mittee to move the House that John Howard, Esq. be called in 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 he has made upon that subject." The motion passed unanimously; and Mr Howard had, accordingly, the honour of receiving the public thanks of the House for his philanthropic exertions. To show, however, how little the spirit which animated these exertions was understood or appreciated, we may mention that it is related that, during his examination before the committee, one member put the question to him, "At whose expense he travelled?"

Mr Howard, however, was still only at the commencement of his labours. In the month of March 1774, only a few days after receiving the thanks of the House of Commons, he set out for the extreme north of England, to visit the jails there. In an incredibly short space of time he had traversed the counties of Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancaster, Chester, and Shropshire, visiting the jails in each; then, after revisiting those of Stafford, Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, and Northampton, he returned home to Cardington; from which, after a week's repose, he set out for Kent. With the examination of the jails of Kent, Mr Howard's first survey of the jails of England may be said to have been finished. To give, once for all, an idea of the minute and thorough manner in which he discharged his self-imposed duty, we may quote his remarks on the county jail at Durham. After giving a list of the officials and their salaries, he proceeds thus :-"The high jail is the property of the bishop. By patent from his lordship, Šir Hedworth Williamson, Bart. is perpetual sheriff. The court for master's side debtors is only 24 feet by 10: they are permitted sometimes to walk on the leads. They have beds in the upper hall, and in several other rooms. Their rooms should be ceiled, that they might be lime-whited, to prevent infectious disorders, and that great nuisance of bugs, of which the debtors complain much here and at other places. Common side debtors have no court; their free wards, the low jail, are two damp, unhealthy rooms, 10 feet 4 inches square by the gateway; they are never suffered to go out of these except to chapel, which is the master's side debtor's hall; and not always to that: for on a Sunday, when I was there, and missed them at chapel, they told me they were not permitted to go thither. No sewers. At more than one of my visits I learned that the dirt, ashes, &c. had lain there many months. There is a double-barrelled pump, which raises water about 70 feet. Felons have no court; but they have a day-room, and two small rooms for an infirmary. The men are put at night into dungeons: one, 7 feet square, for three prisoners; another, the great hole, 16 feet by 12, has only a little window. In this I saw six prisoners, most of them transports, chained to the floor.

In this situation they had been for many weeks, and were very sickly; their straw on the stone floor almost worn to dust. Long confinement, and not having the king's allowance of two shillings and sixpence a-week, had urged them to attempt an escape; after which the jailer had chained them as already mentioned. There is another dungeon for women felons, 12 feet by 8; and up stairs, a separate room or two. The common side debtors in the low jail, whom I saw eating boiled bread and water, told me that this was the only nourishment some had lived upon for near a twelvemonth. They have, from a legacy, one shilling and sixpence a-week in winter, and one shilling a-week in summer, for coals. No memorandum of it in the jail: perhaps this may in time be lost, as the jailer said two others were-namely, one of Bishop Crewe, and another of Bishop Wood, from which prisoners had received no benefit for some years past. But now the bishop has humanely filed bills in Chancery, and recovered these legacies, by which several debtors have been discharged. Halfa-crown a-week is paid to a woman for supplying the debtors with water in the two rooms on the side of the gateway. The act for preserving the health of prisoners is not hung up. The clauses against spirituous liquors are hung up. Jail delivery once a-year. At several of my visits there were boys between thirteen and fifteen years of age confined with the most profligate and abandoned. There was a vacant piece of ground adjacent, of little use but for the jailer's occasional lumber. extends to the river, and measures about 22 yards by 16. I once and again advised the enclosing this for a court, as it might be done with little expense; and it appears that formerly here was a doorway into the prison. But when I was there afterwards in January 1776, I had the mortification to hear that the surgeon, who was uncle to the jailer, had obtained from the bishop, in October preceding, a lease of it for twenty-one years, at the rent of one shilling per annum. He had built a little stable on it."

It

Having completed his survey of the English jails, Mr Howard turned his attention next to those of Wales; and by the end of the autumn of 1774, he appears to have visited the principal jails in that principality. During these last months the field of his inquiries had been extended, so as to embrace a new department. Seeing," he says, in two or three of the jails some poor creatures whose aspect was singularly deplorable, and asking the cause of it, the answer was, They were lately brought_from the bridewells. This started a fresh subject of inquiry. I resolved to inspect the bridewells; and for that purpose travelled again into the counties where I had been; and indeed into all the rest, examining houses of correction, city and town jails. I beheld in many of them, as well as in the county jails, a complication of distress."

Mr Howard's philanthropic labours for now nearly a twelvemonth had of course made him an object of public attention, and

it became obviously desirable to have such a man in parliament. Accordingly, at the election of 1774, he was requested by a number of the electors of Bedford to allow himself to be put in nomination for that town, in the independent interest, along with his friend Mr Whitbread. Mr Howard consented; but when the polling had taken place, the numbers stood thus-Sir William Wake, 527 votes; Mr Sparrow, 517; Mr Whitbread, 429; and Mr Howard, 402. A protest was taken by the supporters of Mr Whitbread and Mr Howard, most of whom were dissenters, against the election of the two former gentlemen, on the ground that the returning officers had acted unfairly in rejecting many legally good votes for Messrs Whitbread and Howard, and receiving many legally bad ones for the other two candidates. Petitions impeaching the return were also presented to the House of Commons by Mr Whitbread and Mr Howard.

Nothing, however, could divert our philanthropist from his own peculiar walk of charity, and the interval between the election and the hearing of the petitions against its validity was diligently employed by him in a tour through Scotland and Ireland, for the purpose of inspecting the prisons there, and comparing them with those of England and Wales. With the Scotch system of prison management he seems to have been, on the whole, much better pleased than with that of England; and he mentions, with particular approbation, that in Scotland "all criminals are tried out of irons; and when acquitted, they are immediately discharged in open court;" that "no jailer has any fee from any criminal;" and that "women are not put in irons." Still he found sufficient grounds for complaint in the state of the prisons themselves. "The prisons,” he says, "that I saw in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Jedburgh, Haddington, Ayr, Kelso, Nairn, Banff, Inverness, &c. were old buildings, dirty and offensive, without courtyards, and also generally without water." "The tolbooth at Inverness," he afterwards observes, "has no fireplace, and is the most dirty and offensive prison that I have seen in Scotland." In the Irish prisons he found, as might have been expected, abuses even more shocking than those he had generally met with in England.

In March 1775, Mr Howard having by this time returned to England, his petition and that of Mr Whitbread against the return of Sir William Wake and Mr Sparrow were taken into consideration by a committee of the House of Commons. On a revision of the poll, the numbers, after adding the good votes which had been rejected, and striking off the bad ones which had been accepted, stood thus-Mr Whitbread, 568; Sir William Wake, 541; Mr Howard, 537; Mr Sparrow, 529. Thus, although by a small majority Mr Howard lost the election, his friend, Mr Whitbread, who had formerly been in the same predicament, was now returned at the top of the poll in lieu of Mr Sparrow.

It was perhaps a fortunate circumstance for the world that Mr

Howard did not succeed in being returned to parliament. He might no doubt have been of great service as a member of the legislature; but his true function was that which he had already chosen for himself—a voluntary and unofficial inquirer into the latent miseries of human society. It was not so much as a propounder of schemes of social improvement that Mr Howard appeared; it was rather as an explorer of unvisited scenes of wretchedness, who should drag into the public gaze all manner of grievances, in order that the general wisdom and benevolence of the country might be brought to bear upon them. In a complex state of society, where wealth and poverty, comfort and indigence, are naturally separated from each other as far as possible, so that the eyes and ears of the upper classes may not be offended and nauseated by the sights and sounds of wo, the interference of this class of persons-inspectors, as they may be called, whose business it is to see and report-is among the most necessary of all acts for social wellbeing.

VISITS TO FOREIGN PRISONS-PUBLICATION OF HIS GREAT

WORK ON EUROPEAN PRISONS.

Mr Howard having completed his survey of the prisons of Great Britain, began to prepare his reports for publication. "I designed," says he, "to publish the account of our prisons in the spring of 1775, after I returned from Scotland and Ireland. But conjecturing that something useful to my purpose might be collected abroad, I laid aside my papers, and travelled into France, Flanders, Holland, and Germany." The precise route which he pursued during this, his fifth continental tour, is not known; he appears, however, to have gone to France first. He gives the following account of his attempt to gain admission to the famous Bastile of Paris. "I was desirous of examining it myself, and for that purpose knocked hard at the outer gate, and immediately went forward through the guard to the drawbridge before the entrance of the castle. But while I was contemplating this gloomy mansion, an officer came out much surprised, and I was forced to retreat through the mute guard, and thus regained that freedom which, for one locked up within those walls, it is next to impossible to obtain." On this singular adventure of Mr Howard one of his biographers makes the following remark. "In the space of four centuries, from the foundation to the destruction of the Bastile, perhaps Mr Howard was the only person that was ever compelled to quit it reluctantly." Although denied admission to the Bastile, Mr Howard was able to obtain entrance into the other prisons of Paris. His first application, indeed, for admittance to the Grand Châtelet was unsuccessful; but happening to remark that, by the tenth article of the arrêt of 1717, jailers were authorised to admit persons desirous of bestowing charity on the prisoners, he pleaded it before the Commissaire de la Prison; and in this way gained admission not only to that prison, but to the

others. Except for the horrible subterranean dungeons, in which he found that certain classes of prisoners were sometimes confined in France, he appears to have considered the prisons in that country better managed than those of England.

Mr Howard's proceedings in France, French Flanders, and the Netherlands, will be best gathered from the following letter to a friend: "I came late last night to this city; the day I have employed in visiting the jails, and collecting all the criminals laws, as I have got those of France. However rigorous they may be, yet their great care and attention to their prisons is worthy of commendation: all fresh and clean; no jail distemper; no prisoners ironed. The bread allowance far exceeds that of any of our jails; for example, every prisoner here has two pound of bread a-day; once a-day, soup; and on Sunday, one pound of meat. I write to you, my friend, for a relaxation from what so much engrosses my thoughts. And indeed I force myself to the public dinners and suppers for that purpose, though I show so little respect to a set of men who are so highly esteemed (the French cooks), that I have not tasted fish, flesh, or fowl since I have been this side the water. Through a kind Providence I am very well; calm, easy in spirits. The public voitures have not been crowded, and I have met, in general, agreeable company. I hope to be in Holland the beginning of next week."

After visiting the principal prisons in Holland and part of Germany, most of which seem to have particularly pleased him, when contrasted with those at home, Mr Howard returned to England in the end of July 1775. Not to rest, however; for he immediately commenced a second survey of the English prisons. This was interrupted, in the beginning of the year 1776, when he made a trip to Switzerland to visit the Swiss jails, taking some of the French ones in his way. Returning to England, he resumed his second survey of the English and Welsh prisons; and when this was completed to his satisfaction in the beginning of 1777, he took up his residence for the spring at the town of Warrington, in Lancashire, where he had resolved to have his work on prisons printed. His reasons for printing the book there, rather than in London, were various; one of them was, that he wished to be near his friend Dr (then Mr) Aikin, employed as a surgeon in Warrington, whose literary talents were of assistance to him in fitting the work for publication. Dr Aikin gives the following account of the process which Mr Howard's notes underwent, in order to qualify them for being sent to press his own composition, as our readers are already aware, being none of the most correct in a grammatical point of view. "On his return from his tours," says Dr Aikin, "he took all his memorandum-books to an old, retired friend of his, who assisted him in methodising them, and copied out the whole matter in correct language. They were then put into the hands