The walls of jails are good non-conductors of what goes on behind them, and this applies to other prisons as well as to that at Atlanta. Yet once in a while a groan or protest, or a partial account of some outbreak, finds its way through; and in many cases the gist of the story is to the effect that the food is bad or scanty. Other things the men behind the bars suffer stoically, or not so stoically; but lack of food arouses them to despair and frenzy. We have lately heard reports from Sing Sing illustrative of this condition there; and many another jail could echo the complaints of the unfortunates in that gloomy hell-chamber. Convicts know that they are to be punished, that the government has sentenced them, that it is the law; and though they may find cause to disagree with the decree that consigns them to hopeless and useless servitude, they accept it as at least legal and incident to the game as played. But they do not believe that the government has condemned them to starvation, or to poisoning (and the condition in which food often comes to the convicts' table is practically poisonous). They know that no such punishment is included in the statutes; and they can only conclude, therefore, that it is an arbitrary and illegal piece of cruelty or neglect on the part of the warden or commissary officer. They are prone to think that these persons profit financially by cutting down their supplies; and that they are careful to conceal the fact in their reports to the Department, or to disguise it as a meritorious economy. At the same time, they are conscious that there is no regular channel through which they can make their injury known to the authorities, and that nothing is more readily denied, or more easily concealed from inspectors, than is this very abuse. But the suffering which it occasions is constant and cumulative. They are still required to perform their labor, as if in full physical vigor. They are punished if physical weakness causes them to fall short in their tasks. They feel their vitality ebbing, they find themselves ever less able to resist the inroads of disease, their appeals to the doctors are often met with sneers and even animosity; and what marvel is it that stoicism and patience at last give way, and they break out in some wild and savage excess which justifies the resort by their masters to the dungeon and the bullet? But death may well seem to the rebels preferable to the lingering pains of the alternative fate. The under nourishment and malnourishment of convicts is, in fact, one of the worst crimes of the many which their despots perpetrate upon them. From any point of view, it is barbarous and wicked--the crime of a Weyler upon the defenseless Cuban revolutionists, which, as much as the destruction of the Maine, impelled this country to declare war. Yet, knowing as we do that it is perpetrated upon the human beings in our prisons, we sit supine and acquiescent, and thereby make the crime our own.