“Very well, go on. If you are in any difficulty, ask me, and I’ll do what I can to make a soldier—I mean a tailor of you.”
The convicts in the gaol where Peace was confined underwent a mild course of treatment. The treadwheel had been entirely removed.
It was first established in 1826, and certainly effected some little improvement on the previous system as a means of deterring from future offence, but when views on prison discipline became more enlightened, and the reformation of a prisoner became an object of greater solicitude than his punishment, it was found that the treadwheel was useless, and worse than useless. When the body was undergoing compulsory and painful exertion the mind was irritated and harassed by the ever-present consciousness of punishment.
The labour least liked by prisoners is the treadwheel. Its use is to raise sufficient water for the use of the establishment to an immense tank fixed in the roof.
Hand-pumping was at first tried with such questionable success that the labourers were suspected of “shirking,” and to prove the charge against them a jury of free workers were called in and set to the task, but, having that blessed privilege, after a trial they dropped the pump handles, and flatly declined “to have any more of it.”
The treadmill answers better, but it is fearfully hard work for the treaders. The “wheel” itself, as at present used in some of our prisons, extends the whole length of the shed by the wall and revolves on an axle.
Attached to the wheel or rather drum are projecting pieces of board six inches in width and about nine inches apart.
Overhead is a short bar for the operator to grasp with his hands, and when the wheel is started he has no foothold and no rest until his period of treading is at an end.
For full twenty minutes he must constantly first raise his right foot and then his left as though he was walking upstairs, and this at a rate of about sixty times for a minute.
Fancy having to ascend one thousand two hundred stairs in twenty minutes—to ascend to the monument three times over in that short time, and then to be released that you may sit in a box like a church pew in the same shed and pick oakum for a further term of twenty minutes by way of a rest, and then three times to the top of the monument again?