It seemed almost hopeless to deal with ferocious and abandoned women.  One of them was observed, desperate with rage, tearing the caps from the heads of the other women, and yelling like a savage beast.  By so much nearer as woman is to the angels, must be measured her descent into ruin when she is degraded.  She falls deeper than a man; her degradation is more complete, her nature more demoralized.  Whether Mrs. Fry felt unequal just then to the task, or whether family affliction pressed too sorely upon her, we do not know; her journal affords no solution of the problem, but certain it is that some three years passed by before any very active steps were taken by her to ameliorate to any decided extent the misery of the prisoners.

But the matter seethed in her mind; as she mused upon it, the fire burned, and the spirit which had to burst its conventional trammels and “take up the cross” in regard to dress and speech, looked out for other crosses to carry.  Doing good became a passion; want, misery, sin and sorrow furnished claims upon her which she would neither ignore nor deny.

John Howard had grappled with the hydra before her, and finally succumbed to his exertions.  As the period of his labors lay principally between the years 1774 and 1790, when the evils against which Mrs. Fry had to contend were intensified and a hundred times blacker, it cannot do harm to recall the condition of prisons in England during the last quarter of the eighteenth century; that is, during the girlhood of Elizabeth Fry.  Possibly some echoes of the marvellous exertions of Howard in prison reform had reached her Earlham home, and produced, though unconsciously, an interest in the subject which was destined to bear fruit at a later period.  At any rate, the fact cannot be gainsaid that she followed in his steps, visiting the Continent in the prosecution of her self-imposed task, and examining into the most loathsome recesses of prisons, lunatic asylums, and hospitals.

The penal systems of England had been on their trial; had broken down, and been found utterly wanting.  Modern legislation and philanthropy have laid it down that reform is the proper end of all punishment; hence the “silent system,” the “separate system,” and various employments have been adopted.  Hence, too, arose the framing of a system of education and instruction under the jail roof, so that on the discharge of prisoners they might be fitted to earn their own maintenance in that world which formerly they had cursed with their evil deeds.  But it was not so in the era of John Howard, nor of Elizabeth Fry.  Then, justice made short work with criminals and debtors.  The former it hanged in droves, and left the latter to literally “rot” in prison.  Two systems of transportation have been tried:  the one previous to Howard’s day succeeded in pouring into the American plantations the crime and vice of England; whilst the other, which succeeded him, did the same for Australia.  After the breach between the American colonies and the mother-country, the system of transportation to the Transatlantic plantations ceased; it was in the succeeding years that the foul holes called prisons, killed their thousands, and “jail-fever” its tens of thousands.