Page:Memoir of Isaac Parrish, M.D. - Samuel Jackson.djvu/20

, Independents, Roundheads, and Whatnots, till he finally established it in this happier land, which has since assumed the motto—alas! more appropriate in his own time—Virtue, Liberty, and Independence.

Dr. Parrish was elected a member of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Prisons; hence he soon became a frequent visitor of the penitentiary, as Dr. Robert A. Given, then resident physician, writes me, "examining the arrangements of the cells, and closely inspecting the health of their inmates."

He must here have found an exhilarating pleasure in looking back to the labors of his grandfather, Isaac Parrish, who was also deeply concerned for many years in the reformation of prisons. The first meeting of citizens, to take into consideration the condition of the Philadelphia prison, was had in the year 1778, and was held at this grandfather's house. What good man would not rather have such things told of his ancestor, than that he had conquered Mexico, or had even conducted our revolutionary armies? "I would rather," exclaimed an American colonel, at the grave of a sainted man, "I would rather be Anthony Benezet in that coffin, than Gen. Washington with all his fame." "My boast," says the pious Cowper—

But, to resume our subject—Dr. Given had already obtained the correction of some prominent evils that tended to the injury of both mind and body; he had also shown that there was a great amount of mortality and insanity among the convicts, an alarming fact, which some of the older advocates of solitary confinement were not willing to hear or to credit. "The effects of our discipline on health," says Dr. Given, "were entirely unsuspected, its friends being so dazzled by its supposed moral influences as to be totally blind to its physical and mental evils." These men, thus wrapped up in their admiration of solitude and darkness, were indeed so dazzled by the light which Dr. Given had