"I have read every word of your Prison Essay with attention, and do not perceive any difference of principle between your views and mine. Your Essay is a special pleading in favor of the Pennsylvania System; but I do not object to it on this account. Such a pleading was called for in the circumstances mentioned in your preface; it was the thing needed to make an impression; and while it states strongly and eloquently the advantages of the Separate System, it does not conceal, although it does not dwell upon, its defects." And yet Mr. Combe is pressed by our Report, and now by our Treasurer, in opposition to this system; and the work is aided by publishing a truncated sentence, and entitling it _his opinion_. _Thirdly._ We have already observed the timely opposition of William Roscoe to the system of _solitude without labor_, which promised to prevail extensively in the United States. From his publication on this subject, in 1827, our Eighteenth Report, in 1843, draws forth a passage, and entitles it, in capitals, "MR. ROSCOE'S OPINION OF THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM." I will give the whole article or chapter. It is as follows. "MR. ROSCOE'S OPINION OF THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM. "Mr. Roscoe, of Liverpool, said, before the new Penitentiary was built,-- "'At Philadelphia, as has before been observed, it is intended to adopt the plan of "solitary confinement in all cases," "_the duration of the punishment to be fixed_," and "_the whole term of the sentence to be exacted_," except in cases where it shall be made to appear, to the satisfaction of the governor, that the party convicted was innocent of the charge. "'By the establishment of a general system of solitary confinement, a greater number of individuals, imprisoned for _minor offences, will probably be put to death_, by the superinduction of diseases inseparable from such a mode of treatment, than will be executed through the whole State, for the _perpetration of the most atrocious crimes_; with this remarkable difference, that the law has provided for the heinous offender a brief, and perhaps an unconscious fate, whilst the solitary victim passes through every variety of misery, and terminates his days by an _accumulation of sufferings which human nature can no longer bear_.'"[182] [182] Eighteenth Annual Report of the Prison Discipline Society, p. 95.