my antidote.”  So saying he proceeded to visit some of those cells into which he had introduced rational labor (anti-theft he called it).  Here he found cheerful looks as well as busy hands.  Here industry was relished with a gusto inconceivable to those who have never stagnated body and soul in enforced solitude and silence.  Here for the time at least were honest converts to anti-theft.  He had seen them dull and stupid, brutalized, drifting like inanimate bodies on the heavy waters of the Dead Sea.  He had drawn them ashore and put life into them.  He had taught their glazed eyes to sparkle with the stimulus of rational and interesting work, and those same eyes rewarded him by beaming on him with pleasure and gratitude whenever he came.  This soothed and cheered his weary spirit vexed by the wickedness and stupidity that surrounded him and obstructed the good work.

His female artisans gave him a keen pleasure, for here he benefited a sex as well as a prisoner.  He had long been saying that women are as capable as men of a multitude of handicrafts, from which they are excluded by man’s jealousy and grandmamma’s imbecility.  And this wise man hoped to raise a few Englishwomen to the industrial level of Frenchwomen and Englishmen; not by writing and prattling that the sex are at present men’s equals in intelligence and energy, which is a stupid falsehood calculated to keep them forever our inferiors by persuading them they need climb no higher than they have climbed.

His line was very different.  “At present you are infinitely man’s inferior in various energy,” said he.  “Dependents are inferiors throughout the world.”

If they were not so at first starting such a relation would make them so in two months.

“Try and be more than mere dependents on men,” was his axiom.  “Don’t talk that you are his equal, and then open that eloquent mouth to be fed by his hand—­do something!  It is by doing fifty useful and therefore lucrative things to your one that man becomes your creditor, and a creditor will be a superior to the world’s end.  Out of these fifty things you might have done twenty as well as he can do them, and ten much better; and those thirty, added to the domestic duties in which you do so much more than your share, would go far to balance the account and equalize the sexes.”

Thus he would sometimes talk to the more intelligent of his hussies; but he did a great deal more than talk.  He supplied from himself that deficiency of inventive power and enterprise which is woman’s weak point; and he tilled those wide powers of masterly execution which they possess unknown to grandpapa Cant and grandmamma Precedent.  As this clear head had foreseen, his women came out artisans.  The eye that could thread a needle proved accurate enough for anything.  Their supple, taper fingers soon learned to pick up type and place it quite as quick as even the stiff digits of the male, all one size from knuckle to nail.  The same with watch-making and other trades reputed masculine; they beat the men’s heads off at learning many kinds of fingerwork new to both; their singular patience stood them in good stead here; they undermined difficulties that the males tried to jump over and fell prostrate.