but the stranger visiting the prison will be very apt to think for him. He will not fail to have the thought suggested to his mind, that even in the prison there may have been some minds worthy of the highest training of the school; minds which have been lost to God, lost to society, lost to themselves, for lack of better teaching, safer guidance than the fortunes of their lives afforded them. Should providence, in its inscrutable wisdom, cast the lot of the unripe human being on the sunny Hospital side of that dark rampart, a wise and noble provision is made for his mental and moral health; the boy will have a prospect of seeing the genius and virtue which are in him made effectual to his own good and the world's improvement-may grow up into a Coleridge or a Charles Lamb, and have a nation for his friends and posterity for his disciples: but should his evil fortunes cast him on the side of the Church of the Sepulchre-auspicious and ominous names!-there is slender hope; the chance, if chance it be, decides his fate; he is compelled into a career of vice, dissoluteness, and criminality; every honest man is his enemy, and there is no termination of his career likely-hardly possible-except the penal settlement or the gallows.

In the department of the prison called the House of Correction, minor offenders within the City of London are imprisoned. No transports are sent hither, nor is any person whose sentence is above three years in length. In speaking of Newgate, we

noticed the want of air and light, the over-crowded state of the rooms, the absence of proper cellular accommodation, and the vicious intercourse carried on amongst the prisoners. All these evils are multiplied many fold in Giltspur-street Compter. The entire gaol only contains thirty-six separate sleepingrooms; and, according to the highest prison calculation-and this, be it especially noted, proceeds on the assumption that three persons can sleep in small, miserable, unventilated cells, which were built for only one, and are too confined for that, being only about half the size of the model cell for one at Pentonville-it is only capable of affording accommodation for 203; yet we notice by the returns, that at Michaelmas it contained 246! What is the consequence? This-that those small and horrid cells, which we will undertake to say will not hold sufficient air for a single individual's nightly waste, have FIVE human beings locked up in them for twelve or fourteen hours out of every twenty-four! Is not this monstrous? And then these criminals, thus crowded into spaces unnaturally confined and heated, are left entirely alone. So that they abstain from a riot they are pretty free from any interference. restriction is placed upon act or word. Conversation and contamination are perpetually going on, under the eyes and within hearing of the officers of the prison, yet no attempt is made to check it. And, if it were, with the present building, it would be unsuccessful. No alteration of discipline could relieve

No

this prison from the bad reputation which it has acquired of being a disgrace to the corporation of London. It must come down.

The House of Correction and the Compter portion of the establishment are kept quite distinct; but it would be difficult to award the palm of empire in their respective facilities for demoralisation. We think the Compter rather worse of the two. You are shown into a room, about the size of an apartment in an ordinary dwelling-house, which will be found crowded with from thirty to forty persons, young and old, and in their ordinary costumes--the low thief in his filth and rags, and the member of the swell mob with his bright buttons, flash finery, and false jewels. Here you notice the boy who has just been guilty of his first offence, and committed for trial, learning with a greedy mind a thousand criminal arts, and listening with the precocious instinct of guilty passions to stories and conversations the most depraved and disgusting. You regard him with a mixture of pity and loathing, for he knows that the eyes of his peers are upon him, and he stares at you with a familiar impudence and exhibits a devil-may-care countenance, such as are only to be met with in the juvenile offender. Here, too, may be seen the young clerk, taken up on suspicion-perhaps innocent-who avoids you with a shy look of pain and uneasiness; what a hell must this prison and these companions be to him! How frightful it is to think of a person really

untainted with crime, compelled to herd for ten or twenty days with these abandoned wretches! Society, even were it disposed, could never atone to him for such a wrong. The acquaintance thus made can never be shaken off, and the sensations undergone can never be obliterated from the mind. Here may also be seen the forger, the coiner, the housebreaker, the pickpocket, the burglar-all forms and specimens of the criminal population festering in one common mass. These prisoners are left in this room-there are others of the same character without work, without supervision, with nothing in the world to do except to kill time, and nothing wherewith to kill time save illicit gambling and telling over, again and again, the disgusting details of their lives. In the name of reason, what can be expected to result from such a system of prison treatment?

On the other, the House of Correction side of the gaol, similar rooms will be found full of prisoners communicating with each other, laughing and shouting without hindrance. All this is so little in accordance with existing notions of prison discipline, that one is continually fancying these disgraceful scenes cannot be in the capital of England, under the first municipal magistracy in the land, and in the year of grace 1850. Very few of the prisoners attend school or receive any instruction; neither is any kind of employment afforded them, except oakum picking and the still more disgusting

labour of the tread-wheel. When at work, an officer is in attendance to prevent disorderly conduct; but his presence is of no avail as a protection to the less depraved. Conversation still goes on; and every facility is afforded for making acquaintances, and for mutual contamination.

In fact, it is impossible to discover a single redeeming feature in Giltspur-street Compter. The building is too small; the internal arrangement is bad; the discipline is still worse. It is dark, close, unhealthy. Although frequently whitewashed, it is never free from foul and fever-feeding smells. Then, all the rooms and cells are ill-designed for prison purposes, being low, narrow, and unprovided with means for ventilation. They are not fitted up with any of the necessary utensils of a sleeping chamber; there is neither wash-stand nor water-closet in them. Yet large numbers of persons are locked up in each of these cells for twelve hours together, to breathe the contaminated atmosphere, and be the witnesses of personal acts for which common decency would provide private accommodation. And all this period they are left to their own control! The effect of such a deplorable system, must be as deleterious to the health of prisoners as to their morals. Cramming five men into one of these miserable cells is slow murder. No human constitution could long bear up against such treatment.

Giltspur-street Compter is condemned. By intelligent inspectors, it has long been branded as a