Geneva he found only five criminals in gaol and no debtors. Throughout Switzerland, he found no person in fetters, each prisoner had a separate cell, warmed artificially, and strongly built; the greater the crime, the darker the cell. In many countries the gaols were empty. At Berne, all the criminals were kept to hard servile labour-indeed, work was the principal element of the Swiss system of punishment and reform. After inspecting a torture chamber in Germany, and again visiting Holland-to which country he grew more and more partial - he returned to England, more deeply impressed than ever, with the superiority of continental nations generally, in the science of prison discipline, over his own.

Three years had now been occupied travelling at home and abroad, amassing materials for his great work, in the course of which he had travelled 13,418 miles. Still not content, he pursued his investigations and made another complete inspection of the metropolitan prisons. Assisted by his friends Dr Aikin and Dr Price, the sheets were now prepared for the press; at last the great work was completed, printed at Warrington, and given to the world. Howard not only presented copies to the press, to public bodies and every considerable person in England, but sold it at so low a price, that had every copy been purchased the proceeds would not have paid the outlay, on the mere printing and paper. It consisted of 520 quarto pages, with four large plates.

An appendix was afterwards added, which went through two editions.

The "State of Prisons" created an extraordinary sensation; it had been long and anxiously looked for, and was received with great favour by the public; it marked an epoch in the history of social jurisprudence. The system of laws in England was at that time so severe, that it might almost be likened to a Reign of Terror. The most trivial offences were capital: men were hung for stealing deer, killing, or wounding cattle, for cutting down or destroying trees, for even cutting a hop band on a hop plantation. Forgery, smuggling, uttering base coin, even shoplifting, or stealing from a barge on the river, to the value of 5s., were capital crimes. Such were the diabolical laws that existed in Howard's time. Of 678 executions from 1749 to 1771, only 72 were for murder.

The war between Great Britain and her American colonies had put an end to the system of transporting convicts. The gaols were now fuller than ever; the hulk system was tried; and Howard, when examined concerning it before a committee of the House of Commons, declared that with good management, it was in his opinion, preferable to transportation. His own idea was to confine convicts in a great penal work prison; he wished to see introduced a discipline of work. Influenced by his arguments and experience, ministers appointed his friends, Sir William Blackstone and Mr Eden, to prepare the draught of a bill for the creation of such an estab

lishment. Howard at once prepared to start for Holland, to procure more precise information concerning the spin and rasp houses of that country. He proposed also to extend his journey into the north, east, and south of Europe. At the Hague he was nearly killed by a runaway horse dashing against him in the street. On his recovery he resumed his inquiries, and was everywhere impressed with the superiority of the criminal police of Holland, over that of England.

His reputation had now spread over Europe, and wherever he went he was received with honour. At Berlin he was sumptuously lodged, and mixed in the best society; he was, on the whole, pleased with the prisons of that city. Spandau and Magdeburg he found not so bad, as their reputation. Of the prisons of Vienna he speaks in mixed terms of censure and commendation. From Germany he passed through Styria into Illyria; thence to Venice, where he visited the renowned dungeons of that romantic city. At Rome he found much to approve, but still more to condemn, in the criminal institutions of the States of the Church. Not all his influence could obtain for him an entrance into the dungeons of the Inquisition, which he longed to inspect. With the hospital of St Michele for juvenile offenders, he was delighted. On his return voyage from Naples to Leghorn, he met with a fearful storm, and was several times nearly shipwrecked, for as the vessel in which he sailed was suspected of coming from a port where the plague

prevailed, they were refused permission to enter any harbour. The hospitable governor of the island of Gorgona, however, at last received them, and here they remained a week, till the tempest abated, when they reached Leghorn in safety.

At Milan the prison discipline met with his approval. The casa di correzione there, was precisely such a building as he wished to see introduced into England; it combined the two great features of labour and instruction. He returned through Switzerland, Germany, and France, having travelled on this tour 4600 miles.

Having been told in France that French prisoners in England suffered greater hardships than any he had witnessed endured in France by the English, his first care on reaching London was to call on the Commissioners of Sick and Wounded Seamen, to tell them what he had heard, and of his determination to discover if the statements were true. The commissioners received him with courtesy, and gave him every assistance in their power. He then went to Cardington to spend Christmas with his son, and immediately afterwards, set out on a new tour of inspection, one of the longest and most laborious he had taken, occupying from January till the end of November 1779, in the course of which he traversed nearly every county in England, Ireland, and Scotland, travelling no less than 6990 miles. On the whole, he was satisfied with this new inspection. Some of the worst abuses had been removed, the gaols

almost universally, were cleaner, healthier, more orderly. The episcopal gaols of Ely and Durham, with a few others, were still exceptions.

Meanwhile, acts had passed Parliament for building two penitentiary houses, to try the great experiment of home correctional discipline. Government named Howard first supervisor of this undertaking. It was only at the urgent request of his friends, that he accepted the offer. His two colleagues were Dr Fothergill and Mr Whatley, Treasurer of the Foundling Hospital.

A dispute arose at the outset on the choice of a site, and after endless controversy and much waste of time during which both Dr Fothergill, his colleague, and Sir W. Blackstone, his friend and influential patron, died-Howard determined to give up the post; and with his retirement, the project, which had probably never been seriously entertained by the Ministry, was abandoned, and the Botany Bay transportation scheme, adopted in its stead.

There were still unexplored regions on the Continent, and in 1781, Howard, now free from all engagements, sailed, in spite of the war then raging, to Ostend, and travelled through Holland and Germany to Copenhagen. In Denmark he observed whippingposts at the gates of towns, and gibbets and wheels erected on eminences, on which the bodies of maleBeheading was

factors were sometimes left to rot.

the usual mode of capital punishment, but for heinous crimes the wheel was still used. The prisons were in