This is the great model experiment. We can easily reverse the picture. It is but a short walk from Pentonville to Smithfield—scarcely two miles—yet, in the prison world, the two places are antipodes. Here, within the hallowed precincts of the City, stands Giltspur Street Compter, upon the state of which we produce another witness. Mr. Dixon, in his work on London Prisons, testifies that in this jail the prisoners “sleep in small cells, little more than half the size of the model cell at Pentonville, which is calculated (on the supposition that the cell is to be ventilated on the best plan which science can suggest, regardless of cost) to be just large enough for _one_ inmate. The cell in Giltspur Street Compter is little more than half the size, and is either not ventilated at all, or is ventilated very imperfectly. I have measured it, and know exactly the quantity of air which it will hold, and have no doubt but that it contains less than any human being ought to breathe in, in the course of a night. Well, in this cell, in which there is hardly room for them to lie down, I have seen _five_ persons locked up, at four o’clock in the day, to be there confined, in darkness, in idleness, to pass all those hours, to do all the offices of nature, not merely in each other’s presence, but crushed by the narrowness of their den into a state of filthy contact which brute beasts would have resisted to the last gasp of life! Think of these five wretched beings—men with souls, and gifted with human reason—condemned, day by day, to pass in this unutterably loathsome manner two-thirds of their time! Can we wonder if these men come out of prison, after three or four months of such treatment, prepared to commit the most revolting crimes? Could five of the purest men in the world live together in such a manner without losing every attribute of good which had once belonged to them? He would be a rash man who would dare to answer—‘Yes.’ Take another fact from Newgate. In any of the female wards may be seen, a week before the Sessions, a collection of persons of every shade of guilt, and some who are innocent. I remember one case particularly. A servant girl, of about sixteen, a fresh-looking healthy creature, recently up from the country, was charged by her mistress for stealing a brooch. She was in the same room—lived all day, slept all night—with the most abandoned of her sex. They were left alone; they had no work to do; no books—except a few tracts for which they had no taste—to read. The whole day was spent, as is usual in such prisons, in telling stories—the gross and guilty stories of their own lives. There is no form of wickedness, no aspect of vice, with which the poor creature’s mind would not be compelled to grow familiar in the few weeks she passed in Newgate awaiting trial. When the day came, the evidence against her was found to be the lamest in the world, and she was at once acquitted. That she entered Newgate innocent