time nobody had ever
taken the trouble to visit the prisons or to see if the rules were
carried out. If, as sometimes happened, the doctor and gaoler were
kind-hearted men, anxious to do their duty, then the prisoners were
tolerably well cared for. If, on the other hand, they were careless or
cruel, the captives had to suffer. This Howard saw, and was resolved, as
far as possible, to put the prisoners out of the power of the gaolers,
who should be made to undergo a severe punishment for any neglect of
duty. For in Howard's mind, though it was, of course, needful that men
should learn that if they chose to commit crimes they must pay for them,
yet he considered that so much useless misery only made the criminals
harder and more brutal, and that the real object of punishment was to
help people to correct their faults, and once more to become honest men
and women.

* * * * *

Having satisfied himself of the state of the English prisons, and done
what he could to improve them, Howard determined to discover how those
in foreign countries were managed. Paris was the first place he stopped
at, and the famous Bastille the first prison he visited. Here, however,
he was absolutely refused admittance, and seems, according to his friend
Dr. Aikin, to have narrowly escaped being detained as a prisoner
himself. But once outside the walls he remembered having heard that an
Act had been passed in 1717, when Louis XV. was seven years old and the
duke of Orleans was regent, desiring all gaolers to admit into their
prisons any persons who wished to bestow money on the prisoners, only
stipulating that whatever was given to those confined in the dungeons
should be offered in the presence of the gaoler.

Armed with this knowledge and a quantity of small coins, Howard called
on the head of the police, who received him politely and gave him a
written pass to the chief prisons in Paris. These he found very bad,
with dungeons in some of 'these seats of woe beyond imagination horrid
and dreadful,' yet not apparently any worse than many on this side of
the Channel.

* * * * *

After Howard's dismal experiences in England, Scotland, Ireland, and
France, it must have given him heartfelt pleasure to visit the prisons
in Belgium, which, with scarcely an exception, were 'all fresh and
clean, no gaol distemper, no prisoners in irons.' The bread allowance
'far exceeds that of any of _our