A description of the extortions, inhumanities, and crimes against the most elementary laws of sanitation, that were rife in prison-houses and convict establishments, would here be out of place. A full account is to be found in the interesting volumes in the pages of which, Major Arthur Griffiths has exhaustively dealt with the subject; but to shew with what reckless disregard for consequences prisoners were treated, and how little attention was paid to the reclamation of juvenile offenders, it is sufficient to mention the fact that in Newgate, a felon, who had been sentenced to transportation, was retained in England, to act as a schoolmaster to the boy prisoners. Under the unreformed prison system, gaols were little better than universities of crime, that conferred the diploma of "habitual" on the criminals who graduated there, and it was said that half the burglaries that were committed in London were planned in Newgate. CHAPTER XI PIONEER REFORMERS Just when the immediate outlook was the most gloomy, and at an hour when the future seemed most barren of any hopeful sign, unseen and unsuspected influences were already at work; influences which were destined first to arrest, and eventually to repel, the increasing flood of criminality, as well as to alleviate the hard lot of the unhappy convict. Up to this point the annual total of crime had ever been mounting higher and higher whilst the tale of abuses had continued to increase. But the malady had now come to a head, and intelligent public attention was at length focussed on a difficult and unpopular subject, which hitherto had been deliberately avoided by all but the very few who had been familiarized with its magnitude by routine, and who had mostly grown callous to its evils by use. When John Howard began to minister to prisoners, and when Jeremy Bentham began to propound his doctrine of utilitarianism, no one foresaw that the devotion of the one would achieve a transformation of the whole prison system, nor that the profound common-sense of the other would triumph over the irrationality which for centuries had vitiated the penal administration of England.