< Page:Elizabeth Fry (Pitman 1884).djvu
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ELIZABETH FRY.

be calculated on; and I may further say that, notwithstanding the high estimation and reverence in which I held the Holy Scriptures, before I went to the prisons, as believing them to be written by inspiration of God, and therefore calculated to produce the greatest good, I have seen, in reading the Scripture to those women, such a Power attending them, and such an effect on the minds of the most reprobate, as I could not have conceived. If anyone wants a confirmation of the truth of Christianity, let him go and read the Scriptures in prison to poor sinners; you there see how the Gospel is exactly adapted to the fallen condition of man. It has strongly confirmed my faith; and I feel it to be the bounden duty of the Government and the country that these truths shall be administered in the manner most likely to conduce to the real reformation of the prisoner. You then go to the root of the matter, for though severe punishment may in a measure deter them and others from crime, it does not amend the character and change the heart; but if you have altered the principles of the individual, they are not only deterred from crime because of the fear of punishment, but they go out, and set a bright example to others.

Both the silent and solitary systems were condemned by her as being particularly liable to abuse. She considered the silent system cruel, and especially adapted to harden the heart of a criminal even to moral petrifaction. But the strongest protest was made against solitary confinement. Upon every available opportunity she spoke against it to those who were in power. Unless the offence was of a very aggravated nature, she doubted the right of any man to place a fellow-creature in such misery. Some intercourse with his fellow-creatures seemed imperatively necessary if the prisoner's life and reason were to be preserved to him, and his mind to be kept from feeding upon the dark past. To dark cells she had an unconquerable aversion. Sometimes she would picture the possibility of the return of days of persecution, and urge one consideration founded upon the self-interest of the authorities themselves. "They may be building,

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