I should like to take the opportunity of saying how much I appreciate the general good behaviour of the camps during the past year. There have been little lapses, as there must always be in a mixed community of 25,000 people, but on the whole the conduct has been extremely good, which has been a great help to those placed over you. Once more I wish you as good a Christmas as possible and a better New Year. FOOD DIFFICULTIES. The food question also becomes increasingly serious in the camps, as it does in prisons. I confess I feel we ought to ration ourselves very strictly before we cut down the supplies of our prisoners, criminal or otherwise. “The reduced diet,” wrote Fenner Brockway of his prison experiences, “is one of semi-starvation, and every prisoner is becoming thin and physically weak.” (_Labour Leader_, September 6. 1917.) Those who care to inquire of the wives of interned men will learn their side of the case as regards the effect of changed conditions in the camps. The sad feature is that the increasing rigour comes upon men already weakened, both physically and mentally, by long confinement. The original published statement of Sir Edward (now Viscount) Grey [Misc. 7 (1915), p. 23] no longer obtains. The food is, of course, very different, and may not be supplemented. TWO KINDS OF RUMOUR AND SOME REALITY. I have not cared to quote adverse “unofficial information and rumours,” either as regards our own or other detention camps. What some adverse critics say about our own may be read in the _Woman’s Dreadnought_, Vol III., p. 551. The rather terrible appeal of the Captains at Knockaloe is also printed on p. 561. It is a letter which is unwise and hysterical. I do not wonder at its hysteria, and I confess that some things in the letter hit me rather hard. But, alas, the desperation of the interned men on either side does not help towards wise judgment, and for that desperation we are all, in every country, in some measure responsible. It is best to remember instead the real sympathy that those actually in touch with prisoners do often feel. Colonel Panzera’s message is clear evidence of this, and from a private letter I take the following: