(iii) A Barbarous Prison System
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The magistrates and officials, moreover, who enforced the law were often as callous as the law itself.
Fielding's Justice Thrasher, in Amelia, and his Justice Frolic in Joseph Andrews are sketched from life.
'' Many of the justices,"
Smollett pronounced, "men of profligate lives, needy, mean, ignorant and rapacious,' who " often acted from the most scandalous principles of selfish avarice."1
.In rural and small-town areas most Justices of the Peace were squires, though about a fifth or sixth part were parsons; and the power they exercised approached that of " petty sultans."
The pillory, the stocks, the scold's bridle, the whipping post, the branding iron, transportation and atrocious jail were among the means whereby they demonstrated the virtues of the Happy Constitution in "the Land of the Free.'?
In urban centres the enormities of 'trading justices"? and pettifogging lawyers marked such as social pests.
Johnson, in his poem London, attacks "the fell attorney'? who "prowls for prey"; and certainly the ** justice-shops " of the trading justices, by exploiting the shortcomings of a then "highly litigious people," beguiled many to their undoing.?
Fielding represents these contemptible judges as interested always in the side of a case from which they could extort most personal gain.
Nor was this mercenary taint always confined to the lower officials of the law: during a considerable part of the century the higher judges expected, and got, large sums of money as New Year " presents' from the Bar practising under them, while the gratuities of the Lord
Chancellor, at this season, long ran into thousands of pounds.
(iii) A Barbarous Prison System As for the prison system which accompanied this administration of justice, its horrors, owing to the labours of Oglethorpe,
Wesley and Howard, are well known.
Oglethorpe's Parliamentary Committee (1728-29) found that the " gross cruelties "' perpetrated even upon debtors, amounted to little less than
" deliberate torture."* But for decades following these revelations, there was '"'no public conscience"? to support reform.
Not till Wesley began to awaken the soul of England and till Howard, Wesley's friend and apostle, gave his life to prison reform, was any progress registered ; and even then it was appallingly slow.
T. B. Smollett, History of England (1790 Ed.), III, pp. 330-1.
See Dr. George, op. cit., p. 5.
J. L. and B. Hammond, " Poverty, Crime, Philanthropy " (Fohnson's England, I, p. 324).
POLITICS,
PENAL CODE AND PRISONS I8I On February 3rd, 1753, Wesley wrote in his Journal:
'1 visited one in Marshalsea prison, a nursery of all manner of wickedness.
O shame to man, that there should be such a place, such a picture of hell, upon earth!
And shame to those who bear the name of Christ, that there should need any prison at all in Christendom !"' A few years later (1758-59) Dr. Johnson published in The Idler a poignant arraignment of the whole prison system, and of debtors' prisons in particular.
Of the '' multitudes *? pining in those " cells of misery " he contended that most were there not because of any wilful fraudulence on their part, but because of "the wantonness of pride, the malignity of revenge, or the acrimony of disappointed expectation " on the part of their oppressors ; while of prison conditions he said:
The lewd inflame the lewd, the audacious harden the audacious."!
In 1759 Wesley walked to Knowle, near Bristol, to see a company of French prisoners of the Seven Years
War.
His report is revealing:
'' About eleven hundred of them, we are informed, were confined in that little place, without anything to lie on but a little dirty straw, or anything to cover them but a few foul, thin rags, either by day or night, so that they died like rotten sheep.
I was much affected, and preached in the evening on (Exodus XXIII. 9.) ' Thou shalt not oppress a stranger ; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.'
Eighteen pounds were contributed immediately, which were made up to £24 the next day.
With this we bought linen and woollen cloth, which were made up into shirts, waistcoats, and breeches.
Some dozens of stockings were added ; all which were carefully distributed, where there was the greatest want.
Presently after, the Corporation of Bristol sent a large quantity of mattresses and blankets.
And it was not long before contributions were set on foot at London, and in various parts of the Kingdom2,...""?
On January 2nd, 1761, Wesley wrote a long, trenchant letter to the London Chronicle, commending the marvellous transformation which had taken place in Bristol's Newgate.
That prison, he observed, was now " clean and sweet oa: there was "'no fighting or brawling"; "contending parties" were heard "face to face'? before the keeper:
" no drunkenness " was suffered ; nor any whoredom, the women prisoners being "kept separate from the men."
Furthermore, industry was encouraged both by the free provision of tools and materials,
1 Jdler, Sept. 16th, 1758, and Jan. 6th, 1759.
2 John Wesley, Journal, Oct. 15th, 1759.
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and by the payment to prisoners of a '"' moderate profit" on all articles made; public service was provided every Sunday and a sermon was also preached every Thursday ; medical treatment was given gratis to the sick, and '"'a large Bible was chained on one side of the chapel, which any of the prisoners may read."
So remarkable was the transformation from the 'filth, the stench, the misery, and wickedness' of previous days, that Wesley declared the prison to be wearing "a new face' and called for the blessing of God and man upon its remarkable Keeper and his amazing achievement.
But how different was this Keeper's prison from those up and down the country ! In the concluding sentence of this letter, Wesley asked : '"' Meanwhile, will no one follow his example?"
In the opening sentence he had protested:
"' Of all the seats of woe on this side hell, few, I suppose, exceed or even equal
Newgate (London).'?4
When John Howard, in 1773, began his historic crusade, general prison conditions, though somewhat improved since
Oglethorpe's day, were still extremely nauseous.
Most jailers ~ received no pay.
Like trading justices they were jobbers.
Hence, being dependent for livelihood upon bribes, tips, fees, extortions and the like, their tactics were based on intrigue and cunning.
Profits on the open sale of vile intoxicants and on the covert permission of prostitution, together with weekly charges for "release from chains,'' were among their chief sources of revenue.
Many persons moreover were confined in jails for months, or even years, awaiting the Assizes ; and many were detained after being pronounced innocent, because they could not pay the accumulated jailer's-bill.
Notorious prisoners, too, like Jack Sheppard and Rev. Dr. Dodd, were still exhibited to the public, usually at a shilling-a-head.
Sheppard in this way brought in £200.?
On the revelations of Howard's amazing and selfless career we dare not here pause.
One or two quotations will suggest the problem he faced.
At Ely, the prison being unsafe, " the * Though Wesley does not here mention the fact, the Bristol Newgate was run by Mr. Dagge, an early convert of the Revival.
His work must have been both a challenge and an inspiration to John Howard.
See Dr. E. D. Bebb, Nonconformity and Social and Economic Life, 1660-1800 p. ae Praise of Dagge's reforms appears in the Annual Register (1761), p.
61.
In 1724, Sheppard, twenty-two years old, escaped four times from Newgate, forcing on his third evasion " six great doors.'
But before the end of the same year he was hanged at Tyburn, "' in the presence of 200,000 spectators."
Dodd, as a popular London clergyman and a King's Chaplain had violently attacked Wesley.
But before death it was to Wesley he turned for spiritual comfort.
His crime was forgery.
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jailer had endeavoured to secure the inmates by chaining them down on their backs upon the floor, placing an iron collar with spikes about their necks, and a heavy iron bar over their legs."' 1
Thetford jail was "a small dungeon down a ladder of ten steps, with a small window"; yet "in this pit, at the Summer Assizes .
. from sixteen to twenty persons were usually confined for several days and nights, without regard to age, sex or circumstances."
Of Knaresborough jail, in 1776, Howard says : -"' It is under a hall of difficult access ; the door about four feet from the ground.
Only one room about twelve feet square; earth floor; no fireplace; very offensive'; a common sewer from the town running through it uncovered
. an officer confined here took with him a dog to defend him from vermin; but the dog was soon destroyed, and the prisoner's face much disfigured by them.''?
Jail-fever too was one of the by-products of the filth and stench of most prisons of the time.
In May, 1750, " two judges, the Lord Mayor (of London), several of the jury and sixty persons who were present in the Session House during a trial," died of jail-fever, contracted from a batch of filthy prisoners who before entering the dock had been subjected to long and heinous confinement.* A study of the eighteenth century prison exhibits in the London
Museum, will reveal something of the gruesome bestiality from which our modern prison system has been redeemed.
The recent researches, too, of Dr. George, Professor Halévy and other scholars have proven conclusively that the earlier half of that century in England, particularly from 1720 to 1750, was a period of social retrogression, perhaps without parallel in modern times.
Yet in 1752 David Hume, the materialistic philosopher and "intellectual monarch" of the time, was blandly asserting '"' that the privileges of the people have, during the past two centuries, been continually upon the increase."* Had Hume descended from the Olympian heights of his own frigid, assuming superiority and come to know something of the life of the common people of England, he would have realised that "the privileges of the people,' far from increasing, had for some decades been declining : and had he the spiritual eyes to see, he would have realised also that the soulless scepticism of which he himself was chief propagator was a primary instrument of that retrogression.
Gray, the 1 See Sydney, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 318.
2 John Howard, State of Prisons in England and Wales (1777), P372.
3 Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 644.
4 David Hume, Political Discourses, p. 265.
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poet, said of Hume "that he has continued all his days an infant, but one that has unhappily been taught to read and write."!
Is not this criticism equally applicable to the combination of intellectual sophistication and spiritual atrophy which characterised the ruling cliques of most of the century ?
(iv) A Potgnant Paradox With all its social, economic and political perversions, however, English public life, particularly after 1750, was not so utterly retrograde as that of France.
Even in the eighth decade of the century that libertine autocrat, Louis XV, who had spent hundreds of millions of livres from the Public Treasury upon his vain, flattering and intriguing mistresses, could blatantly boast:
'"'In my person alone is the authority ; legislative power belongs to me alone ; public order emanates from me ;
I am its supreme guardian."?
In England, Parliament, for all its corruptions, was a real instrument of Government, expressing at least the opinions of a landed and privileged minority.
Moreover, as Lecky points out, English law at this time, for all its cruelty, knew nothing either of " arbitrary imprisonment'? or of the "barbarous punishment of the wheel" ; nor indeed of any other mode of designed, exquisite, diabolical torture.® Howard's investigations too, show that bad as were most
English prisons, many Continental lazarettos, with their studied and ghastly tortures, were worse.
Indeed while Louis XV was still boasting "that he was France," in England certain things truly majestic already were emerging amidst the surrounding chaos.
More than twenty-five years before the century's close, the national conscience of England was beginning to awaken to the enormity of the whole slave-traffic ; two years before the storming of the Bastille, inspired solely by religious and philanthropic motives, the famous Abolition Committee was formed: and were it not for the French Revolution's set-back to all social reform in England, the suppression of the slave-trade throughout the British Empire would have been an eighteenth century achievement.
Long before the conclusion of the century, too, '' South Sea Bubble finance " was a closed chapter in British history: a new sense of sobriety, morality * Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (first series), on Thomas Gray.
See J. B. Perkins, France under Lows XV (1897) lOpa cit. ly pe sose "J. Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe, (1780).
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and earnestness was everywhere appearing ; drunkenness no longer was fashionable ; the " trading justice " and his "' justiceshop " were now but vaguely remembered ; the harsh crassness of the prison system was greatly ameliorated ; "' patriotism " was assuming a more lofty significance ; and already British
Courts of Justice were beginning to win the admiration of the civilized world.
A new moral outlook and philanthropic spirit were, in fact, everywhere apparent ; a temperate, thinking, industrious and_religious Middle Class was springing rapidly into being; and an unmistakable demand for Parliamentary reform was already becoming vocal.
One of the most poignant paradoxes, moroever, of this highly paradoxical century was that, though mobs frequently were exploited by their "' betters " to sinister ends—not infrequently being incited to the perpetration of dastardly outrages—and though both the Wesleys and Whitefield were at times the objects of mob fury, yet, on the whole, considering the range of their travels, the singularity of their methods and the proportions of their programme, these Spiritual Awakeners were wondrously received by the national multitude.
True, John Wesley, with his customary plainness of speech, could on occasion refer to the "' beasts of the people " ; but this "' beastliness " was generally the effect of mobs being plied with alcohol or heated adroitly to " local patriotism "' by squires, magistrates, parsons, or other designing " gentlemen."
This mob violence moreover, when it occurred, was always local, not national : it was the exception, not the rule.
The central Government , never interfered with Wesley's life-long, national crusade : and, of the Common People, whom Wesley so dearly loved, and to whom he specially ministered, it may truly be said that, despite glaring exceptions, they received him and heard him gladly.
His intrepid courage, his transparent sincerity, his utter selflessness, his directness and dignity of appeal went, generally speaking, straight to the hearts of the dispossessed throng ; the sacred flame in his soul kindled the divine spark in theirs ; and they recognised him for what he was—the Friend of the People, the Mediator of Liberty, the Prophet of God.
Often on the hustings the eighteenth century mob dealt to swashbuckling politicians black eyes, cracked heads, and broken ribs.
Indeed so tempestuous was its fury, when fully unleashed, that Sir Walter Besant, in his close study of this period, pronounces the 1 See Major John Cartright, Take your Chotce (1776). This Democratic treatise is founded squarely on Bible and Christian principles,
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London Mob—" brutal beyond all power of words to describe, or imagination to understand ; so bestial that one is induced to think there has never been in any town or in any age a population which could compare with them.'?
Yet, in Wesley's case, all serious mob assaults in time collapsed; more than once mob leaders with clubs raised over his head, but looked in his face and retired in shame—some to find their soul, and later to become Class leaders in his Cause.
As Augustine Birrell puts it:
'"' The mob knew and appreciated the difference between a Bubb Dodington and a John Wesley."'?
During the fifty-two years of his open-air crusade, contesting three Kingdoms for Christ, Wesley experienced no really serious injuries at the hands of the mob: and one of the amazing features of the Mighty Revival he led was the life-sustained personal influence of this restrained, immaculate, erudite Oxford don, whose speech always was classical English, and whose bearing ever was that of the Christian gentleman, upon soldiers, sailors, publicans, miners, fishermen, smugglers and the roughest industrial workers.
Even as early as the " forties'? of the eighteenth century, by the mouth of the pit and the door of the workshop, vast throngs of horny-handed and face-begrimed toilers removed their hats and stood in wrapt, reverent attention as Wesley, who never stooped to conquer, spoke to their souls of the eternal verities of Earth and Heaven; of body, mind and spirit.
Hundreds of English town-commons and market places, moreover, were transfigured temporarily into Cathedrals as multitudes kneeled solemnly on grass or cobble-stones, turning wistfully their faces toward Heaven, or burying them thoughtfully in their hands, as Wesley, in prayer, besought the Father God, through Christ, to send pardon, power and peace to sin-stained and broken lives.
Wesley probably rode more miles over English roads than any other man who ever bestrode a beast : he rode in all manner of weather, by day and by night ; yet in an era when the chief thoroughfares of England were infested with highwaymen, never once was he robbed on the road.
Often also the open-air crowds to whom he was preaching dealt a peremptory quietus to drunken " gentlemen" and other disturbers, who tried to break up his services; and before his death, he was to witness many of no religious profession at all, coming voluntarily and gratuitously, after their working day to help '' the people called Methodists"? to build " Preaching
Houses."
London in the Eighteenth Century, (Preface, p. viii).
2 A. Birrell, K.C.. Miscellanies.
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In brief, despite the cruelty-and coarseness, the drunkenness and depravity of the age, the multitude could still recognise true nobility and respond to the touch of soul power; the British sense of sportsmanship, too, though often strangely perverted, was not wholly extinct: and to Wesley's spiritual eyes, there was high majesty latent even in the moral ruins of a prodigal and degraded, though inherently mighty, people.
But all this is to anticipate, while both the perspective of our subject and the facts of history compel us to pause yet a little longer on the bleaker aspects of the age: for never can the problems the Great Revival faced be understood or appraised unless first we see clearly, and in some further detail, the incredibly difficult backgrounds in which it had to work.
GBAP TER VItI
EXPIRING HOPES
I FounpD that deaths and discharges nearly made up the whole history of the lives of the parish infant poor .
. an English Church Warden, or ' Father of the Poor,' within the Bills of Mortality, under sanction of his Office, may suffer children to be starved to death, or poisoned with noxious air.
Custom authorises the practice, and he may go on in it from generation to generation .
. and yet pass with impunity."
Jonas Hanway, Earnest Appeal for Mercy to the Children of the Poor (1766). pp. 68, 72.
SHOULD the drinking of this poison (gin) be continued at its present height during the next twenty years, there will, by that time, be very few of the common people left to drink it."
Henry Fievpine, On the late Increase of Robbers (1751).
'"A MAD bull to be dressed up with fireworks and turned loose in the game place, a dog to be dressed up with fireworks over him ; a bear to be let loose at the same time, and a cat to be tied to the bull's tail; a mad bull dressed up with fireworks to be baited."
Strutt's Sports and Pastimes, p. 259.
GHAPTER.
VIII
EXPIRING HOPES
Lord Bryce, after analysing the problems of modern Democracy, relates the story of an Oriental monarch, of uncertain temper, who commanded his astrologer to ascertain from the stars the time appointed for his Royal death.
The astrologer cast his horoscope, but reported that it was impossible to discover the exact date set for the autocratic sovereign's demise.
All the stars clearly revealed to him was that His Majesty's death '' would follow immediately on his own.'
So, contends Bryce, it must be in the case of Democracy : if ever Hope dies, the death warrant of Democracy will immediately be signed.
But not only to Democracy is Hope essential.
It is vital to the faith, the co-operation, the vision without which civilisations and peoples perish.
Of the epoch in question however, Dr. H. W. V. Temperley, in the Cambridge Modern History, writes : '* The earlier half of the eighteenth century in England was an age of materialism, a period of dim ideals and expiring hopes: before the middle of the century its character was transformed ; there appeared a movement headed by a mighty leader, who brought forth water from the rocks to make a barren land live again."?
Now as to the historical accuracy of Dr. Temperley's verdict that England during the first half of the eighteenth century was "a barren land," blighted by '"' materialism," bereft of all save '' dim ideals," and threatened with the expiration of hope, there can be no serious doubt: that fact is backed four square by a volume of evidence too weighty, too inescapable to admit even of challenge.
But the conclusion that the "' character' of the century was " transformed " by 1750, is premature.
'"' Before the middle of the century" the process of transformation was vitally under way.
Not however at Wesley's death (1791), nor even at the end of the century, was that transformation fully achieved ; and not till far into the nineteenth century were some of the noblest fruits of the '' mighty leader's '" sowing completely matured.
1 See James Bryce, Modern Democracies (1921), Vol. II, p. 670.
2 Op. cit., Vol. VI, p. 76.