and one shilling a-week in summer, for coals. No memorandum of it in the jail: perhaps this may in time be lost, as the jailer said two others were—namely, one of Bishop Crewe, and another of Bishop Wood, from which prisoners had received no benefit for some years past. But now the bishop has humanely filed bills in Chancery, and recovered these legacies, by which several debtors have been discharged. Half-a-crown a-week is paid to a woman for supplying the debtors with water in the two rooms on the side of the gateway. The act for preserving the health of prisoners is not hung up. Jail delivery once a-year. At several of my visits there were boys between thirteen and fifteen years of age confined with the most profligate and abandoned. There was a vacant piece of ground adjacent, of little use but for the jailor's occasional lumber. It extends to the river, and measures about 22 yards by 16. I once and again advised the enclosing this for a court, as it might be done with little expense; and it appears that formerly here was a doorway into the prison. But when I was there afterwards in January 1776, I had the mortification to hear that the surgeon, who was uncle to the jailer, had obtained from the bishop, in October preceding, a lease of it for twenty-one years, at the rent of one shilling per annum. He had built a little stable on it.'
Having completed his survey of the English jails, Mr. Howard turned his attention next to those of Wales; and by the end of the autumn of 1774, he appears to have visited the principal jails in that principality. During these last months the field of his inquiries had been extended, so as to embrace a new department. 'Seeing,' he says 'in two or three of the jails some poor creatures whose aspect was singularly deplorable, and asking the cause of it, the answer was, 'They were lately brought from the bridewells.' This started a fresh subject of inquiry. I resolved to inspect the bridewells; and for that purpose traveled again into the counties where I had been; and indeed into all the rest, examining houses of correction, city and town jails. I beheld in many of them, as well as in the county jails, a complication of distress.'
Mr. Howard's philanthropic labors for now nearly a twelve-month had of course made him an object of public attention, and it became obviously desirable to have such a man in parliament. Accordingly, at the election of 1774, he was requested by a number of the electors of Bedford to allow himself to be put in nomination for that town, in the independent interest, along with his friend Mr. Whitbread. Mr. Howard consented; but when the polling had taken place, the numbers stood thus—Sir William Wake, 527 votes; Mr. Sparrow, 517; Mr. Whitbread, 429; and Mr. Howard, 402. A protest was taken by the supporters of Mr. Whitbread and Mr. Howard, most of whom were dissenters, against the election of the two former gentlemen, on the ground that the returning officers had acted unfairly in rejecting many legally good votes for Messrs. Whitbread and Howard, receiving many legally bad ones for the other two candidates. Petitions impeaching the return were also presented to the House of Commons by Mr. Whitbread and Mr. Howard.
Nothing, however, could divert our philanthropist from his own peculiar walk of charity, and the interval between the election and the hearing of the petitions against its validity was diligently employed by him in a tour through Scotland and Ireland, for the purpose of inspecting the prisons there, and comparing them with those of England and Wales. With the Scotch
