It is a point that neither can nor ought to be prevented. It is no more an offence than speaking.

I am your Lordships' most strenuous opponent, not, never will be, a member of" the opposition;" when I enter the House of Commons, I will take my seat on the "treasury side" and never oppose your Lordships, but in defence of good principles, better principles of government than those your Lordships support; and so, your Lordships' most strenuous opponent on principles of government, not personally, because you are in and I am out of office, though you are out of and I am in a Gaol at your suit. RICHARD CARLILE.

P. S. I have learnt that the name of the smuggler who was put into the dark cell for singing is Henry Hardy.

No. 1.-A PAPER DELIVERED TO ME, JULY 22, 1825, BY ONE OF THE MEN IN THE SMUGGLER'S YARD.

SIR,

I BEG to be excused for making so bold, as to trouble you; but you see in what manner we are used, and that we were locked up for nothing. If we make our complaint to the magistrates, they are all agreed; so behave how they please to us, we cannot get any redress, and if we should petition the Lords of the Treasury, we are afraid we shall be punished for so doing. But if you could instruct us how to proceed, to put our complaint in action so as it may be publicly known, and that they may be made ashamed of it, we shall feel ourselves for ever obliged to you. And if you can do any thing for us, we will write our complaint and give it to you. If you say yes, we will write out our complaint to morrow, and if no, say nothing about it.

N. B. All of it to be done private.

Yours, &c.

This paper had no signature but a mark like a figure 1. On reading it, I went back to the man and told him to write what he thought proper, but cautioned him strictly not to put down any thing that was not true. He was rather alarmed at my open manner of speaking to him and said :-" Sir, we don't want all in the yard to know it." I answered, "very well, I do nothing privately, you can do as you think proper." Some days after, or on the 26th, No. 2 was put into my hands.

No. 2.

First, we should like it to be made known to the Lords of the Treasury, what a difference is made in the Gaol between we who

are fined and they who are exchequered for smuggling. They are put into the debtor's yard for the same offence as we are put into this. Theirs is called a debt and ours a fine; but money will discharge either of them. Therefore, we cannot see why there should be so much difference made between a fine and a debt for one and the same crime. The difference must be certainly in the word, it cannot be any thing else, when our crimes are alike. If it was rightly looked into, we are of opinion, that we who are used the worst ought to be used the best, if any difference be made; because, we are taken without any resistance against the officers and brought to prison at their pleasure: whilst they who are exchequered stand trial and beat off the officers who attack them. After that, if they are known by the said officers, their case is thrown into the Court of Exchequer and then they are used as debtors, which is as follows:

DEBTOR'S COURT.

They are allowed to buy what they please to eat and drink, and are allowed to have their wives and friends into their yard seven hours in a day to converse with them. They are allowed to dance or sing, to amuse themselves with their friends, are not locked up winter or summer before ten o'clock at night, and are allowed to have fire and candle light.

set.

SMUGGLER'S YARD.

We are al

But the usage of this our yard is quite the reverse. lowed to buy any thing to eat, but not to drink, except small beer or water. We are not allowed to have candle light, winter or summer; but are locked up all the year through shortly after sun If our wives or friends come to see us, they are not allowed to come any further than the entrance of the Gaol, and there to stand, shut up in an iron cage. Then, we, prisoners, whom they want to see, are had down to see them, and we are locked up in another iron cage, at the distance of twelve or fourteen feet from them. Then there stands the Keeper, or one of the turnkeys, to hear what we have to say to each other, and we are not allowed to go there but once in a day; so, if we have two friends, they must come and see us together, or they cannot see us in the same day.

We are not allowed to have any kind of amusement in this yard. If we have a letter sent to us, it is very often broken open before it comes to the person to whom it is addressed. And all parcels are broken open before they are brought up into the yard to the persons to whom they belong. To make short of the matter, there is no difference made between us and the felons, or a man who has committed ever so bad a crime.

One evening, a man in this yard was singing a song a little loud; but not with contempt, nor thinking he should offend. The keeper heard him, came in a hasty passion and ordered his turnkeys to lock him up in a dungeon. The man said:" Sir, I hope you will forgive me; for I did not know that I should offend." But he would not. So the man was locked up immediately in a stinking dungeon, where he spent that evening and the whole night in a state of suffocation. The stink of the place, the warmness of the weather, and want of air, caused him to walk nearly, the whole night naked, with a handkerchief fanning his face to get air to live. About nine o'clock in the morning, the turnkey came to him, which was on the 20th of July, and he asked him to send up the keeper, which he did. As soon as he came, the prisoner asked to be liberated, or to be moved into another cell; for, where he was, he could scarcely live. His answer was: "no, he should not do any such thing, until he had sent for a magistrate," and shut the door and left him. The prisoner remained in this state from the 19th until the 21st in the morning.

The same evening, his brother prisoners refused to be locked up in their respective sleeping cells, unless the keeper would be pleased to liberate the prisoner, whom he had put in solitary confinement for nothing, but he would not; and after that, they were locked up as usual. Next morning, he kept eighteen of them locked up in their sleeping cells, upon bread and water, until a magistrate came in, which was nearly all the day, and then they were taken before the magistrates and obliged to own themselves in a fault, when they were not, to prevent further punishment. So this is our complaint, which can be witnessed by nearly thirty persons.

Sir, we cannot hear that they are used so in any prison in England except this, and if you please, you can mend the stating of

this.

Calculating, that, if they wrote a plaintive paper, they would not do it in a formal manner, I wrote the following questions, as a guide for them, which they did not get until I had read No. 2..

No. 3.

1st. Are any means for instruction or improvement in writing, arithmetic or reading offered to you by the authorities of the Gaol,. as required of them by a new act of parliament?

2nd. Are all means of recreative amusement, or of bathing, in hot or cold baths, denied to you?

3rd. Do you find any difficulty in obtaining necessaries from the town, and do you obtain them at fair prices?

4th. Have you any other fair ground of complaint, which you cannot get redressed?

Dorchester Gaol, July 26, 1825.

RICHARD CARLILE.

No. 4.

This brought the following answer.

1st. As to instruction offered to us, we have none whatever. 2nd. As to any kind of amusement, we are not allowed any, And as to bathing, we never asked them for it.

3rd. As to the articles, we give above the market price for many things. We give now ninepence halfpenny for a quartern loaf and we hear it is sold in the town for ninepence. And many other things which we cannot answer you until we have enquired.

The locking up of the man for singing was an outrage upon the rules of the Gaol, rendered tenfold more grievous by the state of the weather at the time. I happened to be a spectator of the circumstance of taking the man out of the yard, and I thought at the time, that the wrong person was about to be punished; but unluckily for prisoners, as for subjects outside, Gaolers and Turnkeys in a Gaol, like a King out, can do no wrong towards those under them. With the exception of this single act of singing, and the tone of that was any thing but offensive, nothing could exceed the good order of all the men in that yard at the moment. Every man in the yard felt the outrage, and it seems, that they shewed that they felt it, at their time of locking up. And though their momentary refusal to be locked up was a wrong means, it was clearly meant to express nothing more than a sense of injury.

Singing, I perceive, is forbidden by the rules; but no one can justly call it one of those serious offences for which the refractory cells are held in terrorem. If it must be called an offence, and I do not demur to it, as I am not qualified to offend on that ground, surely, the nearer it is placed in the scale to Zero, the nearer it will be to moral fitness. I heard the prisoners singing almost throughout the time that this singer was placed in a state of suffocation for it. A man, who has a throat for singing, breaks out like a bird. It is natural, and though by no means agreeable to me unless melodious, I cannot place it in my list of vices. I like to see men cheerful, though not brawling and noisy fools. I like to see them at recreative amusement, and think, that it ought to be allowed in this as in other gaols. In a Gaol, it is an essential to health; for, where both body and mind are cramped, it is almost impossible, that there can be health. The practice of terror, as a punishment, is now almost confined to that abominable old school which wars with all change and improvement. Better principles have developed that knowledge of right and wrong will moralize better than the tread-mill or the lash, and that bad habits cannot be eradicated by torture, can only be eradicated by the substitution of better to be obtained from increased knowledge.

Whether or not the Gaoler and Magistrates suspected that the

discharged turnkey, Thomas Bunn, had been instrumental in the correspondence between me and the smugglers, I know not; but the first effect that came to my knowledge was his discharge. Afterwards, I learnt, that the Lords of the Treasury had transmitted my communication to Mr. Peel and he to the Visiting Magistrates immediately on its receipt, The matter was kept a secret, though the Gaoler gave evidence for weeks that a storm was about to burst on the head of this Thomas Bunn and his wife, who, after twelve years services, and faithful services, were turned our of the Gaol, at a few hours notice, with five children and another near at hand. The Gaoler told them that "they might thank their friend Carlile for it;" whilst the ground assigned by the magistrates was that the husband had made a profit on the bread delivered to the prisoners, a circumstance which has uniformly been the case, and which was well known to the Gaoler; for he too, through the medium of this same turnkey, has sold bacon, milk, butter and potatoes to the prisoners. And after the exposure it was suffered to go on for two months. On hearing the particulars, I sent the magistrates the following report.

A REPORT TO THE WORSHIPFUL MAGISTRATES OF THE COUNTY OF DORSET IN SESSION ASSEMBLED, OCTOBER THE 19th, 1825, BY RICHARD CARLILE, A PRISONER IN THE COUNTY GAOL.

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR WORSHIPS,

WHEN the Visiting Magistrates visited me on the 14th inst, I truly stated, that I had no complaints for them; always remembering, that my complaints have uniformly been of the visiting and other Magistrates, to judge of which, they, of course, cannot presume to be a competent tribunal. Nor did I then hold an intention to make this report, of the main point of which I was then ignorant. But, having heard, that my name has been, by the Gaoler, mingled with and assigned as the cause of the discharge of Thomas Bunn and his wife from their situations in this Gaol, and having before had to sustain many false and painful imputations from this Gaoler, I have resolved to expose him, in this instance, and, in some other matters, to shew, that he is more in fault than I or Thomas Bunn and his wife.

I have heard, that the ostensible cause assigned for the dismissal of Thomas Bunn is, that he has made a halfpenny or something per loaf profit on the bread purchased for the prisoners.

If this be the true state of the case, am I to be blamed, as the cause of his dismissal, for putting the question of the kind to the