, and that objection to the
labour of the diseased classes is only protection in another form. It is an
attempt to raise the natural price of a commodity by saying that such and such
persons, who are able and willing to produce it, shall not do so, whereby every
one has to pay more for it.
    Besides, so long as a man has not been actually killed he is our
fellow-creature, though perhaps a very unpleasant one. It is in a great degree
the doing of others that he is what he is, or in other words, the society which
now condemns him is partly answerable concerning him. They say that there is no
fear of any increase of disease under these circumstances; for the loss of
liberty, the surveillance, the considerable and compulsory deduction from the
prisoner's earnings, the very sparing use of stimulants (of which they would
allow but little to any, and none to those who did not earn them), the enforced
celibacy, and above all, the loss of reputation among friends, are in their
opinion as ample safeguards to society against a general neglect of health as
those now resorted to. A man, therefore (so they say), should carry his
profession or trade into prison with him if possible; if not, he must earn his
living by the nearest thing to it that he can; but if he be a gentleman born and
bred to no profession, he must pick oakum, or write art criticisms for a
newspaper.
    These people say further, that the greater part of the illness which exists
in their country is brought about by the insane manner in which it is treated.
    They believe that illness is in many cases just as curable as the moral
diseases which they see daily cured around them, but that a great reform is
impossible till men learn to take a juster view of what physical obliquity
proceeds from. Men will hide their illnesses as long as they are scouted on its
becoming known that they are ill; it is the scouting, not the physic, which
produces the concealment; and if a man felt that the news of his being in
ill-health would be received by his neighbours as a deplorable fact, but one as
much the result of necessary antecedent causes as though he had broken into a
jeweller's shop and stolen a valuable diamond necklace - as a fact which might
just as easily have happened to themselves, only that they had the luck to be
better born or reared; and if they also felt that they would not be made more
uncomfortable in the prison than the protection of society