Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: John Howard as statist / by William A. Guy. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![1873.] receive with gratitude and respect the recorded labours of those who leave their facts in the rough, as materials for others to make use of. What wo require of them is that their facts should not be so few as to be exceptional; that they should be either all the facts relating to the subject of inquiry, or a large sample of them. We want not a handful, but a whole sheaf of wheat. If a man maybe a statist, and yet not bristle all over with figures and tables, then most assuredly was Howard a statist. For no man ever yet set down facts with more minute and scrupulous accuracy ; no man ever yet cast them into a mould which gave greater scope for summaries and analyses. Take as instances these two aggregate facts. I thought it a point of interest to know in how many of the prisons visited by Howard, in the few years following his appoint- ment as sheriff, the gaol fever prevailed; and I found, without an undue expenditure of labour, that of 105 prisons he witnessed the disease in 6, and heard of it in 21. So that, putting the two figures together, it was reasonable to infer that the fever haunted at least one-fourth of our prisons. Again, I deemed it interesting to ascertain in how many—in what proportion—of the prisons of England the provisions of the Acts of Parliament passed in 1774 had been carried into effect; and Howard’s clear statements of what he saw in his journeys, made in 1776 and 1779, enabled me without difficulty to state the cases of strict obedience to the Acts when compared with those in which they had been but imperfectly carried into effect, as 15 to 130. But Howard did not always leave his facts in the rough to speak for themselves. He not only made brief and judicious comments upon them, but he resorted to the statistical method of tabulation and tabular analysis where he thought that any good purpose was to be answered. Thus at p. 22 of the second edition of his “State of “ Prisons,” he tells us that, in the spring of 1776, he summed up carefully the total number of prisoners in the sundry prisons, so as to present a list of 4,084; and this list has its distinct headings and divisions, with needful explanations attached. To this table, too, he attaches an estimate, founded on his own facts, of the number of dependents (namely, wives and children) that might be assigned to each man in prison. By adding the number of dependents to the number of prisoners, he arrives at the number of persons distressed, as the result of imprisonment. It is 12,252. And he seems pleased to substitute this census for the guesses of others, though it weakens the force of his appeal. The number of prisoners and their dependents, he says, had been “ greatly magnified by conjectural computations.” In another table, Howard so groups his facts as to distinguish years of peace from years of war, and to show that crimes were in excess when the nation was at peace. b 3](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22450452_0005.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
