56 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



to a pump-brake to fill the reservoir over the prison with 

 Witter, but never hi any other way saves labour. Pains are 

 taken in every way, not with absolute success it is admitted, 

 to secure utter silence, and to prevent all communication be 

 tween the prisoners. Criminals are rarely sent here for more 

 than twelve months; and it is said, that with all the science and 

 care that can be devoted to them, their health, both bodily 

 and mental, is endangered, if their confinement is protracted 

 longer. 



It may be, as its admirers have no shadow of doubt, the 

 happiest idea of a prison most happily realized that the world 

 yet knows ; yet it is one of the most painful things to examine 

 that I ever saw. It is hardly possible to speak well of it but 

 in irony, or to describe it without sarcasm, so absurd seems 

 all this scientific care for the well-being physical, mental, and 

 moral of these miserable transgressors, contrasted with the 

 studied neglect, justified and made praiseworthy by strictly 

 economical and religious reasoning, of the unoffending poor. 

 &quot;While no talent, painstaking, and complicated machinery, is too 

 expensive and cumbrous to be devoted to the keeping of the 

 criminal, of the unfortunate, society, through the state, still 

 says Am I my brother s keeper ? 



Hold the hand ! Dash not the book behind the grate, 

 my conservative friend ; I w r ould hint at nothing more dan 

 gerous than education a word one may yet speak in America 

 without being finally condemned as an infidel and a socialist, 

 and a man given to isms. Would you still call me to order, 

 remind me that I am writing on the subject of prisons En 

 glish prisons and that I may take up the subject of schools in 

 another chapter. Yet there may be lessons learned from 

 prisons, and English prisons teach lessons that all w r ho do 

 not care for the subject of education would do well to heed. 



In the prisons of England, in 1841, it was found thu.t 



