infirmity of nature, but the mistake or negligence of policy, who can forbear to pity and lament, to wonder and abhor!

There is here no need of declamatory vehemence; we live in an age of commerce and computation; let us therefore coolly enquire what is the sum of evil which the imprisonment of debtors brings upon our country.

It seems to be the opinion of the later computists, that the inhabitants of England do not exceed six millions, of which twenty thousand is the three-hundredth part. What shall we say of the humanity or the wisdom of a nation that voluntarily sacrifices one in every three hundred to lingering destruction !

The misfortunes of an individual do not extend their influence to many; yet if we consider the effects of consanguinity and friendship, and the general reciprocation of wants and benefits, which make one man dear or necessary to another, it may reasonably be supposed, that every man languishing in prison gives trouble of some kind to two others who love or need him. By this multiplication of misery we see distress extended to the hundredth part of the whole society.

If we estimate at a shilling a day what is lost by the inaction and consumed in the support of each man thus chained down to involuntary idleness, the public loss will rise in one year to three hundred thousand pounds; in ten years to more than a sixth part of our circulating coin. I am afraid that those who are best acquainted

with the state of our prisons will confess that my conjecture is too near the truth, when I suppose that the corrosion of resentment, the heaviness of sorrow, the corruption of confined air, the want of exercise, and sometimes of food,1 the contagion of diseases, from which there is no retreat, and the severity of tyrants, against whom there can be no resistance, and all the complicated horrors of prison, put an end every year to the life of one in four of those that are shut up from the common comforts of human life. Thus perish yearly five thousand men,

over

1 John Howard, writing of debtors' side of the prison in York Castle, describes it, so far as buildings go, as "a noble prison which does honour to the country." He adds that “the allowance for prisoners, whether debtors or felons, was a sixpenny loaf each on Tuesday and Friday " (weight in November, 1774, 3 lb. 2 oz). There were confined on Jan. 25 of that year 110 debtors.-State of the Prisons in England and Wales, ed. 1777, p. 396. Speaking of the general allowance of bread, he says:-"It is probable that when it was fixed by its value near double the quantity that the money will now purchase might be bought for it; yet the allowance continues unaltered . . . In some prisons many criminals are half-starved; such of them as at their commitment were in health come out almost famished, scarce able to move, and for weeks incapable of any labour."-Ib., p. 12. If many criminals, so also some debtors must have been halfstarved, as the allowance of food was the same for both classes.

2 Johnson, in his Life of Savage, praising the keeper of the Bristol gaol, had said:"Virtue is undoubtedly most laudable in that state which makes it most difficult; and, therefore, the humanity of a gaoler certainly deserves this public attestation."-Johnson's Works, viii. 183. Fielding, in the opening chapters of his Amelia, "discloses the secrets of the prison-house," and the brutality of the ruffian who was the keeper.

borne with sorrow, consumed by famine, or putrified by filth; many of them in the most vigorous and useful part of life; for the thoughtless and imprudent are commonly young, and the active and busy are seldom old.

According to the rule generally received, which supposes that one in thirty dies yearly, the race of man may be said to be renewed at the end of thirty years. Who would have believed till now, that of every English generation, an hundred and fifty thousand perish in our gaols! that in every century, a nation eminent for science, studious of commerce, ambitious of empire, should willingly lose, in noisome dungeons, five hundred thousand of its inhabitants; a number greater than has ever been destroyed in the same time by the pestilence and sword!

A very late occurrence may show us the value of the number which we thus condemn to be useless; in the re-establishment of the trained bands, thirty thousand are considered as a force sufficient against all exigencies.' While, therefore, we detain twenty thousand in prison, we shut up in darkness and uselessness two-thirds of an army which ourselves judge equal to the defence of our country.

The monastic institutions have been often blamed, as tending to retard the increase of

1 In 1757 a Bill had been passed for establishing the militia. "Johnson was once drawn to serve in the militia, the Trained Bands of the City of London. . . . He provided himself with a musket and with a sword and belt, which I have seen hanging in his closet."-Boswell's Johnson, iv. 319.

mankind. And perhaps retirement ought rarely to be permitted, except to those whose employment is consistent with abstraction, and who, though solitary, will not be idle; to those whom infirmity makes useless to the commonwealth, or to those who have paid their due proportion to society, and who, having lived for others, may be honourably dismissed to live for themselves.' But whatever be the evil or the folly of these retreats, those have no right to censure them whose prisons contain greater numbers than the monasteries of other countries. It is, surely, less foolish and less criminal to permit inaction than compel it; to comply with doubtful opinions of happiness, than condemn to certain and apparent misery; to indulge the extravagances of erroneous piety, than to multiply and enforce temptations to wickedness.

The misery of gaols is not half their evil: they are filled with every corruption which poverty and wickedness can generate between them; with all the shameless and profligate enormities that can be produced by the impudence of ignominy, the rage of want, and the malignity of despair. In a prison the awe of the public eye is lost, and the power of the law is spent; there are few fears, there are no blushes.

1 "Johnson said, 'If convents should be allowed at all, they should only be retreats for persons unable to serve the public, or who have served it. It is our first duty to serve society, and, after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls. A youthful passion for abstracted devotion should not be encouraged." Boswell's Johnson, ii. 10.

The lewd inflame the lewd, the audacious harden the audacious. Every one fortifies himself as he can against his own sensibility, endeavours to practise on others the arts which are practised on himself; and gains the kindness of his associates by similitude of manners.1

Thus some sink amidst their misery, and others survive only to propagate villainy. It may be hoped, that our lawgivers will at length take away from us this power of starving and depraving one another; but, if there be any reason why this inveterate evil should not be removed in our age, which true policy has enlightened beyond any former time, let those, whose writings form the opinions and the practices of their contemporaries, endeavour to transfer the reproach of such imprisonment from the debtor to the creditor, till universal infamy shall pursue the wretch whose wantonness of power, or revenge of disappointment, condemns another to torture and to ruin; till he shall be hunted through the world as an enemy to man, and find in riches no shelter from contempt.

1 John Howard, in his State of the Prisons in England and Wales, ed. 1777, p. 24, quotes this paragraph. John Wesley recorded on Feb. 3, 1753 :-"I visited one in the Marshalsea prison, a nursery of all manner of wickedness. O shame to man, that there should be such a place, such a picture of hell upon earth!" A few days later he wrote :-"I visited as many more as I could. I found some in their cells underground; others in their garrets, half starved both with cold and hunger, added to weakness and pain."-Wesley's Journal, ed. 1827, ii. 267.