Lord Emmett and three Members of the House of Commons
were asked by the Foreign Office last May to inquire into the treatment of British prisoners by the Bolsheviks. Their report, published in Tuesday's papers and signed by Major Watts Morgan, the Labour Member for Rhondda, as well as by his mlloagues, is a terrible indictment of Bolshevik barbarism. rwo British prisoners were shot for selling old -clothes and old motor tyres to buy food. The others were thrust into filthy and densely crowded cells and starved. In one cell there were eleven ladies, eight Europeans, and ten Chinamen. In another cell, constructed for thirty-two persons, a hundred and seventy people-were confined ; room was made for the Englishman who told the story by the summary execution of one of the prisoners. The English Bolshevik organ, we notice, admits that these dreadful stories are true, though it complains that the report is " one-sided." The point is that the Bolsheviks want to wage "a heavy civil war " against the " bourgeois " in Great Britain. It is well to know what " a heavy civil war " would mean.
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