Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/112

 men and women of very different religious persuasions came together and worked in common, without bitterness, under her gracious influence.

Her good works were so many and so various that it is impossible to record them all; but the great work of her life, and that by which she is best known, she accomplished for the women prisoners of Newgate. She had heard in her own house, from people who had visited them, of the terrible conditions in which the women prisoners were kept, and she made up her mind then and there to go to the prison and to see if these things were true. She went, and found things worse than she had conceived in her worst imaginings. The stimulus given to the work of prison reform by the sainted John Howard had been exhausted, and the condition of British gaols at the time of Mrs Fry's visit to Newgate was everywhere a scandal and a disgrace to the community.

In Newgate prison Mrs Fry discovered the women prisoners crowded into two narrow wards and two small cells, the innocent and the guilty alike, those who had been tried and condemned, and those awaiting judgment—women of all ages and of every degree of depravity, and tender, innocent children and babes amongst them all. The following quotation tells the story:—'The prisoners were destitute of sufficient clothing, for there