Memorandum on Prison Reform 451 



those circumstances, they continued to refuse food, the Government 

 would be free of responsibility. 



Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. 



Newbuildings, Sussex, 

 24th Feb., 1910. 



P.S. I cannot send in this memorandum without adding a word of 

 protest (though it is rather apart from my general subject) against the 

 modern practice of executing prisoners condemned to death within the 

 precincts of our gaols. My experience of a prisoner's feelings after he has 

 been kept for even a short period in the solitary confinement of his cell, 

 leads me to be sure that it is a great aggravation to the penalty of death 

 that he should be denied the right, always extended to sentenced men in 

 former times, of dying in the open air and in the presence of his fellow- 

 men. Like many other so-called humanitarian reforms, the abolition of 

 public execution was brought about very much less in the interests of the 

 condemned man than to spare the feelings of those who condemned him, 

 the soft-hearted public which, while it consented to his death, was shocked 

 at being forced to see him die. To the man himself, shut in for weeks by 

 the four walls of his prison, with nerves unstrung by solitude and that 

 pereptual longing for a sight of trees and fields, and contact once more with 

 the busy life he formerly enjoyed, it must surely have lessened by a great 

 deal the pang of death to be set for one last half hour in the light of day 

 outside those walls, and thus get a breath of the open air of Heaven, and 

 with it the courage to endure his pain, even were it in the presence of an 

 angry mob rejoicing to see him hanged. The thought of this was con- 

 stantly with me in prison, and the horror which must come on a poor soul 

 led out one morning from his cell to the gloomy prison yard, and there, 

 without that small indulgence, strangled secretly by those in charge of him. 

 It is not through inhumanity that these hideous new incidents of prison 

 life and prison death have been devised, but through lack of imagination, 

 and I have sometimes thought that before power should be given to any 

 man to condemn his fellow-man to long punishment in gaol, he should have 

 served his own personal month to teach him what it means. 



