The French are generally great devourers of Bread and therefore what would be a very competent allowance to an Englishman appears a contracted one to them, while the meat which an Englishman would scarcely think enough is to them a reasonable allowance. The Ration of a pound of bread with half a pound of meat Vegetables etc. digested into a Broth or soup yielding seven quarts per diem to every six men affords a support which our labouring poor rarely have at any time, but certainly not during the present scarcity, and which to men living without labour seems enough to maintain them in a general state of good health. And I have been informed by some who are most qualified to know, that the French Prisons had never had so few sick as at the present time. {283} Some indeed who had sported away their allowance in Gambling to prevent which the Agents have taken every precaution in their Power are in fact destitute enough and so they might have been if their Ration had been ten times as great. But this is their own fault entirely and it cannot be expected that if a Prisoner be pleased to throw away his food by vice, that Government must be at the expence of supplying him again. However wherever this has been discovered particularly as it may be in the Article of Bread the whole has been seized by the agent of Officers of the Prison, from the Winners or Purchasers and distributed amongst the Prisoners at large. Many of the Prisoners have stalls in a kind of Market within the walls in which among other articles they sell Provisions and vegetables and I am told acquire considerable sums of money. This interior market is supplied by another without where there is a free access of the Country People with all sorts of provisions Beer and Produce which they are not allowed to sell but at the fair Market Price so that Destitution is only to be found among those few who have been weak or wicked enough to lose their allowance by Gambling. I am also informed that many Thousand pounds have been already remitted, and that sums of money are now continually remitting from France, by the Friends of the Prisoners for additional comforts in their situation. This affords a considerable supply to many of their requirements. Their clothing in general for which the French Government has ceased to provide (as well as for the victualling) is getting very bad, and to meet the winter fairly must by some means or other be supplied.