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Will, walking behind us, looked about in amaze at the half empty streets, the many closed shops, and houses uninhabited, and at last, fetching a great sigh, he said, 'Methinks, mistresses, this whole town looks like a gaol, and the folk go about like condemned prisoners. 'Ay, says Althea; 'but there are worse gaols within this gaol, Will.

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.

But Hetty had no knowledge of gaols, and little of the nature of crimes, beyond what her unadulterated and almost instinctive perceptions of right and wrong taught her, and this sally of the rude being who had spoken was lost upon her. She understood his general meaning, however, and answered in reference to that alone. "It's so best, Hurry," she said.

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. And fearful places he found them to be!

But I will be more precise. The denizens in Darkest England; for whom I appeal, are those who, having no capital or income of their own, would in a month be dead from sheer starvation were they exclusively dependent upon the money earned by their own work; and those who by their utmost exertions are unable to attain the regulation allowance of food which the law prescribes as indispensable even for the worst criminals in our gaols.

A bill for the trial of controverted elections was passed, and in all thirty-five bills were carried through, all of which His Excellency, the Governor, sanctioned, except that relative to gaols in Gaspé, which, though afterwards sanctioned, was reserved for the pleasure of the King to be expressed on it. On the 14th of April the Parliament was prorogued.

In the Committee of Parliament, for inquiring into the state of the gaols, formed 25th of February, 1728, and of which he was Chairman, the active and persevering zeal of his benevolence found a truly suitable employment, by visiting, with his colleagues of that generous body, the dark and pestilential dungeons of the Prisons which at that time dishonored the metropolis; detecting the most enormous oppressions; obtaining exemplary punishment on those who had been guilty of such outrage against humanity and justice; and redressing multitudes from extreme misery to light and freedom.

Toleration, however, was thus at last secured, and the long-oppressed Nonconformists hastened to profit by it. "Ministers returned," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "after years of banishment, to their homes and their flocks. Chapels were re- opened. The gaols were emptied. Men were set free to worship God after their own fashion. John Bunyan left the prison which had for twelve years been his home."

Everything which makes it more easy to live; every sanitary reform, prevention of pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every hospital, every cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which has so I am told increased the average length of life in these islands, by nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise have died; and the great majority of these will be, even in surgical and zymotic cases, those of least resisting power, who are thus preserved to produce in time a still less powerful progeny.

The proceedings against them justified their terror. The Bastile was soon unable to contain the prisoners that were sent to it, and the gaols all over the country teemed with guilty or suspected persons.