The Ministry of Justice has issued a circular to provincial officials state ing that on account of lack of funds it is impossible to proceed rapidly with the work of prison reform, but if these officials enforce prison discipline great improvement can be effected. Then the Ministry proceeds to indicate along what lines reform may be made:
"Horeafter the inmates of prisons should be ordered to cut their hair and to take bath regularly, thos improving their coadbion sod beginning" wciary re From what we know of Chinese Prisons sanitary reform should gin with cleansing the buildings; to make " man comfortable and then put him into filthy den is but to annoy him. There are many reforms that might be instituted without much expense and in some cases their introduction would prove remunerative. For instance although torture has been abolished, on paper, the prisoner who cannot pay "squeeze" is often brutally ill-treated by underlings—a short time ago we had prefects issuing instructions as to the size of certain instruments for corporal punishment while the law said that it did not exist—and these runners must be cleared out, as they have been by the International Mixed Court, ass prelude to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.