But Bentham was in advance of his age in these matters, though his writings exercised a considerable influence in France, where jurists were busy preparing the Penal Code of the First Empire. History, by the pen of Professor Lecky, has severely condemned the statesmen of that period for their callous indifference to all questions relating to the treatment of crime and of prisoners. He says: "England, which stood so high among the nations of the world in political, industrial, and intellectual eminence, ranked in this matter shamefully below the average of the Continent." There was, in fact, no penal system, strictly so-called. It was simply a policy of '_débarras_,' under which all offenders against the law were shipped to the Colonies; young and old, grave and petty offenders were all banished under a rough and ready scheme of Transportation, (as explained in my Chapter on the history of Penal Servitude). So long as this System lasted--from 1787 to 1845--the modern problems, which are involved in keeping our prisoners at home, did not occupy the public mind. This apathy and callousness was not due entirely to the sense of security which Transportation gave by the practical elimination from the body politic of persons presumed dangerous to the State: it was due also to the want of imagination, which is the parent of cruelty. For this, the absence of any system of National Education must be held responsible. It was not until imagination was quickened by the great religious revivals, by the gradually increasing power of the Press--(the champion of all forms of unnoticed suffering) and by the spread of education among the masses, that Philanthropy, in its modern garb, the Inquisitor of prisons and of the dark places of the world, came down to the earth, and demanded that all those cruelties which were associated with English penal law should cease, and that it should no longer be possible to say with Sir S. Romilly (1817) that "the laws of England were written in blood." _Excidat illa dies ævo nec cetera credant secula._ But dawn was breaking, and the impulse that was to compel attention to '_la question pénitentiaire_' came from the other side of the Atlantic.