I have given this title to the present chapter because the gaol fever while it raged was the visible exponent of the foul condition of all gaols, including Newgate, or, as Dr. Guy puts it, “the physical expression of manifold prison neglect and mismanagement.” The loathsome corruption that festered unchecked or unalleviated within the prison houses was never revealed until John Howard began his self-sacrificing visitations, and it is to the pages of his ‘State of Prisons’ that we must refer for full details. Some would be incredible were they not vouched for on the unimpeachable testimony of the great philanthropist. All through the eighteenth century the case of all prisoners was desperate, their sufferings heart-rending, their treatment a disgrace to that or any age. They were either entirely deprived of, or at best but scantily provided with, the commonest and most indispensable necessaries of life. They were often denied both light and air, which are assuredly the free heritage of all God’s creatures. Rapacity and extortion, of which more directly, were too prevalent in prison administration to allow of many windows when all such openings were heavily taxed. What windows there were looked generally down dark entries or noisome passages, and gave no light. In Newgate until the building of the new (and last) gaol, the felons’ side and the common debtors’ side were so dark that it was necessary to use links and burners all day long; indeed, artificial light was generally necessary all over the prison, except in the press-yard. The place of durance was sometimes underground, a dungeon, or subterranean cellar, into which the prisoners were lowered, to fight with rats for the meagre pittance of food thrown to them through a trap-door. These terrible _oubliettes_ were too often damp and noisome, half a foot deep in water, or with an open sewer running through the centre of the floor. They had no chimneys, no fireplace, no barrack beds; the wretched inmates huddled together for warmth upon heaps of filthy rags or bundles of rotten straw reeking with foul exhalations, and fetid with all manner of indescribable nastiness. There was not the slightest attempt at ventilation, as we understand the word. The windows, when they existed, were seldom if ever opened, nor the doors, for the spaces within the prison walls were generally too limited to allow of daily exercise, and the prisoners were thus kept continuously under lock and key. Water, another necessary of life, was doled out in the scantiest quantities, too small for proper ablutions or cleansing purposes, and hardly sufficient to assuage thirst. Howard tells us of one prison where the daily allowance of water was only three pints per head, and even this was dependent upon the good will of the keepers, who brought it or not, as they felt disposed. At another, water could only be had on payment, the price being a halfpenny for three gallons.