Page:Elizabeth Fry (Pitman 1884).djvu/124

116 which others could work. Within about seventy octavo pages, she discourses practically and plainly on the formation of Ladies’ Committees for visiting prisons, on the right method of proceeding in a prison after the formation of such a committee, on female officers in prisons, on separate prisons for females, on inspection and classification, on instruction and employment, on medical attendance, diet, and clothing, and on benevolent efforts for prisoners who have served their sentences. It is easy to recognise in these pages the Quakeress, the woman, and the Christian. She recommends to the attention of ladies, as departments for doing good, not only prisons, but lunatic asylums, hospitals, and workhouses. At the same time she strongly recommends that only orderly and experienced visitors should endeavour to penetrate into the abodes of vice and wickedness, which the prisons of England at that day mostly were. Among other judicious counsels for the conduct of these visitors occur the following, which read as coming from her own experience. That this was the case we may feel assured; Mrs. Fry was too wise and too womanly not to warn others from the pit-falls over which she had stumbled, or to permit anyone to fall into her early mistakes:—

“Much depends on the spirit in which the worker enters upon her work. It must be the spirit not of judgment but of mercy. She must not say in her heart, ‘I am holier than thou’; but must rather keep in perpetual remembrance that ‘all have sinned,’ and that, therefore, great pity is due from us even to the greatest transgressors among our fellow-creatures, and that in meekness and love we ought to labour for their restoration. The good principle in the hearts of many