The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

1851] MR. FREDERIC HILL. I/I
obtain the appointment of my brother Frederic, but I
forbore at the time to mention his name, as the Post-
master-General was in haste to reach the House of
Lords.
To justify my selection I need only recount a few
facts. My brother had been for sixteen years
one of
the Inspectors of Prisons ; for twelve years in Scotland,
and the remaining time in. England. He was
one of the first appointed under the Act of 1835, by
which the office was created ; and Lord John Russell,
then Secretary of State for the Home Department,
when assigning to the inspectors their districts, paid
him the compliment of saying that he had given him
Scotland because he knew that in that part of the
kingdom there was most need of improvement.
On examination, my brother found that, with the
almost sole exception of the Glasgow Bridewell, which
was under the governorship of an admirable prison
reformer, Mr. Brebner, the Scottish prisons were as
bad as Lord John Russell had stated, and that indeed
the great majority, instead of being places of reform,
were the abodes of idleness and disorder, and not
unfrequently of drunkenness and riot ; in a word, of
general demoralization. Although invested with no
other power than that of inspection, and of making
Reports to the Secretary of State, and, through him,
to Parliament and the country, my brother, in a short
time, effected a great change. He obtained the removal
of a large number of bad officers, the appointment
in their stead of persons qualified for their duties,
whom till his nomination there
including matrons (of
had been only two or three in the whole of
Scotland),
with a proper corps of female assistants, and without
waiting for the erection of new prisons, he succeeded,
in most instances, in inducing the local authorities at