Foreign News: Vermont Atrocities?

Terrific was the indignation of virtually the entire English Press last week, when two British sailors hove into Liverpool and announced that they were recently “imprisoned without trial of any sort for more than ten months” at St. Albans, Vermont, U. S. A.

Said Sailor Michael Frane: “Throughout the whole period I did not leave the single room in which we were kept, together with robbers, bootleggers and the scum of the country. I did not have a single hour’s exercise all the time, nor a single change of underclothing for over five months. Although I had pneumonia and Stanley West, my companion, was even worse off, we were given only bread and a piece of butter the size of a quarter, and a can of green tea holding about a cupful each day. For that the prison commissioners get $1.50 a day per head.”

Citizens of the U. S. could only admit, shamefacedly, that prisoners in many U. S. city jails are shamefully underfed by profiteering keepers. For example, such a state of affairs was exposed, last year, in the “Model City,” Cleveland.

As to the reported “Vermont atrocities,” impartial citizens awaited developments, merely noting that before the British seamen were “imprisoned without trial” they had violated U. S. immigration laws by crossing over from Canada without passports.