A committee obtained by his influence, did not conduct its inquiry in easy state in St Stephen's, but appalled the guilty parties by immediately repairing to the prisons, and diving to the furthest recesses of their dungeons. In the Marshalsea, it found that even those who paid excessive fees for their lodgings, were laid in lairs above each other on boards set on tressels, where they were packed so close together, that many were believed to have died from mere deficiency of air. There was no doubt that many others, debtors, had come to a miserable end by starvation. Some were found in the last stage of attenuation. Those who could not provide for themselves, had nothing to feed on but a scanty charity-allowance from the benevolence of individuals, which, when distributed among the whole, furnished each with sometimes only a few peas in the day; and at intervals of several days, an ounce and a half of meat. 'When the miserable wretch,' say the committee in their report, 'hath worn out the charity of his friends, and consumed the money which he hath raised upon his clothes and bedding, and hath ate his last allowance of provisions, he usually in a few days grows weak for want of food, with the symptoms of a hectic fever; and when he is no longer able to stand, if he can raise 3d. a day to pay the fee of the common nurse of the prison, he obtains the liberty of being carried into the sick-ward, and lingers on for about a month or two, by the assistance of the above-mentioned prison portion of provision, and then dies.' The committee made more lifelike this horrible description of the state of the prison by describing the results of their efforts to relieve the sufferers. They said: 'On the giving food to these poor wretches--though it was done with the utmost caution, they being only allowed the smallest quantities, and that of liquid nourishment--one died; the vessels of his stomach were so disordered and contracted for want of use, that they were totally incapable of performing their office, and the unhappy creature perished about the time of digestion.' These prisoners were debtors, not criminals. We make our extracts from the reports, just after having heard in a scientific society an examination of the dietary of a large district of prisons. The difficulty appeared to be, to find the medium that would preserve health without making the criminal's living in some measure luxurious; and it appeared that, by almost every dietary in actual use in the district, the prisoners fattened; in fact, they profited so much in constitution by sobriety, good air, and regular food, however simple, that it was found a difficult matter to give them what might be considered a bare sufficiency, without raising their physical condition, and sending them out of prison with improved constitutions. So different is imprisonment for crime in the present age, from imprisonment for debt a hundred and twenty years ago.