ng day. This
was our situation for fourteen or fifteen hours out of the
four-and-twenty. I had never been accustomed to sleep more than six or
seven hours, and my inclination to sleep was now less than ever. Thus
was I reduced to spend half my day in this dreary abode, and in complete
darkness. This was no trifling aggravation of my lot.

[Footnote D: See Howard on Prisons.]

Among my melancholy reflections I tasked my memory, and counted over the
doors, the locks, the bolts, the chains, the massy walls, and grated
windows, that were between me and liberty. "These," said I, "are the
engines that tyranny sits down in cold and serious meditation to invent.
This is the empire that man exercises over man. Thus is a being, formed
to expatiate, to act, to smile, and enjoy, restricted and benumbed. How
great must be his depravity or heedlessness, who vindicates this scheme
for changing health and gaiety and serenity, into the wanness of a
dungeon, and the deep furrows of agony and despair!"

"Thank God," exclaims the Englishman, "we have no Bastile! Thank God,
with us no man can be punished without a crime!" Unthinking wretch! Is
that a country of liberty, where thousands languish in dungeons and
fetters? Go, go, ignorant fool! and visit the scenes of our prisons!
witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their
governors, the misery of their inmates! After that, show me the man
shameless enough to triumph, and say, England has no Bastile! Is there
any charge so frivolous, upon which men are not consigned to those
detested abodes? Is there any villainy that is not practised by justices
and prosecutors? But against all this perhaps you have been told there
is redress. Yes; a redress, that it is the consummation of insult so
much as to name! Where shall the poor wretch reduced to the last
despair, to whom acquittal perhaps comes just time enough to save him
from perishing,--where shall this man find leisure, and much less money,
to fee counsel and officers, and purchase the tedious dear-bought remedy
of the law? No; he is too happy to leave his dungeon, and the memory of
his dungeon, behind him; and the same tyranny and wanton oppression
become the inheritance of his successor.

For myself, I looked round upon my walls, and forward upon the premature
death I had too much reason to expect: I consulted my own heart, that
whispered nothing but innocence; and I said, "This is society. This is
the object, the dist