7 petty offenders. An act passed
in 1779 provided for the erection of two penitentiaries. Howard was to
be a supervisor. The failure to carry out this act led, as we shall see,
to one of Bentham's most characteristic undertakings. One peculiarity
must be noted. Howard found prisons on the continent where the
treatment was bad and torture still occasionally practised; but he
nowhere found things so bad as in England. In Holland the prisons were
so neat and clean as to make it difficult to believe that they were
prisons: and they were used as models for the legislation of 1779. One
cause of this unenviable distinction of English prisons had been
indicated by an earlier investigation. General Oglethorpe (1696-1785)
had been started in his philanthropic career by obtaining a committee of
the House of Commons in 1729 to inquire into the state of the gaols. The
foundation of the colony of Georgia as an outlet for the population was
one result of the inquiry. It led, in the first place, however, to a
trial of persons accused of atrocious cruelties at the Fleet
prison.[114] The trial was abortive. It appeared in the course of the
proceedings that the Fleet prison was a 'freehold,' A patent for
rebuilding it had been granted to Sir Jeremy Whichcot under Charles II.,
and had been sold to one Higgins, who resold it to other persons for
L5000. The proprietors made their investment pay by cruel ill-treatment
of the prisoners, oppressing the poor and letting off parts of the
prison to dealers in drink. This was the general plan in the prisons
examined by Howard, and helps to account for the gross abuses. It is one
more application of the general system. As the patron was owner of a
living, and the officer of his commission, the keeper of a prison was
owner of his establishment. The paralysis of administration which
prevailed throughout the country made it natural to farm out paupers to
the master of a workhouse, and prisoners to the proprietor of a gaol.
The state of prisoners may be inferred not only from Howard's authentic
record but from the fictions of Fielding, Smollett and Goldsmith; and
the last echoes of the same complaints may be found in _Pickwick_ and
_Little Dorrit_. The Marshalsea described in the last was also a
proprietary concern. We shall hereafter see how Bentham proposed to
treat the evils revealed by Oglethorpe and Howard.

NOTES:

[96] Aikin's _Country Round Manchester_.

[97] Bunce's _History of the Corporati