vailed until comparatively recent times. Mrs Fry, the prison reformer, thirty years after the establishment of Phillip's penal settlement, described the women's ward in Newgate as such a scene of 'begging, swearing, gaming, fighting, singing, dancing, dressing up in men's clothes, and such an awful place as only to be described as hell above ground, and too dreadful for us to take young persons with us on our visits.'
Years after Phillip was in his grave, Buxton gave an account of the prison system in London. He said that after the commitment of a prisoner was made out, he was handcuffed to a file of perhaps a dozen wretched persons in a similar situation, and marched through the streets, sometimes a considerable distance, followed by a crowd of impudent and insulting gazers, exposed to the stare of every passenger; the moment he entered prison, irons were hammered on to him; then he was cast into the midst of a compound of all that was disgusting and depraved. At night he was locked up in a narrow cell, with perhaps half a dozen of the worst thieves in London, or as many vagrants, whose rags were alive, and in actual motion with filth. He might find himself in bed, and in bodily contact, between a robber and a murderer; or between a man with a foul disease on one side, and one with an infectious disorder on the other. He might spend his days deprived of free air and wholesome exercise. He might be prohibited from following the handicraft
