Let us for a moment look at the then condition of a few of the prisons in England, where we might have hoped to find a better state of things. Of Cheshire County Gaol, at Chester, he says: “Under the pope’s kitchen is a dark passage, 24 feet by 9; the descent to it is by twenty-one steps from the court. No window; not a breath of fresh air; only two apertures (lately made), with grates in the ceiling, into the pope’s kitchen above. On one side of it are six cells (_stalls_), each about 7½ feet by three, with a barrack bedstead, and an aperture over the door, about 8 inches by 4. In each of these are locked up at night sometimes three or four felons.” “In many gaols, and most bridewells, there is no allowance of bedding or straw for prisoners to sleep on, and if by any means they get a little, it is not changed for months together, so that it is offensive and almost worn to dust. Some lie upon rags, some upon the bare floor.” In the County Gaol at Carlisle,—in one room, he states,—“I saw three men and four women lodged together.” In the County Gaol at Gloucester, “there is no separation of the women…. The licentious intercourse of the sexes is shocking to decency and humanity. Many children are born in this gaol.” Many similar instances of a violation of the rules of virtue and decency are recorded by him. _Evil of Association._—Howard early became sensible of the great evil of associating together prisoners of all ages, and of all grades of criminality, and frequently deplored its corrupting influences upon the young and less hardened and practised in the ways of crime; and he remarked that even debtors, when associated with the felons (as they frequently were), soon became equally depraved with the worst of the criminals. Seeing this, he urged separation, at night, as _essential_, and at all times as _desirable_; but he does not seem to have matured any plan of thorough separation, by which alone these influences could be effectually guarded against. Beside from the first, communicating freely the wrongs which he discovered, as they came to his knowledge, in the year 1777 he published, in a large volume, his “State of the Prisons.” Thus the world was put in possession of facts, many of them of so horrible a character as to awaken an intense interest, and enlist the sympathies of the benevolent on behalf of the victims of such wrongs, many of whom were really not guilty of crimes to warrant their incarceration; and even when guilty, they were still human beings, objects of divine mercy, and though they had by their conduct forfeited their liberty,—if the makers of the laws, and those appointed to administer them, did not feel the force of the Christian obligation, to endeavor to promote their reform and to care for their souls,—it was but reasonable to suppose that the common impulses of humanity would have prompted to extend to them at least as much kindness and bodily comfort, as are admitted to be due to the “beasts that perish.”