tly proved that an individual officer had murdered any prisoner
by the use of a particular torture, yet the instruments of torture
described in the above extract were in the prisons--they were seen and
handled by the committee, who were not to suppose that they were kept
for no use. They state, that it had become the practice for the
keepers 'unlawfully to assume to themselves a pretended authority as
magistrates, and not only to judge and decree punishments arbitrarily,
but also to execute the same unmercifully.'

In the exercise of this authority, the keepers seem to have imitated
the cruelties of the classical tyrant Mezentius, commemorated by
Virgil as chaining the living to the dead, for the committee say: 'The
various tortures and cruelties before mentioned not contenting these
wicked keepers in their said pretended magistracy over the prisoners,
they found a way of making within the prison a confinement more
dreadful than the strong room itself, by coupling the living with the
dead; and have made a practice of locking up debtors who displeased
them in the yard with human carcasses. One particular instance of
this sort of inhumanity, was of a person whom the keepers confined in
that part of the lower yard which was then separated from the rest,
whilst two dead bodies had lain there four days; yet was he kept there
with them six days longer; in which time the vermin devoured the flesh
from the faces, ate the eyes out of the heads of the carcasses, which
were bloated, putrid, and turned green during the poor debtor's dismal
confinement with them.'

Some of the accounts given by the committee are as grotesque, without
being so horrible. A certain Captain John M'Phaedris had been a person
of considerable fortune, and, like many of his contemporaries, had
been a victim to the South-sea speculation, which appears to have made
all the debtors' prisons more than usually full between the years 1720
and 1725. He refused to pay the exorbitant fees demanded by the keeper
for accommodation, and maintained that they were illegal. To silence
so troublesome a person, he was turned, unsheltered, into the yard,
where he had to remain exposed to the weather day and night. 'He sat
quietly,' said the committee, 'under his wrongs, and, getting some
poor materials, built a little hut to protect himself as well as he
could from the injuries of the weather.' The keeper, seeing this
ingenious abode, exclaimed with an oath that the fellow