Mr. Eden’s strength broke down under the prodigious effort to defeat the effect of separate confinement on the bodies and souls of his prisoners.  Dr. Gulson ordered him abroad.  Having now since the removal of Hawes given the separate and silent system a long and impartial trial, his last public act was to write at the foot of his report a solemn protest against it, as an impious and mad attempt to defy God’s will as written on the face of man’s nature—­to crush too those very instincts from which rise communities, cities, laws, prisons, churches, civilization—­and to wreck souls and bodies under pretense of curing souls, not by knowledge, wisdom, patience, Christian love, or any great moral effort, but by the easy and physical expedient of turning one key on each prisoner instead of on a score.

“These,” said Mr. Eden, “are the dreams of selfish, lazy, heartless dunces and reckless bigots, dwarf Robespierres, with self-deceiving hearts that dream philanthropy, fluent lips that cant philanthropy and hands swift to shed blood—­which is not blood to them—­because they are mere sensual brutes, so low in intelligence that, although men are murdered and die before their eyes, they cannot see it was murder, because there was no knocking on the head or cutting of throats.”

The reverend gentleman then formally washed his hands of the bloodshed and reason-shed of the separate system, and resigned his office, earnestly requesting at the same time that, as soon as the government should come round to his opinion, they would permit him to co-operate in any enlightened experiment where God should no longer be defied by a knot of worms as in ——­ Jail.

Then he went abroad, but though professedly hunting health he visited and inspected half the principal prisons in Europe.  After many months events justified his prediction.  The government started a large prison on common sense and humanity, and Mr. Lacy’s interest procured Mr. Eden the place of its chaplain.

This prison was what every prison in the English provinces will be in five years’ time—­a well-ordered community, an epitome of the world at large, for which a prison is to prepare men, not unfit them as frenzied dunces would do; it was also a self-sustaining community, like the world.  The prisoners ate prisoner-grown corn and meat, wore prisoner-made clothes and bedding, wire lighted by gas made in the prison, etc., etc., etc., etc.  The agricultural laborers had out-door work suited to their future destiny, and mechanical trades were zealously ransacked for the city rogues.  Anti-theft reigned triumphant.  No idleness, no wicked waste of sweat.