"The Bolsheviki have restored the barbarous methods of torture. The examination of prisoners frequently takes place with a revolver at the unfortunate prisoner's head. "The Bolsheviki have established the odious practice of taking hostages. Still worse, they have struck at their political opponents through their woman folk. When recently a long list of hostages was published in Petrograd, the Bolsheviki seized the wives of those men whom they could not find and threw them into prison until their husbands should give themselves up." When the Bolsheviki were forced to evacuate Riga, in May, 1919, they left behind them in the [**] prisons 1,600 hostages who were found to be in a state of unspeakable misery and starvation. An Associated Press despatch of March 22, 1919, states that "a Russian girl of 19 years, who, in December, 1918, had been charged with espionage, was tortured by being pierced thirteen times in the same wound with a bayonet. She lived, however, and made an affidavit to these details." The same dispatch states that "an examination of dead bodies of persons alleged to have been killed by the Bolsheviki in the Perm district, shows a preponderance of bayonet wounds in the back, but in other instances mouths were slit, fingers and hands cut off, and the heads of the victims smashed." "Struggling Russia," in its issue of April 5, 1919, informs us that "officers have come out of Petrograd prisons with their nails torn off, and that prisoners after having been fed on herrings were given nothing to drink for two or three days." A dispatch from Warsaw, dated April 10, 1919, stated that fugitives from Russia were pouring into that city, each of them bringing fresh tales of Bolsheviki horrors. The people in Russia, it was said, were being shot on the least provocation. For instance, men who remained in bed during the cold weather to keep warm because they had no fuel were accused of "discontent" and dragged into the streets and shot. Dead bodies, it was claimed, were left lying in the streets in heaps. In order to maintain their popularity with the workingmen and with their hired mercenaries, the Bolsheviki paid their supporters enormous wages by means of an unchecked paper issue. In fact they have turned out so many tons of paper money, without financial guarantees of any sort, that today in Russia money has lost practically all its value. "Struggling Russia," March 22, 1919, publishes an appeal issued in Petrograd and signed by the following organizations: Committee for the Defence of Freedom of the Press; Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party; Central Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists; Central Committee of the Councils of Peasant Deputies and the Union of Workmen-Printers. Among other things the appeal says: