Generally he held the good effect of separate confinement to be merely negative; he laughed to scorn the chimera that solitude is an active agent, capable of converting a rogue.  Shut a rogue from rogues and let honest men in upon him—­the honest men get a good chance to convert him, but if they do succeed it was not solitude that converted him but healing contact.  The moments that most good comes to him are the moments his solitude is broken.

He used to say solitude will cow a rogue and suspend his overt acts of theft by force, and so make him to a non-reflector seem no longer a thief; but the notion of the cell effecting permanent cures might honestly be worded thus:  “I am a lazy self-deceiver, and want to do by machinery and without personal fatigue what St. Paul could only do by working with all his heart, with all his time, with all his wit, with all his soul, with all his strength and with all himself.”  Or thus:  “Confine the leopards in separate cages, Jock; the cages will take their spots out while ye’re sleeping.”

Generally this was Mr. Eden’s theory of the cell—­a check to further contamination, but no more.  He even saw in the cell much positive ill which he set himself to qualify.

“Separate confinement breeds monstrous egotism,” said he, “and egotism hardens the heart.  You can’t make any man good if you never let him say a kind word or do an unselfish action to a fellow-creature.  Man is an acting animal.  His real moral character all lies in his actions, and none of it in his dreams or cogitations.  Moral stagnation or cessation of all bad acts and of all good acts is a state on the borders of every vice and a million miles from virtue.”

His reverence attacked the petrifaction and egotism of the separate cell as far as the shallow system of this prison let him.  First, he encouraged prisoners to write their lives for the use of the prison; these were weeded, if necessary (the editor was strong-minded and did not weed out the re-poppies); printed and circulated in the jail.  The writer’s number was printed at the foot if he pleased, but never his name.  Biography begot a world of sympathy in the prison.  Second, he talked to one prisoner acquainted with another prisoner’s character, talked about No. 80 to No. 60, and would sometimes say:  “Now could you give No. 60 any good advice on this point?”

Then if 80’s advice was good he would carry it to 60, and 60 would think all the more of it that it came from one of his fellows.

Then in matters of art he would carry the difficulties of a beginner or a bungler to a proficient, and the latter would help the former.  The pleasure of being kind on one side, a touch of gratitude on the other, seeds of interest and sympathy in both.  Then such as had produced pretty things were encouraged to lend them to other cells to adorn them and stimulate the occupants.

For instance, No. 140, who gilded the bull, was reminded that No. 120, who had cast him, had never had the pleasure of setting him on her table in her gloomy cell and so raising its look from dungeon to workshop.  Then No. 140 said, “Poor No. 120! that is not fair; she shall have him half the day or more if you like, sir.”