for the police, owing to the pressure of social engagements, another day was fixed, politics permitting.  The entente cordiale extended even in some instances to the jailers and the bench, and, as in those early days of the Quaker persecution of which Milton’s friend, Ellwood, has left record, prisoners sometimes left their cells for a night to attend to imperative affairs, or good-naturedly shortened or canceled their sentences at the pressing solicitation of perturbed magistrates.  Prison was purified by all these gentle presences, and women criminals profited by the removal of the abuses they challenged.  Holloway became a home from home, in which beaming wardresses welcomed old offenders, and to which husbands conducted erring wives in taxicabs, much as Ellwood and his brethren marched of themselves from Newgate to Bridewell, explaining to the astonished citizens of London that their word was their keeper.  A suffragette’s word stood higher than consols, and the war-game was played cards on table.  True, there were brutal interludes when Home Secretaries lost their heads, or hysterical magistrates their sense of justice, or when the chivalrous constabulary of Westminster was replaced by Whitechapel police, dense to the courtesies of the situation; but even these tragedies were transfused by its humors, by the subtle duel of woman’s wit and man’s lumbering legalism.  The hunger-strike itself, with all its grim horrors and heroisms, was like the plot of a Gilbertian opera.  It placed the Government on the horns of an Irish bull.  Either the law must kill or torture prisoners condemned for mild offenses, or it must permit them to dictate their own terms of durance.  The criminal code, whose dignity generations of male rebels could not impair, the whole array of warders, lawyers, judges, juries, and policemen, which all the scorn of a Tolstoy could not shrivel, shrank into a laughing-stock.  And the comedy of the situation was complicated and enhanced by the fact that the Home Office, so far from being an Inquisition, was more or less tenanted by sympathizers with Female Suffrage, and that a Home Secretary who secretly admired the quixotry of the hunger-strikers was forced to feed them forcibly.  He must either be denounced by the suffragettes as a Torquemada or by the public as an incapable.  Bayard himself could not have coped with the position.  There was no place like the Home Office, and its administrators, like the Governors of the Gold Coast, had to be relieved at frequent intervals.  As for the police, their one aim in life became to avoid arresting suffragettes.