same food that she gives her soldiers, except that the latter get a pound more of bread daily than the former-a fair enough discrimination, as the soldier burns up more energy per diem than the prisoner. Each prisoner in Russia gets at noon a half-pound of meat in the form of thick, chunky soup. At night he gets a quarter-pound of meat in the same way, two pounds of black bread, and kasha, frequently ad lib. Kasha is buckwheat cooked from six to eight hours in water and then mixed with fat and a little onion. It is delicious, and is eaten by all classes in Russia. Of course the prisoner in Russia does not eat all his bread and kasha in the evening when it is given to him, but saves some of it for the following day. The food for Russia's captives is prepared by the same cook who prepares the food of their soldier guards-it is, in fact, the same food.

Germany's food bill for her prisoners is upwards of 750,000 marks (about $187,500) a day, and during the first fifteen months of the war she spent 350,000,000 marks to feed the men her soldiers had taken. Of course the expense of her prison boarding-houses is increasing every day. During the first part of the war there was a disposition on the part of some of Germany's citizens to begrudge the prisoners their food, and a few public protests were made, but that feeling has died out entirely. In the first place, Germans fear starvation no longer; and, in the second place, they realize that Germany's unusually large crops in 1915 were made possible by prison labor.

Both the Russian and the Austro-German prisoners are supposed to get a coat, a pair of trousers, two pairs of underdrawers, and two pairs of socks apiece when they enter captivity, but as a matter of fact they do not always get them. As a rule, the soldiers who are captured are allowed to wear their hostile uniforms until worn out. Many prisoners in both Teuton and Slav prisons have no shirts under their coats, while others have no coats over their shirts.

The usual prison building is rather more dismal, dingy, and generally uncomfortable than a run-down army barrack. When Mr. Harte reached Europe in January, 1915, he built three small houses-all that the funds then at his disposal would permit. The Young Men's Christian Association has since, however, put up a number of barracks, and they are model structures, one hundred feet by thirty; they contain one large sleeping and living room, seventy feet by thirty, and three small rooms for reading, study, and recreation.

Having found the American Young Men's Christian Association trustworthy, the European Governments are beginning to give practical proof of their confidence in the American organization. Germany has appropriated 150,000 marks for Mr. Harte to spend as he pleases for the benefit of German prisoners in Russia, and the Czar's Government has granted 50,000 rubles for the Young Men's Christian Association to devote to its work among Russian prisoners in Germany and Austria. Half a million dollars will be enough to enable the Young Men's Christian Association to carry on all the work it is planning among the war prisons of Europe for several months to come, Mr. Harte told me. But, in addition to trying to raise this fund, Mr. Harte is anxious to get twenty thousand Americans who will each write an occasional letter and send a package of good things to some prisoner who will be appointed as their correspondent.

The personal touch, the feeling that some one outside the prison barriers is interested in him, counts for a lot with every prisoner. This lends great importance to the efforts the American Young Men's Christian Association is making to facilitate the delivery of the prison mails-in fact, the Young Men's Christian Association has become a sort of postal clearing-house. Every time that Mr. Harte or any of his assistants goes from Russia to Germany or vice versa, a trip which is made every month or two, many sacks of letters are carried to men in foreign prisons from their relatives and friends at home.

To keep the prisoners healthy in mind by giving them entertainment and a little human sympathy, and to keep them healthy in body. by providing work for all who are able to work, are the aims of the Young Men's Christian Association. Hence the importance of the workshops that the Young Men's Christian Association is installing in prisons. The captives build their own barracks and their own furniture, and many of them have become very efficient at the textile and carving trades. The carpets woven by English officers and the wooden utensils and objects of art carved by the Russian soldiers are becoming famous in Europe!

On the whole, Germany treats her prisoners more efficiently, but less kindly, than Austria and Russia. She gives them more work to do, however, using them both in agriculture and in road-building.

Russia utilizes little of the potential indus

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trial energy which fills her military prisonsa great mistake on her part. Only a few thousand captives in Russia have been used to work on the roads and railways of the Empire. Most of the Russian war prisoners are in Siberia, where the need of wagon roads as freight feeders to the Trans-Siberian Railway is great. In the winter a sledge going from one little settlement to another simply follows the track of the last sledge that has gone that way, or makes a new trail if a fresh snowfall has obliterated the old. In Siberia, as in parts of European Russia, there is what is called "the roadless season." This comes in both spring and fall, when for two or three weeks at a time traffic is impossible over the muddy, undrained wagon trails, and villages are cut off from each other and from the outer world. Transportation certainly is civilization in vast, inaccessible Russia, and the construction of plenty of good roads would be a direct step toward raising the whole standard of life and civilization in thousands of Russian villages. Convention V, Article VI, of the Hague Convention permits prisoners of war to be used in non-military labor. Such a use of Russia's million prisoners would make both them and Russia healthier, happier, and wealthier. Colonel Gilovatsky, in charge of . the prison camp at Razdolnoi, using four thousand men for a few weeks, has proved what fine roads prisoners can make. But if the Russian Government does not wish to utilize this tremendous reservoir of labor to repair some of the damage wrought by war and to assist in the improvement of Russia's industrial future, at least the great reserve of labor might be lent to private industries, mining companies, etc., which would be glad to contract for it on a fair basis.

Thus far, to the small extent that Russia has utilized the labor of her prisoners at all, the Austrians have been favored more than the Germans. This is because many of the Austrians are Slavs who have a smattering of Russian or Polish and can manage to make themselves understood. But in no other way is there any discrimination among the different races and nationalities in Russia's prisons. In nearly all the prisons, however, distinctions are made in the treatment of captive officers and captive men.

Wherever it is possible, the officers are segregated from the rank and file, and in some camps the more intelligent and more cultured soldiers are separated from the lower peasant types. In some camps, too, the

officers are permitted to retain their shoulderstraps or to wear some other sign of their rank. This usually works well; it enables the officers to keep the respect of their men and encourages them to co-operate with the prison guards in maintaining discipline.

The prison camps of Russia vary much in size, appearance, and comfort. They range in size from very small settlements, such as the one at Bielgorod, where eleven Austrian officers share three large rooms in a private house and are allowed to exercise on the grounds under guard, to one or two of the larger Siberian camps, which are cities in themselves, containing as many as thirty thousand prisoners. In many instances the military barracks throughout Russia that have been vacated when garrisons have been called to the front are filled up with the men whom those garrisons and other Russian soldiers have captured. One prison in Siberia is in a church, and at Alchevskol an old circus harbors five hundred men in the winter. A stove in the center of the single ring radiates heat toward the shelves built over the terraced seats where the prisoners sleep. But the Russians believe that this is going to be a long war, and they are making provisions to handle a million or two lodgers for two or three years. The barracks of board and brick are found to be colder than houses with walls of earth, and a new type of dwelling is being constructed at many of the prison camps throughout Siberia. Excavations are made to a depth of five or six feet. The solid earth banks about the excavation are then used as the walls of the house, being extended in height a few feet with planking or bricking in which windows are cut. The roof is of logs or planks covered with sods. Given a brick stove in such a house, men can laugh at the long-fanged winters of Siberia.

In all the Russian camps the prisoners get an hour or two of exercise a day under guard, and in some much more. In all they have at least one bath every two weeks, in many they get one bath a week, and in some camps where water is plenty they can bathe to their hearts' content.

The corps of investigators in charge of Mr. Pierce, specially appointed by the United States Government to look into conditions in Russian war prisons, reports a widely varying state of affairs. Some of the prisons are admirable, like the camp of five thousand at Mokentiafskia, in Siberia, in charge of Colonel Rostovstoff, who has the barracks washed

out three times a day, once with bichloride of mercury. In a few buildings where men are packed in tightly, lying on. shelves built one above another like the "joy beds " in an opium den, our investigators report a condition of things "hardly tolerable." But most of the prisons are at least tolerable, and the bad ones are being supplanted by sanitary camps as rapidly as possible. The prisoners complain much more often of the non-delivery of letters from home than they do of bad ventilation or bad food. They are permitted to have their own organizations for pleasure, several prisons have their own. orchestras, and the officers quartered in private houses in Tomsk are allowed to play tennis and enjoy other outdoor sports.

As an instance of the newly found efficiency with which the Russian Government is learning to handle the huge task of prison administration, consider the case of the big camp at Nikolsk-Ussurick. Each of the twenty-two one-story brick dormitories was criminally crowded with a thousand men. Clothes were washed in mud puddles, decayed fish was served as food. At the beginning of last summer in the camp were a thousand cases of scurvy and several hundred cases of typhus. Then the chief administrators of the war prisons and the American investigators heard of it, the Russians acted with unusual celerity, and by the end of the summer both diseases had been stamped out.

The prisoners differ much in their attitude toward their captors and their environment. While the train on which I was traveling from Archangel to Vologda stopped to permit the passengers to patronize a restaurant which furnished bad food at high prices, with a fellowtraveler, a Russian official, I walked up the tracks a few yards to where a knot of Austrian prisoners were busy laying the standard-gauge track that was to replace the narrow-gauge one then on that line. One of the Austrians had once been a textile worker in Paterson, New Jersey. We fell to talking, and it was strange in the crisp air of that morning near the Arctic Circle to hear him recall the events of the long and hard-fought textile strike of 1913 and to hear the bitterness which he still cherished against the Paterson Chief of Police.

"I leave America after de strike and never more vill I go back. Not to Austria, neither. Dis country suits me. After de war I stay in Russia."

Quite different were the feelings and viewpoint of one of six non-commissioned Aus

trian officers who shared two rooms in a large private house in Polnoff. This man was allowed the entire freedom of the garden and courtyard around the house, and for an hour a day he was permitted to walk unguarded on the main street of the town, which ran before the house in which he lived.

"How are you getting on, Sergeant asked one of the prison investigators attached to the American Embassy.

"Rotten!" answered the Austrian, in good English.

"What's the matter? Isn't your food all right?"

"Oh, the food's all right, but every time I take my promenade on this beastly street I get my boots muddy."

Yet this was the very street on which the Nachalnik (Mayor), Ispravnik (Chief of Police), and other town dignitaries paraded with their wives and sweethearts on holidays!

The Russians, of course, are loth to talk about the escapes and attempted escapes from their prisons. Two officers in the private house at Bielgorod, to which I have already referred, got away from their guards, but were caught as they jumped aboard a train. Eleven officers escaped from Razdolnoi and crossed the Chinese frontier. At once a high palisade was built around the recreation ground at that camp, but there have been many escapes from other prisons near the border of China.

Russia and Germany have an agreement for the exchange of all prisoners who have been so badly injured that they are unfit for military service. The men are sent back and forth by way of the Scandinavian countries, crossing the Russian border at Tornea, Finland, where they are ferried across the river or dragged over it on the ice to Haparanda, Sweden, where they are again entrained.

I was standing on the platform of the little Haparanda station one of those still nights of crushing cold which the Swedes love. The sky was moonless, but the glow of the bright Arctic stars in the level mirror of fresh, hard snow illumined every detail of the landscape. A freshly filled train of German wounded was pushed into the station from a siding by a puffing one-lunged yard engine. In spite of the cold which froze the breath on his Kaiser-cut mustache when he opened the car window, a one-legged German private leaned out into the vibrant night and called to me in my own language.

"You English?" he asked.

Ireland, and we were very, very doubtful as to how we should get on there. It was only four years after the Phoenix Park tragedy, and the political atmosphere was still very uncertain. Well, we crossed the Channel by night, and steamed into Dublin Bay in the morning, in the most glorious sunshine. Our four children were with us, and they were very much excited. They were dressed in white, and were immensely delighted with the whole show, and as the state procession moved through the city they waved and kissed their hands. The Irish love children, and so our children paved the way very much for us.

The industrial movement then came into play. We found a great many scattered home industries, which were developed into a collection of industries such as people had not dreamed of. We put a notice in the papers that any one who had things they would like to show might apply. I visited schools, convents, etc., in connection with this work. There were a number of small lace industries started after the famine. Many of them had no regular way of reaching the markets. Each was trying to do what it could in its own way.

So the Irish Industries Association was formed in order to try to help to improve and develop these industries, to find a market for them, and to make them known. Of course Mr. Gladstone's Government was in power for only a very short time, and we then left Ireland. Should we go on with our project? President Sullivan, of Queen's University, Cork, and Sir Robert Hamilton, a very remarkable man, Under-Secretary in the Irish Government and one of the originators of the Home Rule movement, said, "By all means try to get your plan started." We communicated with every sort of person of all different churches and creeds about it, and it was really very delightful to find out how ready they were to work together over this.

From that time, although we did not go back to Ireland officially until twenty years later, I was a great deal there, working at these industries in the meantime.

When we came back to Ireland, in 1906, the industrial movement had taken altogether a different position. A number of associations had been formed to deal with it, and there had been improvement, not only in the relations between England and Ireland, but also in the economic development of Ireland itself. Sir Horace Plunkett took the

lead in the movement which brought about the formation of a new Government Department for Agriculture and Technical Instruction. The Land Purchase Acts were gradually solving the long-standing land problem. Meantime the housing conditions in the Irish cites remained untouched. As to the public health, the Registrar-General pointed out figures with regard to tuberculosis to the effect that in 1864 Ireland stood better than either England or Scotland. By 1906 this was reversed. In the other two countries conditions had been bettered, whereas in Ireland comparatively little had been done. During all those years there was the emigration to America also, which was draining the country of its young life. Here was a really seri

ous condition. The tendency of tuberculosis was to increase rather than to decrease. in America, one reason for the growth of tuberculosis in Ireland, notably in Belfast and also in Dublin, was the congested condition of the people in the cities. The poor from the country districts coming into the city to be relieved were always accentuating the conditions in Dublin. In Belfast the congestion of population was due to the factories and to rapid growth.

The economic problem of Ireland had been changing from a rural problem to a city problem. What was to be done? There had been an association-a branch of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis-but it had not done much. was then decided to start this women's association, with the idea of appealing specially to women. This organization, actually started in 1907, was called the Women's National Health Association of Ireland. The first idea was to deal purely with tuberculosis, but the plan was afterwards made to include the general health. Among the health problems which engage the consideration of the Association are stamping out tuberculosis, combating the causes of infant mortality, providing for a proper milk supply, advocating the movement for better housing, spreading the knowledge and practice of health principles in the home, promoting school hygiene, and developing healthful recreation. Take tuberculosis, for instance; this question received a quick response. The Irish people are quick to seize an idea. If they once see that it is a good thing, they promptly take it up. This public education campaign, by which means America accomplishes so many useful social reforms, just suited the people. Although