Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/332

not content himself with sitting out the trials in open court > his inquisitiveness and his benevolence alike impelled him to visit the jail to which the prisoners had been condemned. Howard found it, like all the prisons of the time, wretchedly defective in all its arrangements; but what chiefly astonished and shocked him was an almost incredible abuse arising out of the circumstance that neither the jailer nor his subordi nates were salaried officers, but were dependent for their livelihood on fees which they rigorously exacted from the prisoners themselves. He found it to be a fact that some whom the juries had declared not guilty, others in whom the grand jury had not found even such appearance of guilt as would warrant a trial, others whose prosecutors had failed to appear, were frequently detained in prison for months after they had ceased to be in the position of accused parties, until they should have paid the fees of jail delivery. (See Introduction to The State of the Prisons in England and Wales.} His prompt application to the justices of the county for a salary to the jailer in lieu of his fees was met by a demand for a precedent for charging the county with such an expense. This he undertook to find if such a thing existed. He went accordingly from county to county until his journey had extended to every town in England which contained a prison, but the object of his search eluded inquiry. He could find no precedent for charging the county with the wages of its servants, but he did find so many abuses in prison management which imagination had never conceived, and so many sufferings of which the general public knew nothing, and of which the law took no account, that he determined to devote to the exposure of those wrongs and the reform of those abuses whatever time and money might be needful. The task cost him a fortune, and the best remaining years of his life. The subject of prison reform, indeed, had not previously been wholly absent from the public mind. As early as the year 1728 the House of Commons had appointed a com mittee to inquire into the state of Newgate, the Marshalsea, and other London prisons, where abuses had come to light which had caused the house to order the arrest of several governors of jails, who were tried for high mis demeanours (see Reports of the Committee Appointed to Inqidre into the State of the Gaols, 1729). Much more recently Popham, member for Taunton, had forced the unwilling legislature at least to discuss the propriety of paying fixed salaries to jailers out of the county rates ; but in February 1773 the bill after passing the second reading had been withdrawn with a view to its being again brought forward in an amended form. The way had thus been prepared for a friendly reception to anything Howard might have to say as the result of his investigations ; and at the close of his first rapid survey of the English prisons he was, through the influence of the supporters of Popham s bill, cited to appear before a committee of the whole house in March 1774. After his report had been received and he himself examined upon it, it was moved and carried, on the house resuming, "that John Howard, Esq., be called to the bar, and that Mr Speaker do acquaint him that the House are very sensible of the humanity and zeal which have led him to visit the several jails of this kingdom, and to communicate to the house the interesting observations which he has made on that subject." Almost immediately an Act was passed which provided for the liberation, free of all charges, of every prisoner against whom the grand jury failed to find a true bill, giving the jailer a sum from the county rate in lieu of the abolished fees. This was followed in June by another requiring justices of the peace to see that the walls and ceilings of all prisons within their jurisdiction were scraped and whitewashed once a year at least ; that the rooms were regularly cleaned and ventilated ; that infirmaries were provided for the sick, and proper care taken to get them medical advice ; that the naked should be clothed ; that underground dungeons should be used as little as could be ; and generally that such courses should be taken as would tend to restore and preserve the health of the prisoners. It was highly characteristic of the man that, having caused the provisions of the new legislation to be printed at his own private cost in large type, he sent a copy to every jailer and warder in the kingdom, determined that no one should be able to plead ignorance of the law if detected in the violation of its provisions. He then set out upon a new tour of inspection, from which, however, he was brought home by the approach of a general election in September 1774. Siding with those who objected to the American policy of the Government, he had consented to stand as one of the anti-ministerial candidates for Bedford; although, however, he was returned by a narrow majority along with his friend Whitbread, he was unseated after a scrutiny on account of the alleged disqualification of some of those voters who had supported him. He was thus left entirely free for the vigorous prosecution of the special task which he had assigned himself ; and he began to have thoughts of publishing the immense mass of facts which he had so industriously collected, and which was still so rapidly accumulating. But after a tour which had extended to Scotland and Ireland, it occurred to him before going into print that his notes would be much enhanced in utility if supplemented with the regulations and arrangements of the more important Continental prisons. In April 1775, accordingly, he set out upon an extended tour through France, the Low Countries, and Germany. At Paris he was at first denied access to the prisons ; but by recourse to an old and almost obsolete law of 1717, according to which any person wishing to distribute alms to the prisoners was to be admitted and allowed to dispense his charity with his own hand, he succeeded in inspecting the Bicetre, the Force 1 Eveque, and most of the other places of confine ment, the only important exception being the Bastille. With regard to this last, however, he succeeded in obtaining pos session of a suppressed pamphlet, which he afterwards translated and published in English, to the unconcealed chagrin of the French authorities. At Ghent he examined with special interest the great Maison de Force, then recently erected ; its distinctive features useful labour, in the profits of which the prisoners had a share, and complete separation of the inmates by night drew from him the exclamation that it was a " noble institution." At Amster dam, as in Holland generally, he was much struck with the comparative absence of crime, a phenomenon which he attributed to the industrial and reformatory treatment there adopted. In Germany he found little that was useful and much that was repulsive ; in Hanover and Osnabriick, under the rule of a British sovereign, he even found traces of torture. Returning to England in autumn with his copious notes, he determined, before finally reducing them to order and sending them to press, to undertake another tour of England. This lasted for seven months (November 1775 to May 1776), and yielded results so important by way of correction and supplement that he resolved to give his Continental experience the benefit of a similar revision. On this occasion he extended his tour to several of the Swiss cantons. At last in 1777 appeared The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observa tions, and an Account ofsorm Foreign Prisons (Warrington). It met with a very favourable reception, although its author was fully justified in his statement in the preface tfiat as the journeys were not undertaken for the traveller s amuse ment, so the results of them were not published for general entertainment, It consists principally of a mass of minute statistical details, somewhat pedantically accumulated and very unmethodically arranged ; its most important section