Turning our eyes to the condition of prisons during the last century, we perceive that scarcely a single ray of humanity had then penetrated their dreary confines. Idleness, debauchery, blasphemy, brutality, squalor, disease, wretchedness, mingled in them as in a hateful sty. All the unfortunate children of crime, the hardened felon, whose soul was blotted by continual guilt, and the youthful victim, who had just yielded to temptation, but whose countenance still mantled with the blush of virtue, and whose soul had not lost all its original brightness, were crowded together, without separation or classification, in one promiscuous, fermenting mass of wickedness, with scanty food and raiment, with few or no means of cleanliness, a miserable prey to the contagion of disease, and the worse contagion of vice and sin. The abject social degradation of the ancient Britons, in the picture drawn by Julius Cæsar, excites our wonder to a less degree than the well-authenticated condition of the poor prisoners in the polished annals of George the Third. Of all the circumstances which conspired to produce this wretchedness, it cannot be doubted that the promiscuous commingling of the prisoners in one animal herd was the most to be deplored. This evil arrested general attention. In France it enkindled the burning eloquence of Mirabeau, as in England it inspired the heavenly charity of Howard. It was felt not only in Europe, but here in our own country. Nay, it still continues, the scandal of this age and place, in the present jail of Boston! In the effort to escape from this evil, persons with best intentions, but by a not unnatural error, rushed to the opposite extreme. It was proposed to _separate_ prisoners from each other by a system of _absolute solitude_, without labor, books, or solace of any kind. This was actually done in Maine, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Without referring particularly to other States, I ask you to follow the course of things in Pennsylvania. In 1818 a law was passed authorizing the building of a penitentiary at Pittsburg "on the principle of solitary confinement of the convicts," and "provided always that the principle of the solitary confinement of the prisoners be preserved and maintained." In 1821 another law was passed authorizing the same at Philadelphia. Both of these prisons were conceived in a system of _solitude without labor_.