Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/22

10 endured twelve years at the pleasure of one of the keepers. In the House of Correction at Kendal a man had been in solitary confinement ten years, though he had intervals of sanity of nine and ten months' duration. As to the condition of insane women, it was one to shudder at, not to speak of. In private mad-houses (in spite of an act passed in 1774 ) matters were as bad, or worse; and one of the visiting physicians declared he was ill with the atmosphere of their filth, "although accustomed to the dissecting-room." At length, in 1816 a bill passed the Commons (and was lost in the Lords) "for the better Regulation of Mad-houses;" and gradually that came to be a public and redressed wrong, which had been an obscure grievance.

Of our prison discipline, much the same history may be told. Long after Howard's time (who declared in 1773, that so miserably off" were these kennelled sufferers, that "to rot in jail," was an exact and not a figurative expression, and that more persons perished thus, than by public execution), our prisons remained, for the most part, dens of corruption, disease and torture. In 1804, Mr Neild, a magistrate of Aylesbury, (Secretary to a Society for the relief and discharge of poor Debtors), published, in the "Gentleman's Magazine," observations on Chelmsford and Colchester Bridewells. He afterwards published an account of all the jails in this island; which he had visited unauthorised and unaided, Government doing nothing to help him in his self-imposed task; and obstacles having been thrown in his way which would have wearied out any less benevolent patience. From 1804 to 1812, he appears to have been ceaseless in his endeavours to procure some amendment; and though, when Fowell Buxton followed in 1818, and when Mrs Fry devoted herself to the female prisoners of Newgate, very little general improvement was perceptible; yet much