A correspondent gave in the Times of Tuesday some details
as to the employment of British prisoners in Germany. She saw prisoners doing all the work of farms with the help of only a few women. One landowner in Mecklenburg boasted that at last he had been able to make the roads he needed by employing Russian prisoners. There is generally one armed guard to every ten prisoners, but in many cases single prisoners work without any guard at all. Lan- guage presents no great difficulty, as the guards carry phrase-books. But as a matter of fact the prisoners pick up enough knowledge of German quite quickly. The pay used to be threepence a day, but has been raised to sevenpence, in addition to the food and housing. The chief security is that the men know that they are better off than they would be in prison. It is surely time, in view of such evidence as :this, that we overcame the quite inadequate objections that prisoners could not be widely employed here because of the difficulty of guarding them and conversing with them.
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