would be required in the selection of the
governors of gaols as in the selection of
physicians to our hospitals. On the judgment of
each, equal reliance would be placed; how to
treat individual cases, and when to discharge
them as relieved and cured, being subject to
general rules, whether economic or medical,
left for determination to the skill of the
appointed officers. The prisons of the nation
would not be so many disconnected
undertakings, but all parts of one great whole; and
as there are hospitals for children, for
consumptive cases, and for idiots and for
incurables, so Mr. Hill looks forward to the
day when we may have prisons prepared
for the classification of offenders according to
the general character of their crimes, and also
according to the three separate classes, men,
women, and children. The refractory or the
confirmed and hopeless criminals whose
presence among others would complicate the
discipline of any gaol, he would have drafted
to a prison of their own, and collected for
peculiar treatment in establishments analogous
to those existing, among us doctors, for idiots
and incurables. Prisons should not be
expensive structures with palatial fronts. The
average cost of building prisons is now
about a hundred and fifty pounds for each
criminal's accommodation. The largest and
newest portion of York Castle was erected
at a cost of one thousand two hundred pounds
a head—which, compared with even Model
Cottages, is rather an expensive style of
building.

Thus far I have carried Mr. Hill in my gig.
He is full of good matter, and his views are
always worth steady reflection; but are not
always to be adopted without inquiry. I
will now hint how I come to this latter
conclusion.

As that learned and influential body, The
British College of Health, trace all diseases
to one polluted source, which only their
admirable pills, numbers one and two, can
purify; and, as I, myself, am not clear but
that the neglect of a disorder to which I have
devoted much time and attention (I allude to
whitlows), may have something to do with
the commission of Crime; so I generally find
that writers on prisons, and thick-and-thin
administrators of prison systems, write about
prisons and prisoners as if everything else in
the social system were perfectly adjusted.
Whereas it appears to me impossible rationally
to consider the subject of Prison Discipline
without an immediate, a constant, and a
careful reference to the condition of many
varieties of people who never offend against
the laws and never get into prison at all.

Mr. Hill is so far sensible of this difficulty
as connected with the employment of prison
labour, that he makes the good suggestion
that there might be established in workhouses,
for all people able to maintain themselves in
the house by their own work, an independent
ward, in which a distressed man, having
health and industry, might find relief
unalloyed by the degradation—which such a
man often keenly feels—of living on the
parish. But I go further, and contend that
until there be such wards in workhouses,
we must not think of regulating prisons as
Mr. Hill proposes. I go further still, and
contend that one of the first essentials and
requirements of a well-regulated Prison is,
that its inmates should be worse off in every
imaginable respect than the bulk of honest
paupers and honest labouring men. Taking
every precaution to ensure the cleanliness and
health of criminals—for it is of great
importance to society that they should not
engender disease—I require that their
condition shall, in no particular, present a favorable
comparison with the pauper's or the
labourer's. Let it do so under any system, and
I call that system, however plausible in
theory, a manifestly false and absurd one in
its practical operation.

We may all set up our little chandlers'
shops of political economy, and serve out
quarterns and half quarterns of that excellent
article across the counter until Doomsday:
but on this question of prison labour there
always remains a consideration to be kept in
view which is even superior to that
commodity. It is, that the poor and honest
workman shall never within his personal
experience know it to be a fact that his
labor is interfered with, by the labor of
criminals thrown into the market with the
contract-power of a great prison. It would
no doubt be an unspeakable comfort to him,
in such a case, to know from the Gospel
according to Cocker, that society was the
gainer by the operation. Such an assurance
would beyond all question exceedingly
mitigate the pangs of hunger, the miseries of a
wretched home, the despair of living hard by
the toil of a whole life; still, enough suffering,
and enough matter for unwholesome reflection
and unwholesome contrast would remain in
the breast of that deluded and unreasonable
citizen, to render it highly desirable that he
should never be placed in such a condition.
And so widely is this felt, notwithstanding
the briskness of the retail trade in political
economy, that the difficulty of getting work
for prisoners to do, has been enormous; while
the difficulty of disposing of their work, when
it has been done on speculation, has, over and
over again, necessitated its sale at a
considerable loss. Mr. Hill's treadmill patients
did not grind the air because the magistrates
were bent on their grinding the air, but
because the magistrates could not get anything
else for them to grind.

And this brings me to another consideration.
I think it right and necessary that
there should be in jails some degraded kind
of hard and irksome work, belonging only
to jails. I don't think Mr. Hill's punishment
of cleanliness and discipline, and no beer
and no tobacco, half enough for the regular