vast advantage to society, to public morals, and to themselves."

The improved construction and police of prisons is another important point. These are now not merely places of detention and of punishment, where there was great danger incurred of contracting deadly diseasest, but schools of improvement. Instead of proving, as formerly, certain means of confirming vice in its career, and corrupting innocence when suspicion led to temporary loss of liberty, there are now at all events the means proffered whereby the inmates may regain their moral with their personal liberty, and every pains taken that innocence may quit them uncontaminated. Much difference of opinion still prevails in regard to the

* M. Demidoff also thinks favourably of the "Colonial System for the Cure of Social Evils" (pour la Guérison des Maladies Sociales), which has been essayed in Holland. [There can be no doubt of the infinite advantages of the "allotment system," which is happily on the spread in England; the good that would certainly result from the general adoption of this system seems incalculable. Vide Mrs. Loudon's very able book on Political Economy, 8vo. London.-ENG. ED.]

+ In former times, the prisoners in Newgate, and other large gaols, used to be decimated at intervals by typhoid fever of a bad kind, which was elaborately described under the name of jail fever, or jail distemper. Epidemic fever is now unknown in any of the London prisons. In the House of Correction, Coldbath Fields, where there are usually from 1300 to 1400 prisoners, the Infirmary has rarely more than three or four tenants at one time; and when I visited it, in company with the author of this essay, in September 1841, there was but a single patient-a poor young woman far gone in consumption, which she was suffering under when she came into the place.-ENG. ED.

advantages or disadvantages of the several plans of treating prisoners that have been proposed. But the time cannot be far off when the friends of humanity will be enabled to arrive at unanimity of opinion on the subject. If experience prove that the American or solitary system is a frequent cause of insanity, it must of course be very much restricted, or entirely superseded*.

The milder punishments now awarded have also their influence in preserving the health of those who have made themselves obnoxious to the law. Mutilations, and other kinds of what may be called organic inflictions, have happily become matter of tradition in all policied countriest.

In the military service harshness and severity are yielding every day-have already yielded-to humane and reasonable treatment. Attention to the cleanliness of his quarters, to the sufficiency of his clothing, and to the abundance and excellence of his food,

* In Bernoulli (op. cit. p. 82) it is stated, on the authority of Coindet, that of 329, 15, or 1 in 22, had become insane.

† All our experience seems to satisfy us, nevertheless, that the grand object with society should be to take away inducements to commit crime: once a "criminal always a criminal" is an axiom with every one who has had to do with this class, whether in America or England, and it is probably the same in other countries-the "reform of the criminal," they say, "is a dream." If this be so, our prisons might have Dante's lines over the gates of hell inscribed upon their doors:

"Lasciate ogni speranza

Voi che intrate qui."

"Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here!"

ENG. ED.

added to humane and civil treatment, go so far to secure the common soldier against disease, that on home service he is probably the healthiest man in the community. It has been well observed by a very competent authority*, that "a good commanding officer has generally a healthy regiment." Thou

sands are still living, who have to thank the military hospital, and the skill and devotion of its medical officers in the English, French, and German armies, for health recovered, for life and limb preserved.

It is the same in the naval service. The sailor is now treated as a man and a christian: crowding in quarters is avoided; his provisions are of the best— in long voyages he is supplied with preserved fresh meats and lemon-juice; instead of being taught to acquire a taste for spirituous liquors by being forced to drink his allowance of grog, he is now rather encouraged to abstinence, and all the evils that flowed from insubordination, the constant consequence of intemperance, are avoided. The ill effects of wetting between decks are now well known, and never encountered; dry rubbing with hollystones is substituted for washing, and stoves are conveniently placed to secure ventilation; the ballast in all well-appointed ships is now some article that will not corrupt the air by its moisture and decomposition—it is pig iron, or, better still, large iron tanks filled with water, which afford the com

* Sir James M'Grigor, Medical Sketches, p. 95, Lond. 1804.

ARTIZANS AND LABOURERS.

31

pany a supply of that indispensable element, pure as when it came from the well, and almost ad libitum, through the whole course of even the longest voyage. The health of the navy has made truly wonderful progress within the last half century*.

The special scientific study of the diseases of artizans and labourers, in laying open the often hidden sources of their sufferings, has, at the same time, exposed the ways and means of removing them, or rendering them nugatory. The physician and philosopher working hand in hand here, good fruits have certainly not been wanting. The draught furnace, as a means of ventilating mines, and the safety-lamp of Davy, have already saved lives innumerable. Undertakings which, in former times, had all to be accomplished by the labour of men's bodies, and often proved highly detrimental to health, are now, for the most part, performed by machinery‡.

* Vide Blane, Comparative Health of the British Navy, from the year 1790 to 1814, in his Select Disserts.; and the Report on the Health, &c. of the Navy, by Dr. Wilson.

† See the work of Rammazzini on the Diseases of Artificers, translated into French by Patissier, and into German, with additions, by Schlegel; also, Adelman, on the same subject, Würzburg, 1803; Fuchs on the Influence of Trades, &c. on Health, in Hecker's New Annals; [Turner Thackrah on the Effects of the principal Arts, Trades, and Professions, on Health and Longevity, 8vo. London, 1831; and Dr. Calvert Holland on Diseases of the Lungs from Mechanical Causes, 8vo. Lond. 1844.-ENG ED.]

Ruptures are relatively much more frequent among the labouring than among the other classes of society. In Würtemberg it has been estimated that there are 30,000 persons affected with rupture. Riecke, p. 47.

If it shall be found that the mortality is actually greater in manufacturing districts than in those where the population is chiefly employed in agriculture, it will, at the same time, be discovered that this is mainly due to inequality in the tide of occupation; that not unfrequently the stream of full employment and abundance is succeeded by the ebb of idleness and want. The advantages of savings banks, however, and of benefit societies, which are ever better understood and more appreciated, promise gradually to lessen the consequences of this inequality. It is unquestionable that in the majority of the mills and manufactories themselves, with their roomy, well ventilated, and comfortably warmed apartments, the labourer is infinitely better off than he is in his dwelling

* Quetelet, op. cit. 213. [There can be no doubt of the fact being so. The mean length of life in Liverpool is 25 years; in some of the counties of England it is even as high as 45 years. But the defective police of the City from first to last, and the circumstances of the population, may be charged with the whole difference. In the city, hundreds, thousands, are suffered to herd in cellars below the level of the ground, and they are the most wretched of God's creatures: driven out in rags from their own country-Ireland-by starvation, they come to meet disease and death in the crowded avenues of Liverpool and Bristol, Glasgow and Manchester. But civilization can be rightly charged with nothing of all this misery; civilization has rather been struggling against it for centuries, but in vain. Thomas Carlyle, the philosopher, the poet, the friend of man, says well and truly, that England has always treated Ireland like a step-mother, and that Ireland has requited her by sending her starvelings forth to degrade the hardy yeoman of the English soil to the level of the mud-housed, rag-clad, potato-fed outcast of the misgoverned country (vide his "Chartism," Lond. 1840.) ENG. ED.]