debauchery, while the untried poor man was half starved, lodged on damp stones, exposed, from unglazed windows, to every blast, and crowded promiscuously with the vilest of mankind in deep dungeons, where fever and foul pestilence ever smouldered. Sometimes a black assize swept away prisoners, gaolers, and even judges. The barbarity of the system may be appreciated from the circumstance that Howard considered he had achieved a great triumph, when he at length obtained an order for a daily allowance of a penny loaf and small piece of cheese for each untried prisoner.
Howard was anxious to establish reformatory prisons or penitentiaries, but his humane schemes met with little favour. With the experience we have since had, we cannot imagine that he could have had any success, except in establishing a clean and wholesome system of management.
The country was no more prepared then than it is at present, to permit desperate ruffians to be unloosed to renew their crimes on the expiration of their terms of imprisonment. But no one then contemplated the construction of prisons like Reading, as costly and comfortable palaces, in which the hard-labour test would consist in composing moral essays, and collating texts of Scripture.[1]
The annual accumulation of roguery was to be got rid of!—That was the problem; and, so long as it was solved, few cared how. Hanging had been stretched to its utmost limits; transportation had been checked by the revolt of a country which decided to employ no slaves who had not at least 25 per cent. of black blood in their veins, and to receive no rogues except those who had escaped unconvicted.
Under these difficult circumstances, a proposition for "shovelling" out our criminals on the shores of the antipodes, recently re-discovered by Cook, was eagerly entertained. There it was presumed, on very insufficient grounds, the place of punishment could be rendered self-supporting; at any rate, the prisoners would cease to be a nuisance to the life and property of this country. Howard opposed the project, but his opposition was fortunately unheeded, although founded on very sufficient grounds.
When we now examine the population, the wealth, the commerce, the sources of annually increasing power and prosperity of the Australian colonies, and the undeniable elements of empire which they enjoy, it is scarcely possible to believe that the first settlement was formed with the overflowings of our gaols and the sweepings of our streets; that, for a long series of years, its very existence was dependent
- ↑ Reading Gaol, Berks.
