongest, but if the statement of deaths in the other is, as I conceive it is, wholly unsupported by the fact, this is equally mischievous. It is not, however, by any means clear to me that a jury will take the same view of the subject, ... but unless some serious consequences are to be apprehended from suffering these publications to go unnoticed, I should not be inclined to institute prosecutions upon them. V. GIBBS.’ Later on, Vicary Gibbs thinks that they should be prosecuted, but wants information about the heavy mortality of November 1809 to April 1810, and also tables of comparison between the deaths in our own barracks and those in French prisons. I cannot trace the sequel of this, but, reading by the light of the times, it is probable that the matter was hushed up in the same way as were the exposures of Messrs. Batchelor and Andrews at Stapleton a few years previously. The heavy mortality of the six months of 1809–10 was due to an epidemic of measles, which carried off no less than 419 persons in the four months of 1810 alone.