'Miss Smith' so that she might travel unrecognised, but that disguise
could not be kept up when she got back to Lea Hurst. Crowds thronged to
see her from the neighbouring towns, and the lodge-keeper had a busy
time. However, her father would not allow her to be worried. She needed
rest, he said, and she should have it; and if addresses and plate and
testimonials should pour in (as they did, in quantities) someone else
could write thanks at her dictation. All round Lea Hurst her large
Russian dog was an object of reverence, and as for Thomas the
drummer-boy--well, if you could not see Miss Nightingale herself, you
might spend hours of delight in listening to Thomas, who certainly could
tell you far more thrilling tales than his mistress would ever have
done.
We should all like to know what became of Thomas.
* * * * *
Miss Nightingale is still living, but the privations and over-work of
those terrible months had so broken her down that for the last forty
years she has been more or less of an invalid. Still, her interest is as
wide as ever in all that could help her fellows, and though she was
unable to go among them as of old, she was ready to help and advise,
either personally or by letter. If she had given her health and the
outdoor pleasures that she loved so much in aid of the sick and
suffering, she had won in exchange a position and an influence for good
such as no other woman has ever held.
* * * * *
Since this little account was written, the king has conferred on her the
highest honour he could bestow on a woman, the Order of Merit, while the
lord mayor of London and the corporation have given her the freedom of
the City. Thus her life will end in the knowledge that she has gained
the only honours worth having, those which have not been sought.
PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES
I am afraid you will think this a sad story, and so it is, but things
would have been sadder still but for the man I am going to tell you
about. His name was John Howard, and if you were to ask, 'Which John
Howard?' the answer would be, 'John Howard the Philanthropist,' which
means 'a lover of men.'
* * * * *
It is a great title for anyone to win, and no one ever earned it more
truly than this son of the rich upholsterer of Smithfield, born in
Clapton, then a country village of the parish of Hackney, in 1727. As
you will see by and by, Howard spent the last seventeen years of his
life in fighting three giants who were very hard to beat, named
Ignorance, Sloth, and Dirt; and it is all the more difficult to overcome
them because they are generally to be met with together. Unfortunately,
they never can be wholly killed, for when you think they are left dead
on the field after a hard struggle, they always come to life again; but
they have never been quite so strong since the war waged on them by John
Howard, who died fighting against them in a Russian city.
* * * * *
Howard had always been a delicate boy, which made it all the more
wonderful that he could bear the fatigue of the long journeys which he
undertook to help people who could not help themselves. He was married
twice, but neither of his wives lived long, and he had only one little
boy to look after. But when the child was four years old, Howard felt
that it was dull for him to be alone with his father, and without any
play-fellows, so he sent him to a small school kept by some ladies,
where little John, or 'Master Howard,' as it was the fashion to call
him, would be well taken care of.
Howard was a quiet man, and very religious, but, what was rare in those
times, he did not believe everybody in the wrong who thought differently
from himself. He lived quietly among his books on a small estate he
owned near Bedford, called Cardington, where he studied astronomy and
questions about heat and cold, and when only twenty-nine was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society. Medicine always interested him, and he
learned enough of it to be very useful to him during his travels;
indeed, it was owing to his fame as a doctor that he was summoned to see
a young Russian lady dying of fever, which, according to many, infected
him, and caused his own death. In his studies and in the care of his
tenants many peaceful years passed away. The man who afterwards became
known as the champion of 'prisoners and captives, and all who were
desolate and oppressed,' did not allow his own tenants to live in
unhealthy and uncomfortable cottages crowded together in tiny rooms with
water dropping on to their beds from the badly thatched roofs, like many
other landlords both in his day and ours. He opened schools for the
children, and drew up rules for them. The girls were taught reading and
needlework, the boys reading and a little arithmetic. Writing does not
seem to have been thought necessary, as none of the girls learned it,
and only a few of the boys--probably the cleverer ones. On Sundays they
were all expected to go to church or chapel, whichever their parents
preferred.
* * * * *
In spite of the generosity which made John Howard ready to give money or
time to any scheme that seemed likely to be of use to the poor, he was
not popular with his neighbours, and saw very little of them. They
thought him 'odd' because he did not care for races, or cock-fights, or
long dinners that lasted far into the night, where the gentlemen often
drank so much that they could not get home at all. Year by year Howard
was teaching himself to do without things, and by and by he was able to
live on green tea and a little bread and vegetables, with fruit now and
then as a great treat. No wonder he was considered eccentric by the
Bedfordshire country gentlemen!
* * * * *
But, in spite of his quiet ways, Howard had a passion for travelling,
and when a youth threw up the position of grocer's apprentice which his
father had obtained for him, and started for France and Italy.
Immediately after the death of his first wife he determined to go for a
change to Lisbon, then lying in ruins after the recent earthquake.
Before, however, his ship was out of the English Channel it was attacked
and overpowered by a French privateer, and both crew and passengers were
left without anything to eat or drink for nearly two days. They were
then taken to the prison at Brest, thrown into a dark and horribly dirty
dungeon, and apparently forgotten. Besides hunger and thirst, they went
through terrible pangs, fearing lest they were to be left to starve; but
at length the heavy bolts of the iron door were shot back, and a leg of
mutton was thrust inside. Nobody had a knife, every weapon had been
taken from them, and if they had, they were all too hungry to wait to
use it. They sprang on the food like wolves and gnawed it like dogs.
For a week they all remained in their dungeon, and then Howard, at any
rate, was allowed to leave it, and was sent first to Morlaix and then to
Carpaix, where he was kindly treated by the gaoler, in whose house he
lived. Howard gave his word that he would not try to escape, and for
two months he remained there--a prisoner on parole, as it is
called--writing letters to prisoners he had left behind him, who had not
been so fortunate as himself. From what he had gone through he could
easily guess what they were suffering, and determined that when once he
got back to England he would do everything in his power to obtain their
freedom.
[Illustration: They sprang on the food like wolves.]
In two months Howard was informed by his friend the gaoler that the
governor had decided that he should be sent to England, in order that he
might arrange to be exchanged for a French naval officer, after swearing
that in case this could not be managed, he would return as a prisoner to
Brest. It was a great trial of any man's good faith, but it was not
misplaced, and happily the exchange was easily made. No sooner were his
own affairs settled than Howard set about freeing his countrymen, and
very shortly some English ships were sent to Brest with a cargo of
French prisoners and came back with an equal number of English ones, all
of whom owed their liberty to Howard's exertions.
His captivity in France first gave him an idea of the state of prisons
and the sufferings of prisoners, but eighteen years were to pass before
the improvement of their condition became the business of his life.
* * * * *
Mr. Howard was appointed high sheriff for the county of Bedford in 1773,
and as such had the prisons under his charge. The high sheriffs who had
gone before him were of course equally bound to see that everything
inside the gaol was clean and well-ordered, but nobody really expected
them to trouble their heads about the matter, and certainly they never
did. However, Mr. Howard's notion of his duty was very different. He at
once visited the county prison in Bedford, and the misery that he found
there was repeated almost exactly in nearly every prison in the British
Isles. The gaoler in Bedford--and in many other places--had no salary
paid him, and therefore screwed all he could out of his prisoners; and
no matter if a man were innocent or guilty, if a jury had condemned him
or not, he must pay fifteen shillings and fourpence to the gaoler, and
two shillings to the warder who brought him his food--when he had
any--before he was set free. If, as often happened, the prisoners could
not find the money, well, they were locked up till they died, or till
the fees were paid.
When Howard informed the magistrates of what he had found, they were as
much shocked as if it had not been their business to have known all
about it.
'A dreadful state of things, indeed!' they said, 'and they were greatly
obliged to Mr. Howard for having discovered it. Yes, certainly, the
criminals and those who had been confined for debt alone ought to be
placed in different parts of the prison, and the men and women should be
separated, and an infirmary built for the sick. Oh! they were quite
willing to do it, but the cost would be very heavy, and the people might
decline to pay it, unless the high sheriff could point to any other
county which supported its own gaol.'
* * * * *
At the moment, the high sheriff could not, but he had no doubt that such
a county would be easily found, so he at once started on a visit to some
of the prisons, but, to his surprise, he did not discover _one_ in which
the gaoler was paid a fixed salary. And the more he saw of the prisons,
the more he was grieved at their condition. Almost all had dungeons for
criminals built underground, dark, damp, and dirty, and sometimes as
much as twenty feet below the surface; and often these dungeons were
very small and very crowded. Mats or, in a few of the better-managed
prisons, straw was given the prisoners to lie on, but no coverings, and
those who were imprisoned for debt were expected to pay for their own
food or go without it.
* * * * *
Sick at heart with all that he had seen, Howard went home for a short
rest, and then set out again on one of those tours on which he spent
the remaining years of his life, never thinking that the work was done
when he had reported on the terrible evils of the prison system, but
always returning to make sure that his advice had been carried out,
which it often was not. Curious to say, there are few instances of
difficulties being put in the way of his inspecting the prisons in any
of the countries which he visited, while about six months after his
labours began, he was called to the bar of the House of Commons, and
publicly thanked for his services in behalf of those who could not help
themselves.
Mr. Howard was pleased and touched at the honour done him, and at the
proof that
Evil is wrought by want of Thought,
As well as by want of Heart;
but he was much more gratified by two laws that were passed during that
session, one for relieving innocent prisoners from paying fees, and the
other for insisting on certain rules being carried out which were
necessary to keep the prisoners in good health.
* * * * *
This last Act was greatly needed. The bad air, the dirt, and the
closeness of the rooms constantly produced an illness called gaol fever,
from which numbers of prisoners died yearly, one catching it from the
other. Nominally, a doctor was attached to every prison, but instead of
being ready, as doctors generally are, to risk their lives for their
patients, these men usually showed great cowardice. In Exeter, the
doctor when appointed had it set down in writing that he should not be
obliged to attend anyone suffering from gaol fever; in the county gaol
for Cornwall, every prisoner but one was ill of this disease when Howard
paid his first visit there. And no wonder, for here the prison consisted
of only one room with a small window, and three 'dungeons or cages,'
the one for women being only five feet long. The food was let down to
them through a hole in the floor of the room above.
In Derby, Howard was thankful to see that things were far more what they
ought to be. The rooms were larger and lighter, there was an infirmary
for the sick, 'a neat chapel,' and even a bath, 'which the prisoners
were required occasionally to use.' Here the debtors, instead of being
nearly starved, were given the same allowance of food as the criminals.
They were also supplied with plenty of straw, and had fires in the
winter. Newcastle was still better managed, and here the doctor gave his
services free; but the Durham gaol was in a terrible state, and when
Howard went down into the dungeon he found several criminals lying there
half-starved and chained to the floor. The reason of these differences
probably lies in the fact that before Howard's 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_ gaols. Two pounds of bread a day, soup
once, with a pound of meat on Sunday.' This was in Brussels, but when he
went on to Ghent, things were better still.
Like most of the large towns of Flanders, Ghent had a stirring history,
and its townspeople were rich and prosperous. At the time of Howard's
visit, it was part of the dominions of the emperor Joseph II., brother
of Marie Antoinette, and by his orders a large prison was in course of
building. Though not yet finished, it already contained more than a
hundred and fifty men, and Howard felt as if he must be dreaming when he
saw that each of these prisoners had a room to himself, a bedstead, a
mattress, a pillow, a pair of sheets, with two blankets in winter and
one in summer. Everything was very clean, and the food plentiful and
wholesome. But, besides all this, Howard noted with a feeling of envy
two customs which so far he had tried in vain to introduce into England.
One was that the men and the women should be kept apart, and the other,
that they should be given useful work to employ their time. In England,
a prisoner was sometimes condemned to 'hard labour,' but this was a mere
form. There was no system arranged beforehand for the employment of
convicts, and indeed, till more light was admitted into the English
prisons, it was too dark to work at anything, so they just sat with the
other criminals in the dark, stifling dungeons, with nothing to do and
nothing to think of!
A more horrible punishment could not have been invented, and if the
criminal left the prison at all, he was sure to come out even worse than
he went in. And how was anything else possible?
* * * * *
Now in Ghent, and in most of the Flemish prisons, it was all as
different as could be. The women sat in work-rooms of their own, when
they had finished cleaning and cooking, mending all their own and the
men's clothes, which it was part of their duty to wash. This done, wool
in what is called its 'raw state' was served out to them--that is, wool
as it had been taken off the sheep's fleece--and they had to comb out
all the tangles, and spin it into long skeins. Then the skeins were
taken to the men, many of whom were weavers by trade, and by them it was
woven into cloth which was sold.
Thus, in doing work in which they could occupy themselves and take a
pride, the prisoners unconsciously ceased to think all day of the bad
lives they had led, and longed to lead again; and when they had served
the time of their sentences and were discharged, they had a trade to
fall back on, and, what was still more important, the _habit_ of
working.
Besides this, the method of 'hard labour' carried out in the Ghent
prison had another great advantage for the prisoners. Every day each
person's work, which would take him a certain number of hours to finish,
was dealt out, and when it was done, and done _properly_, the prisoners
were allowed, if they chose, to go on working, and the profits of this
work were put aside to be given them when they were discharged. And in
Ghent the criminals were not left, as in England, to the mercy of the
gaoler, nobody knowing and nobody caring what became of them, for the
city magistrates went over the prison once every week, and also arranged
what meals the prisoners were to have till the next meeting.
In a gaol in the beautiful old city of Bruges, the contrast between the
care taken of the sick criminals and the numberless deaths from gaol
fever in his own country filled Howard with the deepest shame. In
Bruges, the doctors did not make stipulations that they should not be
expected to visit infectious patients, but they wrote out their
prescriptions in a book for the magistrates to read. Thus it was
possible for the rulers of the city to judge for themselves how ill a
man might be, and how he was being treated; and as long as the doctor
considered him in need of it, fourteen pence daily--a much larger sum
then than now--was allotted to provide soup and other nourishing food
for the sick person.
* * * * *
When Howard passed from Belgium to Holland he found the same care,
though here the rules respecting the gaolers were stricter, because
they were responsible for the orderly state of the prison and the
conduct of the prisoners.
The gaolers were forbidden, on pain of a fine, to be seen drinking in
public-houses, to quarrel with the prisoners, and to use bad language to
them, and, greatest difference of all from the prisons he was accustomed
to, no strong drink was allowed to be sold within the walls! Debtors
were few, while in England they were more numerous than the criminals;
and in Amsterdam not a single person had been executed for ten years,
whereas in Britain sheep-stealing and all sorts of petty offences were
punished by hanging.
From Holland Mr. Howard travelled to Germany, where, as a whole, the
same sort of rules prevailed; and in Hamburg, the wives of the
magistrates went to the prisons every Saturday to give out the women's
work. In some places the men were set to mend the roads, clean the
bridges, clear away the snow, or do whatever the magistrates desired,
and a guard with fixed bayonets always attended them. But they much
preferred this labour, hard though it often was, to being shut up
indoors, and looked healthy and cheerful.
* * * * *
After three months Mr. Howard returned home and inspected the prison at
Dover, to find to his dismay everything exactly as before; and when,
after a little rest, he set out on a second English tour, scarcely
anywhere did he perceive an improvement. One small prison in the Forest
of Dean was inhabited by two sick and half-starved men, who had been
kept in one room for more than a year almost without water or fire or
any allowance for food. In another, at Penzance, which consisted of two
tiny rooms in a stable-yard, was one prisoner only, who would have died
of hunger had it not been for a brother, even poorer than himself, who
brought him just enough to keep him alive. Again and again Howard paid
out of his own pocket the debts of many of those miserable people, which
sometimes began by being no more than a shilling, but soon mounted up,
with all the fees, to several pounds.
* * * * *
With only short intervals for rest, Howard went on travelling and
inspecting, now in the British Isles and now abroad, and by slow degrees
he began to see an improvement in the condition of the prisoners in his
own country, whether criminals or debtors in gaols or convicts in the
'hulks,' as the rotten old ships used as prisons were called. He was
careful never to leave a single cell unvisited, and spoke his mind
freely both to the keepers and to the magistrates. The House of Commons
always listened with eagerness to all he had to tell, and passed several
Bills which should have changed things much for the better. But the
difficulty lay, not in making the law, but in getting it carried out.
It is wonderful how, during all these travels and the hours spent in the
horrible atmosphere of the prisons, a delicate man like Howard so seldom
was ill. Luckily he knew enough of medicine to teach him to take some
simple precautions, and he never entered a hospital or prison before
breakfast. Dresden and Venice appear to have been the two cities on the
Continent where the prisoners were the worst treated, many of them
wearing irons, and few of them having enough food.
* * * * *