98 PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 1903 
brutal amusements were common; and crime was 
repressed by codes of laws so severe that in the British 
Islands more than one hundred offences were punishable 
with death ; a severity that made men callous to hanging. 
It is said that a street that stood on the site of the New- 
street Station in Birmingham, had been such a haunt of 
coiners that there was hardly a house in it one of whose 
occupants had not been hanged for counterfeiting money. 
A late clerk of the County Prison at Gloucester once told 
me that an old woman he knew had described to him the 
roadway that ran through the courtyard of the building in 
the time of George III. Iron railings only separated the 
mixed company of prisoners of all kinds from the by- 
passers. She said, that when about twelve years of age, 
she was going along this roadway, when one of the men 
behind the bars accosted her with: “ Little maid, what be 
“you come here for? To see we hanged I spose? We 
“be’ant a goin’ to be hanged to-day; ‘tis put off till next 
Saturday !” 
Many years ago I took a Philadelphian visitor over 
Gloucester Prison. He was struck on entering one of 
the principal wards with its resemblance to similar build- 
ings in the United States. As we were leaving we met 
the magistrate who presided over the Committee in charge 
of the Prison, T. Barwick Lloyd-Baker, the founder of the 
Reformatory System. On introducing the American to 
him, and mentioning what the latter had said about 
Gloucester Prison being so much like those on the other 
side of the water, T. B. Lloyd-Baker said, “I can tell you 
the reason of that. Very soon after the United States 
had gained their Independence, they found the need of an 
effective system of prison discipline, and they sent a com- 
mission to this country to enquire into the arrangements 
in vogue in Great Britain. It so happened that just before 
this, this prison at Gloucester required some extension 
