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The women's division consisted of two wards and two cells, containing a superficial area of about one hundred and ninety yards. Into these apartments, at the time of Mrs. Fry's visit, above three hundred women were crammed, innocent and guilty, tried and untried, misdemeanants, and those who were soon to pay the penalty of their crimes upon the gallows.
The reader is aware of the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. The judge was empowered to inflict a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage, on the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of New Haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not infrequent.
They heard the loud bell of the convent gate, then the opening and shutting of several doors; and many a glance flashed up to the ceiling as the brain behind scurried the sins of the week together. It had been arranged that the six leading misdemeanants were to go first and receive much sound advice, before the old priest had begun to feel the fatigue of the confessional.
Thus curiously it came to pass that the one man who above several misdemeanants distinguished himself by bad conduct, amounting to cowardice, and who ran away to escape trial, kept the tokens of the single achievement of the day from him whose valor had won them. The Poder herself was set on fire, and destroyed.
As to the 'majority, the higher classes, the fact that men are often imprisoned for offences political and others which they are proud to suffer for, would always attenuate the ignominy attached to 'imprisonment. And were this the only penalty for all crimes, for first-class misdemeanants and for the most atrocious of criminals alike, the distinction would not be very finely drawn by the interested; at the most, the severest treatment as an alternative to capital punishment would always savour of extenuating circumstances.
Then the decree nisi and the King's proctor tries to show cause why and, he failing to quash it, nisi was made absolute. But as for that the two misdemeanants, wrapped up as they largely were in one another, could safely afford to ignore it as they very largely did till the matter was put in the hands of a solicitor who filed a petition for the party wronged in due course.
Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative to send abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising himself to the police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares from house to house like a moving bonfire. Only the police themselves go darkling, and grope in the night for misdemeanants.
It seemed as though needless energy was being spent counting and recounting our little group. "Wouldn't do anybody any good to try to get away from here," said one of the white girls. "Too many bloodhounds!" "Bloodhounds!" I asked in amazement, for after all these women were not criminals but merely misdemeanants. "Oh, yes.
Lucien was taken to the same part of the building, to a cell adjoining the rooms let to misdemeanants; for, by orders from the examining judge, the Governor treated him with some consideration. Persons who have never had anything to do with the action of the law usually have the darkest notions as to the meaning of solitary or secret confinement.
I will not recite them, because they will easily suggest themselves to the readers who have followed my narrative. In conclusion I asked, if our release was impossible, that we might be treated as first-class misdemeanants, according to the general European custom in the case of press offenders, or at least supplied with books and writing materials. Sir William Harcourt sent no answer for a month.
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