I

ELIZABETH FRY

"Humanity is erroneously considered among the commonplace virtues. If it deserved such a place there would be less urgent need than, alas ! there is for its daily exercise among us. In its pale shape of kindly sentiment and bland pity it is common enough, and is always the portion of the cultivated. But humanity armed, aggressive, and alert, never slumbering and never wearying, moving like an ancient hero over the land to slay monsters, is the rarest of virtues."-JOHN MORLEY.

THE present century is one that is distinguished by the active part women have taken in careers that were previously closed to them. Some people would have us believe that if women write books, paint pictures, and understand science and ancient languages, they will cease to be true women, and cease to care for those womanly occupations and responsibilities that have always been entrusted to them. This is an essentially false and mistaken notion. True cultivation of the understanding makes a sensible woman value at their real high worth all her womanly duties, and so far from making her neglect them, causes her to appreciate them more highly than she would otherwise have done. It has always been held at least, in Christian countries-that the most womanly of women's duties are to be found in works of mercy to those who are desolate and miserable. To be thirsty, hungry, naked, sick, or in prison, is to have a

claim for compassion and comfort upon womanly pity and tenderness. And we shall see, if we look back over recent years, that never have these womanly tasks been more zealously fulfilled than they have been in the century which has produced Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, and Octavia Hill.

Mrs. Fry was born before the beginning of this century -in 1780-but the great public work with which her memory will always be connected was not begun till about 1813. She was born of the wealthy Quaker family, the Gurneys of Norwich. Her parents were not very strict members of the sect to which they belonged, for they allowed their children to learn music and dancing-pursuits that were then considered very worldly even by many who did not belong to the Society of Friends. The gentle poet, William Cowper, speaks in one of his letters, written about the time of Elizabeth Fry's childhood, of love of music as a thing which tends "to weaken and destroy the spiritual discernment." Mr. and Mrs. Gurney, however, seem to have been very free from such prejudices, as well as from others which were much more universal, for their children not only learnt music and dancing, but also-girls as well as boys-Latin and mathematics.

Mrs. Gurney seems to have discerned that she had an especial treasure in her little Elizabeth. She is spoken of in her mother's journal as "my dove-like Betsy." The authoress of the biography of Elizabeth Fry in the Eminent Women series, says: "Her faculty for independent investigation, her unswerving loyalty to duty, and her fearless perseverance in works of benevolence, were all foreshadowed" in her childhood. She had as a young girl what appears to us now a very extraordinary dread of enthusiasm in religion. One would think that if ever a woman needed enthusiasm for her life's work, Elizabeth Fry was that woman. But she confesses in her journal, written when she was seventeen years of age, "the greatest fear of religion" because it is generally allied with enthusiasm. Perhaps the truth is that she had so deep a

natural fount of enthusiasm in her heart that she dreaded the work that it would impel her to, when once it was allowed a free course. She had a very strong, innate repugnance to anything which drew public attention upon herself, and only the imperative sense of duty enabled her to overcome this feeling. In her heart she said what her Master had said before her: "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me."

When the sphere of public duty first revealed itself to her, she records in her diary what it cost her to enter upon it, and writes of it as "the humiliating path that has appeared to be opening before me." It must be noticed, however, that in her case, as always, the steep and difficult path of duty becomes easier to those who do not flinch from it. In a later passage of her diary, the public work which she had at first called a path of humiliation she speaks of as "this great mercy."

In the little book to which reference has just been made, we read that the first great change in Elizabeth Gurney's life was caused by the deep impression made upon her by the sermons of William Savery. It is rather strange to find the girl who had such a terror of enthusiasm, weeping passionately while William Savery was preaching. Her sister has described what took place. "Betsy astonished us all by the great feeling she showed. She wept most of the way home. . . . What she went through in her own mind I cannot say; but the results were most powerful and most evident" (p. 11, Elizabeth Fry. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman). Her emotion was not of the kind that passes away and leaves no trace behind. The whole course of her life and tenor of her thoughts were changed. She became a strict Quakeress, not, however, without some conflict with herself. There are

pleasant little touches of human nature in the facts that she found it a trial to say "thee" and "thou," and to give up her scarlet riding habit. Soon after this, at the age of twenty, she became the wife of Mr. Joseph Fry, and removed to London, where she lived in St. Mildred's Court,

in the City. The family into which she married were Quakers, like her own, but of a much more severe and strict kind. Her marriage was, however, in every respect a fortunate one. Her husband sympathised deeply with her in all her efforts for the good of others, and encouraged her in her public work, although many in the Society of Friends did not scruple to protest that a married woman has no duties except to her husband and children. Her journal shows how anxiously she guarded herself against any temptation to neglect her home duties. She was a

tender and devoted mother to her twelve children, and it was through her knowledge of the strength of a mother's love that she was able to reach the hearts of many of the poor prisoners whom she afterwards helped out of the wretchedness into which they had fallen.

Her study of the problem, how to help the poor, began in this way. A beggar-woman with a child in her arms stopped her in the street. Mrs. Fry, seeing that the child had whooping-cough and was dangerously ill, offered to go with the woman to her home in order more effectually to assist her. To Mrs. Fry's surprise, the woman immediately tried to make off; it was evident what she wanted was a gift of money, not any help to the suffering child. Mrs. Fry followed her, and found that her rooms were filled with a crowd of farmed-out children in every stage of sickness and misery; the more pitiable the appearance of one of these poor mites, the more useful an implement was it in the beggar's stock-in-trade. From this time onwards the condition of women and children in the lowest and most degraded of the criminal classes became the study of Mrs. Fry's life. She had the gift of speech on any subject which deeply moved her. From about 1809 she began to speak at the Friends' meeting-house. This power of speaking, as well as working, enabled her to draw about her an active band of co-workers. When she first began visiting the female prisoners in Newgate it is probable that she could not have supported all that she had to go through if it had not been for the sympathy and companionship of Anna

Buxton and other Quaker ladies whom she had roused. through her power of speech, just as she had herself been roused when a girl by the preaching of William Savery.

The condition of the women and children in Newgate Prison, when Mrs. Fry first began visiting them in 1813, was more horrible than anything that can be easily imagined. Three hundred poor wretches were herded together in two wards and two cells, with no furniture, no bedding of any kind, and no arrangements for decency or privacy. Cursing and swearing, foul language, and personal filthiness, made the dens in which the women were confined equally offensive to ear, eye, nose, and sense of modesty. The punishment of death at that time existed for 300 different offences, and though there were many mitigations of the sentence in the case of those who had only committed minor breaches of the law, yet the fact that nearly all had by law incurred the penalty of death, gave an apparent justification for herding the prisoners indiscriminately together. It thus happened that many a poor girl who had committed a comparatively trivial offence, became absolutely ruined in body and mind through her contact in prison with the vilest and most degraded of women. No attempt whatever was made to reform or discipline the prisoners, or to teach them any trade whereby, on leaving the gaol, they might earn an honest livelihood. Add to this that there were no female warders nor female officers of any kind in the prison, and that the male warders were frequently men of depraved life, and it is not difficult to see that no element of degradation was wanting to make the female wards of Newgate what they were often called-a hell on earth.

When Elizabeth Fry and Anna Buxton first visited this Inferno, there was so little pretence at any kind of control over the prisoners, that the Governor of Newgate advised the ladies to leave their watches behind them at home. Mrs. Fry, with a wise instinct, felt that the best way of influencing the poor, wild, rough women was to show her care for their children. Many of the prisoners had their