Here we have one of the great abuses of the horrible “debtor’s prisons” in London. They were jobbed by the officials, and the bare decencies of life could only be obtained by a heavy payment. The warders charged £1.1.0. on entrance for “garnish,” which was supposed to provide coals, candles, brooms, etc., and exorbitant fees were demanded for rooms. The state of those who could not pay was deplorable. In the prison of the Court of Requests at Birmingham, according to the Parliamentary papers of 1844, eight years after “Pickwick” was written, the male prisoners slept in an attic eleven feet long by sixteen broad on platforms littered with loose straw. For exercise, at Kidderminster they walked in a yard thirteen yards square; and their room was without even a fireplace. For food they were allowed one quarter of a loaf of bread and were allowed two jugfuls of water for drinking and washing. In 1827 nearly 6000 persons in London were imprisoned for debt. We read constantly in Dickens of Chancery prisoners, especially in “Little Dorrit”; men who had been thrown into gaol to rot there for years because they could not pay for suits in which they had been quite unwillingly involved. The absurdity of the system was enhanced by the fact that they were deprived of any chance of working to pay their debts. Many were forgotten and left literally to rot. They were not even allowed to escape by bankruptcy; for unless a man failed in trade he could not claim that relief, nor could his property be divided among his creditors. The law thus gave no means of escape to the debtor nor of payment to the creditor. Imprisonment for debt was not abolished in England till 1869; and it is now only allowed by order of the court in the case of small debts which people can but will not pay. The horrors of the prisons which Howard and Elizabeth Fry, for all their gallant efforts, were powerless to remove, gave rise to a wave of public sentiment which carried their administration to an opposite extreme. Dickens saw this and exposed the folly of the movement in “David Copperfield.” You will doubtless remember that David’s old schoolmaster, Mr. Creakle, of Salem House, suddenly developed from a brutal pedagogue into an ardent philanthropist, after having become a Middlesex magistrate, and devoted himself to the well-being of criminals. Copperfield, as the rising author of the day (Dickens himself), is invited to see a new model prison and takes his old friend Traddles with him. “It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money on the erection of an industrial school for the young or a house of refuge for the deserving old. In the kitchen repasts were being prepared for the prisoners, so delicate that none of our soldiers, sailors, labourers, or workmen could hope ever to dine half so well.”