A curious fate has befallen this ancient institution. In its more primitive form it now arouses universal disgust and horror. The Russian prisons of Siberia are, for instance, a by-word of reproach. The physical and mental torture which they inflict, wholesale and indiscriminately, on men and women, on political suspects as well as on the lowest criminals, have been described over and over again, from within and from without, during the last fifty years, in Dostoieffsky’s _Recollections of the Dead-House_, by Maximoff, and by Krapotkine, and still, when Mr. Kennan repeats the old story, a wave of indignation passes across the civilised world. Elsewhere on the fringe of European civilisation the primitive prison is still scarcely changed. The Spanish prisons are often filthy and overcrowded, and the inmates are maintained in laziness. In the Spanish prison of Ceuta, in Morocco, there are 3000 convicts, mostly for life, and crowded together, so that 112 sleep in one room.[92] The native prisons of Morocco are the abodes of oppression, starvation, and filth, where the innocent and guilty are thrown in together, without any kind of work, and allowed to die slowly. “The horrors of these places are indescribable. Often they are underground, damp, and pestilential; always filthy. They are frequently very crowded, and a dozen or more poor wretches may be fastened in one chain by their necks, with heavy irons on their wrists and ankles, unable to stir a foot away from one another for any purpose all night, and often all day.”[93] “On the highest authority,” says Mr. Cook, “I am able to say that the prison population of the city of Morocco equals the free population.” In the interior, where there is no dread of European influence, things are naturally much worse. In Egypt the prisons are filthy and filled with untried prisoners. In Greece the prisoners are, “if possible, dirtier than those of Egypt, no work, no books, and but little food. Some of the rooms containing ten prisoners were less than twelve feet square.” Many of the prisons of South Africa are in a wretched condition, and some of those in the United States are little better.