The Prison Act of 1778 is the beginning of the English Prison System. This measure, the result of the joint labours of Mr. Howard, Sir William Blackstone, and Mr. Eden, was due, not only to the newly-awakened interest in the treatment of prisoners, but to the political necessity for making provision for keeping our prisoners at home, which had resulted from the loss of the American Colonies. In this Act the principle of separate confinement with labour, and of religious and moral instruction, is clearly laid down and enforced. In the year 1781, a further Act was passed, making it compulsory for Justices to provide separate accommodation for all persons convicted of felony who were committed for punishment with hard labour, it being recited in the preamble to the Act that in the absence of such provision "persons sentenced for correction frequently grow more dissolute and abandoned during their continuance in such houses." The principle of separate confinement having been thus recognized by Parliament, the Justices of some Counties, including Sussex and Gloucester, respectively, started the local prisons of Horsham, Petworth, and Gloucester, on the separate plan, and they furnish interesting historical record of the formal adoption in this country of a system which, a few years later, under American influences, became generalized throughout the civilized world. The proposition of Mr. Jeremy Bentham for a new and less expensive mode of employing and reforming convicts, by the construction of a large establishment, called by him a "Panopticon," appears to have diverted public attention from the real end and object of imprisonment; and this proposition, being finally abandoned in 1810, led to the consideration of fresh plans, which ended in a system of so-called "_Classification_" as established in 1822, by the Act of 4th George IV., Cap. 64. Until Mr. Crawford's visit to the United States, separate confinement, though established in 1775, and only ceasing to be enforced when broken in upon by numbers for whom the accommodation was insufficient, appears to have been almost entirely lost sight of. An approximation to it existed at Millbank since the completion of that Prison in 1821, and a fair example of the system had been in operation at Glasgow since the year 1824. It is very doubtful, however, after the enormous expenditure made to effect classification, whether these traces of the system would have rescued it from oblivion without the aid derived from its practical development in the United States, and the concurrent testimony given in its favour by eminent men in France, Prussia, and Belgium.