A DEGRADING EXHIBITION

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2028, 13 March 1907, Page 4

A DEGRADING EXHIBITION

Surely there is no more utterly senseless exhibition than that of fasting—unless it be ovoreating. Sacco, tho extraordinary person who nearly killed himself a year or two ago breaking a record, was nearly at death’s door when tho last mail loft London through trying to do without food for fifty days. It was twonty-eiglit days since he entered the small wooden hut at Olympia to begin his ordeal, and ho had become an emaciated wreck. “Backwards and forwards across tho narrow limits of his cage Sacco hobbles most of tho time when he is not asleep,” says a London paper. “He was onco, if his photographs are to be believed, a tall man, strong and vigorous-looking. He now seems like ono in the last stages of consumption. His shoulders are bent, his cheeks painfully sunken, his foroliead lined by deep furrows, and his dark eyes are mournful as those of a beaten dog.” At another time he was too weak to rise, and the management were seriously thinking of calling in a doctor and breaking down tho lint. In these fasts tho would-be record-breaker is soaled up in a chamber with a glass front, through which the morbidlyminded public can feast their eyes on him, and no ono enters it till the fast is over. In Sacco’s case there was only a small grating to admit fresh air, and the atmosphere must have become appalling, for ho smoked continuously. Indeed, ho complained that fresh air made him feel ill. All day long the public flattened their noses against the glass to gaze on the horrible spectacle of a man dying by inches. Sacco would gather up tho front of his waistcoat to show them how tliiu ho had got, and they would laugh—and pass oil to see the lions next door, who at least had regular meals. “It is a most , degrading spectacle, and is attended by so much danger that tho intervention of the polico will bo called for unless it is stopped.” Sacco obstinately declined to break his fast or to allow himself to be examined by a doctor, but as he had twenty days to go it is extromely improbable that ho succeeded in his task. Sacco’s wife stayed day and night gazing at the man sho believed to bo dying, and at times shrieking out hysterically to the lookers-on to save her husband. “You will ruin your husband’s reputation and caroor,” declared Sacco’s manager, reprovingly. “I do not caro for anything as long as his life is saved” was Madame Sacco’s reply. Is it not possible to put this sort of thing down by law?