' The receipts of this box, when
there were any, were divided among the poor prisoners; and the
men on the poor side relieved each other in this degrading office.
Although this custom has been abolished, and the cage is now
boarded up, the miserable and destitute condition of these
unhappy persons remains the same. We no longer suffer them to
appeal at the prison gates to the charity and compassion of the
passersby; but we still leave unblotted the leaves of our statute
book, for the reverence and admiration of succeeding ages, the
just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall
be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to
die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction. Not a week
passes over our head, but, in every one of our prisons for debt,
some of these men must inevitably expire in the slow agonies of
want, if they were not relieved by their fellow-prisoners.
Turning these things in his mind, as he mounted the narrow
staircase at the foot of which Roker had left him, Mr. Pickwick
gradually worked himself to the boiling-over point; and so
excited was he with his reflections on this subject, that he had
burst into the room to which he had been directed, before he had
any distinct recollection, either of the place in which he was, or of
the object of his visit.
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