There can be no doubt about the horrors of the old prisons, but it was only men and women of especial insight who recognised that there was real evil in them. Literature and art did much to arouse the public conscience. There is a strong description of the Bridewell in "Roderick Random," where Smollett makes Miss Williams tell her life story. In this prison, she says, "I actually believed myself in hell tormented by fiends; indeed, there needs not a very extravagant imagination to form that idea; for of all the scenes on earth that of Bridewell approaches nearest the notion I had always entertained of the infernal regions. Here I saw nothing but rage, anguish and impiety; and heard nothing but groans, curses and blasphemy. In the midst of this hellish crew I was subjected to the tyranny of a barbarian who imposed upon me tasks that I could not possibly perform and then punished my incapacity with the utmost rigour and inhumanity. I was often whipped into a swoon and lashed out of it, during which miserable intervals I was robbed by my fellow-prisoners of everything about me even to my cap, shoes and stockings: I was not only destitute of necessaries but even of food, so that my wretchedness was extreme." No one need suppose that Smollett is guilty of exaggeration, for the well-known plate of Hogarth shows us the actual scene and the records of the place are numerous. There were, of course, just as many good and charitable men and women then as there are now, but the possibility that a Bridewell was a thing that the world had then no use for was entirely beyond the thought of the eighteenth century citizen. In the same way how few of us recognise that there is much room for reform in the penal system of to-day. It is natural that it should be so. We arrive in the world knowing nothing much about it, we are brought up to believe that everything that has been going on for the last few centuries has been for the best, and the tired old ones who are leaving us are never tired enough to leave off telling us that they have made every possible reform that it was safe and advisable to make. In the few years of hustling life and in the scanty hours that he can spare from earning his daily bread the average citizen has little time and opportunity to investigate the social system of which he is a unit, or to understand how or why the wheels of the world machine are grinding unevenly. When we read of the horrors of two or three hundred years ago, it should not be to cast a reproach against our fathers, but rather to learn who were the men and women who moved the world of that day to see things as they were. These glorious spirits have enabled us to enter upon our inheritance free from the worst degradations of the past and we may best render them thanks and praise by learning to follow their example.