“Although it is now many years since I had the pleasure
of making your acquaintance, at the same time with that of our late excellent
and ever lamented friend, Sir Samuel
Romilly, yet I have never ceased to feel a sincere interest in
your welfare, and to participate in the efforts in which you have been
continually employed, for improving the condition of society, and regulating
its concerns upon better principles than the fallacious and temporising
expedients at present so generally resorted to. That the progress made in such
an undertaking must be slow, you have been too well aware; but, although all is
not accomplished, much has been done; and if we
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LIFE OF WILLIAM ROSCOE. | 227 |
“Of this tract I now take the liberty of offering a
copy to your acceptance, in the hope that you will find it, on the whole,
consistent with the opinions which you yourself have so much more effectually
advocated; and this step I have been induced to take at this moment, from
having observed in the Bibliothèque Universelle, for
February, 1825, an article on prison discipline, in which large extracts are
made from your report in 1822, to the representative council of Geneva, on the
establishment of a penitentiary for that canton; in which the objections to the
employment of that brutalising engine, the tread-wheel,
228 | LIFE OF WILLIAM ROSCOE. |
“That your recommendations have contributed to promote the establishment of a more humane and more effectual system of prison discipline in that enlightened community, consoles me, in some degree, for the regret and anxiety I have lately felt on receiving from Mr. Hopkins, of New York, one of the three commissioners appointed by the legislature of that state, to report on the discipline of their prisons, a copy of their report, in which they have recommended an entire alteration, amounting to the abandonment of the reformatory system, and the establishment of a severe and unremitting plan of compulsory labour, under the immediate discipline of the lash, and the dread of solitary confinement; both of which the jailer may inflict at his own pleasure, so that the former shall not exceed thirty-nine lashes, and the latter twelve months, at any one time!
“On receiving this document, I lost no time in
transmitting to the commissioners, and several of my friends in New York, the
hasty remarks of which I now enclose you a copy; which will, however, I fear,
be too late to be of any avail, even if I could flatter myself that they would
be likely to produce any effect upon the public de-
LIFE OF WILLIAM ROSCOE. | 229 |