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CHAP. society and contaminated with the vicious atmosphere inseparable from such company.

The arrangement would have been sufficiently deplorable if the officers of every prison had been carefully selected. Unfortunately the wardsmen were usually prisoners themselves. They were almost all felons, and selected for their responsible duties, not from any sense of their worth, but for their good conduct within the prison. The most atrocious felon, with sufficient selfrestraint to conform to the prison rules, was likely to become a warder; and, as a matter of fact, the Committee of 1818 found two persons, convicted of crimes of an infamous nature, invested with this authority. Men of all ages and of all dispositions, hardened ruffians and timid lads, were thus thrown together, and the worst among them were selected to maintain a nominal order, and to uphold the authority of the law. Theoretically, indeed, the convict felons were sentenced to hard labour, but in practice no labour was exacted from them. The time was spent, not in enforced labour, but in enforced idleness, and the hours were devoted to 'indecent and unseemly conversation.'1

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Such a system could hardly be expected to produce any good results. The consequences to which it led were in the unanimous opinion of competent critics deplorable. 'The people were made worse in prison,' said the ordinary in Newgate; they go out better instructed in crime than they entered.' They quit Newgate,' said another witness, 'much worse characters than when they go in.' 'Most of the prisoners,' said the governor of Coldbath Fields prison, are as bad when they go out as they are when they come, and some a great deal worse.' 'The discipline of our prisons,' said the chaplain of the same establishment, corrupts five or ten to every one that it reforms.' These were not merely the opinions of interested persons. 1 Metropolitan Police Report, 1818, pp. 13, 14.

A Committee which sat in 1822 fully endorsed them and the increase of crime in the metropolis left no room for doubting their accuracy. In 1806, 889 persons were committed for trial at the Old Bailey; 1,413 persons were committed for trial in 1814. In 1815 there were 112 boys confined in the hulks. One of these miserable children, condemned to associate with the most depraved and dangerous offenders, was not eleven years old.1

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II.

Howard.

Horrible as the system was, a ray of light had already penetrated the gloom which shrouded the prisons of the country. A humane man had devoted a life to the cause of prison reform; and attention had been forcibly directed to the existence of mismanagement and misery, which the world before had been only too ready to ignore. John Howard was born in 1726; he died in Russia, when John he was sixty-four years of age, in 1790. His work was done in a century with which this history has no concern. The fruits of it were only being slowly gathered at the period at which this history opens. Howard's own misfortune first directed his attention to the misery of prisoners. Travelling from London to Lisbon during the Seven Years War, the vessel in which he was a passenger was captured by a French cruiser. Howard was thrown for some time into a French prison, and he thus experienced the misery which prisoners in all countries, whether guilty or unfortunate, had to endure. The recollection of what he had suffered induced him after his release to make a tour of enquiry into the management of English, Irish, Scotch, and Continental prisons. The facts which he collected during these enquiries were published in several works, and the public thus became acquainted with the defects of a system of which they had previously been profoundly ignorant. He has visited all Europe,' said Burke, not to survey the stateliness of temples, but to dive into the

1 Romilly, vol. iii. p. 185. Police Report, 1818, pp. 81, 86, 172, 179.

CHAP depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hos

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pitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected; to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries.'1

The horrors, which Howard's tours disclosed, almost passed comprehension. A few examples will sufficiently illustrate a singularly painful subject. Chesterfield gaol was the property of the Duke of Portland. It consisted of one room, and a cellar, which had not been cleaned for months, beneath it. Howard found in it four miserable debtors. They had 'no allowance, no straw, no firing,' they were almost starved. The gaol at Ely was the property of the bishop. It had been out of repair, and the gaoler had secured the prisoners by chaining them down on their backs upon the floor. In 1782 Howard found two debtors in this gaol; the debt of the one amounted to 38. 54d., the other was confined for a few shillings' costs and gaol fees. The Bridewell at Abingdon consisted of two dirty day-rooms and three offensive night-rooms; the straw, worn to dust, swarmed with vermin; no court, no water accessible to prisoners; the petty offenders were in irons, and at my last visit eight were women.' So horrible was the high gaol at Exeter, that the surgeon was excused by contract from attending any prisoner in the dungeons that had the gaol fever. The prison at Penzance was the property of Lord Arundel. The men's room was 11 feet square by 6 feet high. It had one window, 18 inches square. In this room Howard found a miserable debtor. The door,' he added, had not been opened for four weeks when I went in, and then the keeper began to clear away the dirt.' In many prisons the prisoners' allowance of bread was regulated not by weight but by price. At Guildford in

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1 Burke, at Bristol, in 1780, quoted in Pop. Encycl., ad verb. Howard.

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Surrey, at Southwell in Nottinghamshire, for instance, CHAP. the prisoners were allowed three-halfpennyworth of bread a day. At some times 17 oz. and at others only 12 oz. of bread could be purchased for three halfpence. At most prisons a new prisoner was compelled to pay garnish, footing, or chummage; in other words to find drink for the other prisoners. Pay or strip,' was the demand made of him, and, as the gaol tap was usually kept by the gaolers, the gaolers were interested in maintaining the system. For the same reason the gaolers encouraged the introduction of visitors. In the Fleet in London, butchers and others came to play skittles, fives, and tennis. There was a wine club every Monday, and a beer club every Thursday. Such was the system which it was Howard's mission to destroy. The system was the more horrible because debtors and felons, convicts and committed persons, were all dealt with in the same way. In 1776, out of 4,084 prisoners, 2,437 were debtors, 653 petty offenders, and only 994 felons. In many places there was only one gaol delivery a year. In Hull they used to have the assize only once in seven years.1

Howard died in 1790 a martyr to the cause which he had undertaken. He caught a malignant fever of a poor stricken unfortunate, whom he had humanely visited, and the disease proved fatal to a constitution, which had never been strong, and which had been seriously tried by the noble work in which he had been engaged. At the Elizabet time at which Howard died, a young girl, Elizabeth Fry. Gurney, was growing up into womanhood at her father's house at Norwich. Young as she was, she had already collected twenty poor children around her, and was occupying herself with their education. In the last year of the eighteenth century she moved to London, on her

1 Howard's State of Prisons, fourth edition, pp. 12, 15, 219, 278, 291, 320, 323, 339, 383, 397.

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CHAP. marriage with Joseph Fry, a strict and devout member of the Society of Friends. Her husband was a wealthy banker. Mrs. Fry was only thirty years of age; she had the duties both of a mother and of a wife to occupy her time, and the pleasures, which London affords to the wealthy, were at the disposal of her leisure. A casual visit paid to Newgate in 1813 first revealed to her the squalor and misery of the wretched inmates. Touched by the scenes which she had witnessed, she succeeded in forming a society of ladies, who undertook to visit the female prisoners. She was rewarded for her noble exertions by the results of her disinterested ministry. The most hardened and depraved evinced gratitude for kindness to which they had no claim, and to which they had previously been strangers. The female prisoners, who had been previously unmanageable, became docile under her gentle treatment, and a new example was furnished of the truth of the old adage, that you may lead a man whom you cannot drive. A casual anecdote, extracted from the pages of the Annual Register,' may perhaps prove the kind of place that Newgate was when Mrs. Fry commenced her visits. In the year before that in which Mrs. Fry formed her association of ladies, a visitor to the prison had his pocket picked within the walls, and his watch stolen. The keeper ordered the convicts to be searched; but the convicts, one hundred and forty in number, considered this as an encroachment on their liberties,' took possession of the common yard, and expelled the officers. Driven out of the yard, they mounted the staircase, and, after remaining in revolt for many hours, were ultimately starved into submission. It is almost impossible to realise in 1878 that such a scene could have been witnessed in the heart of London only a little more than sixty years ago; but the contemporary annalist, who records the revolt and the subsequent submission of the convicts, hardly appears to realise

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