Horrified at the state in which he found the prison and at the abuses of justice that prevailed, John Howard determined to find out what was done in other parts of the kingdom, and visited a number of gaols throughout the country.

Escape from the pursuit of soldiers was almost impossible, and they had been brutally beaten and bruised by infuriated captors; and then, uncared for, nor shown the slightest mercy, had been thrust into loathsome gaols to helplessly await trial, and a certain conviction.

recording the sentences, remarks:'Convicts under sentence of death in Newgate and the gaols throughout the kingdom increase so fast, that, were they all to be executed, England would soon be marked among the nations as the Bloody Country.'

"I've seen two Dutch gaols," said the other; "and I have no use for them.

They don't feed you too well in Dutch gaols, especially when you've got a concession and a consul.

Now there will not be so many gaols in London town, Lucy, but I can find out where Andrew lies; and if I cannot have him out, I can supply his wants at least.' 'Althea, Althea, you do not dream of going up?'

,' says Althea; 'but there are worse gaols within this gaol, Will.

Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the gaols of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtue neither of the countries they came from, nor of those they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished."

He expressed his surprise that such witnesses, as those against the bill, should have been introduced at all: he affirmed that their oaths were falsified by their own log-books; and that, from their own accounts, the very healthiest of their vessels were little better than pestilential gaols.

With this view, he brought forward a motion in the House of Commons, "that an inquiry should be instituted into the state of the gaols in the metropolis."

Several chapels have been destroyed, and several inoffensive papists have been plundered, but the high sport was to burn the gaols.

Not only is respectability more easy, as is proved by the broad fact that it is the poor people who fill the gaols, and not the rich ones: but virtue, and religionof the popular sort.

They state, that "in the course of their visit, to the gaols in the metropolis, the Committee very frequently meet with destitute boys, who, on their discharge from confinement, literally know not where to lay their heads.

To him this had always been the supreme quality of the English character; how could he make use of it to fill English gaols?

Its modern buildings are, the monument erected to Sir Thomas Picton, the Guildhall, the two gaols, a fish and butter market-place, over which is the town fire-bell; the slaughter-house, similar to the abattoir at Paris, and excellent shambles, with poultry and potato market-places annexed.

The Habeas Corpus Act suspended, the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England.

Terms of slang and flash are used, as a matter of course, every where, from the gaols to the Viceroy's palace, not excepting the Bar and the Bench.

If you are rich, and want to enjoy the exalted luxury of relieving distress, go to the Bankrupt Court, to the Court for Insolvent Debtors, to the gaols, the work-houses, and the hospitals.

If you are rich and childless, and want heirs, look to the same assemblages of misfortune; for all are not culpable who appear in the Bankrupt and Insolvent Lists; nor all criminal who are found in gaols; nor all improvident who are inmates of work-houses and hospitals.

Pestilences which decimated populations, and which, like the great plague of London, destroyed 7,165 people in a single week, have lost their virulency; gaol fever has disappeared, and our gaols, once each a plague-spot, have become, by a strange perversion of civilisation, the health spots of, at least, one kingdom.

Mitchel, who shared his Australian imprisonment, left a fine picture of "this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in among the off-scourings of England's gaols, with his home desolated and his hopes ruined, and defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf.

More radical change is found in that legislation freeing prisoners on parole, providing indeterminate sentences, and in the creation of special courts for boys and young women, with special gaols and reformatories.

The empty territories of the Empire were no longer to be treated only as gaols for convicts, fields for negro slavery, or even as asylums for the persecuted or refuges for the bankrupt and the social failures of the Mother Country.

[Footnote 1: An amusing article might be written on the more primitive gaols of the early settlements.

Gaols, primitive, 233.