HUNGER STRIKES.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 86, 18 April 1913, Page 4

HUNGER STRIKES.

Mr Lloyd Jones, of Wanganui, writer to a Wellington paper with regard to the suffragette hunger strike, and Mrs Pankhurst’s refusal to take food. Mr Jones ears: After all that has been published on the subject of long fasting, it is surprising that the authorities can have any such fear, or that they can resort to the barbarous and cruel practice of forcible feeding. It is this' process which makes the women ill and leads to their early release. Voluntary abstention from food does not cause “starvation or death until many weeks, in some cases months, have elapsed. The voluntary fast has a purifying effect on the body and mind, and 1 feel convinced that if the women prisoners were left to fast a>s long as they pleased the day would come when they would be “hungry,” and then they would eat. and they would be in a much saner frame of mind. It is a very wonderful thing that, after the second or third day of a fast, all the sense of hunger leaves one, and food has absolutely no attraction, and is even repulsive. When nature has completed the purifying process hunger returns, and the patient is then well it, body and mind. 1 think it is extremely improbable that any of these women prisoners would continue their fasts beyond the point when “natural

hunger” returns. In order to bo on the safe side, food should be placed in the cells and renewed every day, so that it is always fresh and nice, and if this were done I feel sure that the day would come when the prisoners would eat, and be all tho better for their voluntary fasts. 11’ d becomes the practice to forcibly feed, and thus make so ill that they have to be released ail prisoners who refuse food, then it is only a matter of time when all criminals will bo adopting “hunger strikes.”