"Another very important point is the excellent effect we have found to
result from religious education; we constantly read the Scriptures to
them twice a day; many of them are taught, and some of them have been
enabled to read a little themselves. It has had an astonishing effect. I
never saw the Scriptures received in the same way, and to many of them
they have been entirely new, both the great system of religion and of
morality contained in them."




XI.

OTHER BENEFICENT WORKS.

The work so successfully accomplished in Newgate was the precursor of
similar work undertaken in other prisons, not in London only, but all
over the country. With prisons now so much better managed, and with
multitudes of workers, single or associated, striving for the welfare of
prisoners, the record of Mrs. Fry's early labours may have lost much of
its interest. But it is well to state clearly the nature of her work,
and the spirit in which it was undertaken. Nor was it only in the
interior of the prisons that her labours were carried on. At that time
the transportation of criminals to penal settlements was very largely
resorted to, and the state of convict ships was as bad as that of the
worst prisons in England. Mrs. Fry made arrangements for the classifying
of female prisoners; for obtaining superintendents and matrons; for
providing schools and work on board ship; and in many ways attending to
the welfare of the poor convicts. She used to go down to almost every
ship that left the Thames, and saw everything done that was possible for