Page:Memoir of Isaac Parrish, M.D. - Samuel Jackson.djvu/21

 flashed in their faces, that they averred positively they could see nothing, and that there was nothing to be seen; like father Gobbo in the "Merchant of Venice," they confessed themselves "sand-blind." Dr. Parrish now came in to the support of Dr. Given, some of the Prison Discipline Society joined them, and, with difficulty, they procured an appointment of physicians to inspect the penitentiaries of neighboring States, wherein the opposite or congregate system of discipline was in use. The commission was instructed to inquire into the physical and mental health of the convicts, and to examine the construction, discipline, domestic arrangements, system of labor, and all matters pertaining to the controversy respecting the two modes of confinement—the gregarious, and the solitary.

Of this laudable and highly responsible commission, Dr. P. had the honor of being a member, nor would it have been easy to find a mind more adapted to the business. He had been for some years very seriously exercised in this controversy, and he had therefore made it a subject of conversation and inquiry in his various intercourse with the philanthropists, to many of whom he was known through his own merits and those of his beneficent father. He read a paper to the Society in 1849, about two years after his return, entitled, "Recollections of a Tour of Observation to the State Prisons of Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut." The Society ordered it to be published, and it appeared accordingly in vol. vi. No. 1, of the Pennsylvania Journal of Prison Discipline.

It is an able and beautiful report, in which joy and sorrow, approbation and reproof, succeed each other as they ought to do in every mind that is sensible to the sufferings of humanity. In all the prisons he found something to commend, and in Boston, particularly, his heart was gladdened with some improvements, which he had not seen at home, and did not expect to see abroad. He started on this journey with a humane but an enlightened prejudice against solitary confinement, as rigidly administered in the Eastern Penitentiary, and though no man could be more open to conviction, or more ready to confess an error, it is plain from the tenor of his "Recollections," that his fears for both mind and body in solitude were not lessened by what he had seen in the congregate prisons.