JOHN HOWARD
SIR,—A hundred and fifty years ago, on January 20th, 1790, John Howard died in Russia on active-service for humanity. He was 64 years old and had gone to the Crimea because the Russo-Turkish War offered an opportunity of studying in military hospitals the methods of -combating plague and camp fever, which he believed to be allied to gaol fever. He caught the fatal illness himself and was buried near the village of Stepanovka, Cherson. He was given an "almost royal funeral "; the peasants have preserved his memory in legend and folk-song, and on his grave are the words, in Russian and Latin, "John Howard : Whosoever thou art thou art stand- ing at the tomb of thy friend."
Howard made his first contact with the prison system when
he became High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1772. He en- nobled that office as no other holder has done by taking seriously its responsibility for the county's prisoners, and his first visit of inspection of Bedford Gaol embarked him at the age of 46 on his life work. He visited every single prison and Bridewell in England and Wales twice or three times before publishing his book, The State of the Prisons. He observed pen nratingly and minutely, weighed the prison rations, measured the rooms, recorded methodically and accu- rately and gave his countrymen a complete and damning pic- ture of the injustice, corruption, inefficiency and misery of the filthy promiscuous eighteenth-century English gaol. He gal- vanised officials and legislators to action by the presentation of accurate information. He gave them new ideas and new standards for prison treatment by visiting and studying the gaols of other countries—France, Flanders, Holland, Ger- many, Denmark, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Turkey, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Nor did the case of prisoners of war escape him, for he visited French and American prisoners at Winchester, Plymouth, Gosport and Pembroke.
Howard himself said he was only "the plodder, collecting materials for men of genius to make use of." By that same token he was the pioneer of all penal reform, and, indeed, of all modem social reform, in so far as it is based on a careful, honest collection, publication and recognition of facts. But it was a faith in God and man which drove Howard to his task. In his own words, "We are required to imitate our Gracious Heavenly Parent, who is kind to the unthankful and the evil. . . . And as to criminality, it is possible that a man who has often shuddered at hearing the account of a murder may, on a sudden temptation, commit that very crime. Let him that thinks he standeth take heed lest he fall, and com- miserate those that are fallen."
Howard died just before Europe was plunged into a quarter of a century of war and reaction. The reforms which he had outlined and Parliament had ordained were shelved, but it was Howard who had taught a later generation how to carry on his work.—I am, Sir, yours, &c., 89 Attimore Road, Welwyn Garden City, Herts.
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