archway leading out of the street to the big gates of the prison, a huge prison-van rolled in under the arch, drawn by stout horses with clattering hoofs, and followed by gens-d'armes, also on stout clattering horses and grandly dressed and armed. The van was on high wheels, and had apparently no window at all; strongly secured, and dismal to look at, like a big hearse, only yellow. People fell back as if rather awed, and the great iron gates rolled open; the cortège rattled in, and in a moment the gates rolled back again. I tried to make my way through the gates in the wake of the prison-van, but there was no time, they closed so quickly and looked inexorable when shut. What powerful ruffians, do you thinkwhat dangerous, strong-sinewed criminals were they conveying with all this show of armed force into the prison? The van contained only a few poor, weak, helpless girls, guilty of the crime of not ministering to impurity in accordance with official rules. O manly, courageous Frenchmen! ever athirst for 'glory,' how well it looks to see you exercising your brave military spirit against the womanhood of your own country! You cannot be expected to govern your own passions, but you can at least govern by physical force the poor women of your streets, and swagger to your hearts' content in your hour of triumph as you proudly enter the prison gates with your trembling caged linnets. But no! miserable men, you cannot even do this; you are beaten by your own women. They cannot meet you on stout horses, with helmets and military swagger and police tyranny, but they beat you with other and more deadly weapons. We speak much of women, under the vicious system we oppose, being the slaves of men, and we realize all the tyranny and oppression which has reduced women to so abject a state; but since I have been in Paris I begin to see the picture somewhat reversed, in a strange and awful way. You can understand how the men who

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have rivetted the slavery of women for such degrading ends become, in a generation or two, themselves the greater slaves; not only the slaves of their own enfeebled and corrupted natures, but of the women whom they have maddened, hardened, and stamped under foot. Bowing down before the unrestrained dictates of their own lusts, they now bow down also before the tortured and fiendish womanhood which they have created. Till now I never fully realized Nemesis in this form. I was reading Whittier's description of an insurrection of negro slaves, brutalized by servitude,—

"And, painted on the blood-red sky,
Dark, naked arms were tossed on high;
And round the white man's lordly hall,
Trod, fierce and free, the brute he made;
Those who, erst, crept along the wall,
And answered to his lightest call

With more than spaniel dread,-
The creatures of his lawless beck,-
Were trampling on his very neck !'

Just as truly, though it is less perceived, are the men of the modern Babylon the slaves of the 'brute they have made,' who is trampling on their very neck, and in fear of whom they plot and plan and scheme in vain for their own physical safety. Possessed at times with a sort of stampede of terror, they rush to International Congresses, and forge together more chains for the dreaded wild beast they have so carefully trained, and in their pitiful panic build up fresh barricades between themselves and that womanhood which they proclaim to be a 'permanent source of sanitary danger.' If it were not too awful, one could almost smile to see these brave men trembling at the very thought of any 'female' being at large who is not the property of some man. M. Lecour, in his last book, appears to regard every woman who is not under the immediate rule of some man, as he would a volcano ready to burst forth under his feet. You will

see how his terror has driven him to contrive a scheme by which all these terrible single women shall be netted by the police and held fast. His scheme is too horrible to speak of. Take the case of a man who abuses the good gifts of nature to brutalize himself by excess in wine: that passive agent, in itself unconscious, and incapable of motive for good or evil, becomes to him a fiery scourge, his tyrant, and he its slave; 'in the end it biteth like a serpent.' Much more, and in a far more awful sense, does abused womanhood become the fiery scourge, the torment, and the tyrant of the men who systematically outrage, in her, God's best gift. Just so far as the soul of a woman is above all inanimate things which are susceptible of abuse, so far is the punishment of the man who outrages it increased. It is true he does not become the slave of the woman, but merely of the female. Yet, inasmuch as she is not a mere inanimate thing, like intoxicating drink, nor a mere animal, but is endowed with intellect, affections, will, responsibility, an immortal spirit, and inasmuch as men have turned all this to poison, so is the vengeance suffered by them in exact proportion. The men of this day who are guilty of the deliberate and calculating crime of organizing and regulating the ruin of women, are preparing for themselves an enslavement, an overmastering terror and tyranny, compared with which the miseries and enslavements brought about by other vices, terrible as these are, are but as the foreshadowing of a reality,—

'The curse which thro' long years of crime,

Is gathering, drop by drop, its flood.'

Already they cringe, abject slaves of the tyrant they have created; they are ruled, cajoled, outwitted, mocked and scourged by her. They rave at and curse her, as a wretched dypsomaniac will curse his intoxicating drink, madly grasping it all the time; and they will continue to curse until their emasculate race becomes extinct.

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"But to return to my story. A couple of surly-looking guards at the gateway of St. Lazare did not answer me when I asked how I was to get in; as I persisted, however, one said, 'Vous pouvez battre,' jerking his head over his shoulder towards a smaller and heavily iron-barred door. Yes! I could 'beat,' no doubt, but my thin hand against that thick iron door made no sound or impression at all. I thought it rather typical of our whole work on the Continent, beating away at the outside of this strong Bastille of misery and horror. Then the words came back to me:— 'I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.' I went into the street and took up a stone, and tried beating with that. It succeeded; a solemn old man in livery opened; I gave him M. Lecour's letter, desiring that they would show me the whole place; and, after looking at it narrowly, he passed me on to the care of a nun, the second in charge.

I visited every hole and corner of it: it took a long time. I could not help quickening my steps a little sometimes, as I went past places where the suggestions of horror were more than I could bear. . . . In the central court of the prison, where a few square yards of blue sky are allowed to look down upon the scene, troops of young girls were taking their hour of prescribed 'recreation, namely, walking, in twos and threes, round and round the sloppy and gloomy yard, where bits of half melted snow were turning into mud. It was a sight to wring the heart of a woman-a mother! Most of them were so very young, and some of them (go and see for yourself, and then you will know I am not exaggerating) so very sweet, so comely, so frank, so erect and graceful, in spite of the ugly prison dress. Well might Alexandre Dumas exclaim, 'O besotted nation, to turn all these lovely women, who should be our companions. in life's work, wives, and mothers, into prostitutes!' But that was not my thought at that moment: my heart was

pierced with thoughts still more bitter and sorrowful. These girls are not all Parisian; they come from all the Provinces, and some from Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and England. There were uncovered heads, of abundant golden and auburn hair of every shade, as well as black; blue eyes, that looked as if meant for mirth and innocence, and plenty of fine dark eyes, with soul and thought in them. I was not allowed to speak to them. Never in my life did I so much long to speak, and I fancied they wished it too. I said in my heart, ' O God, I may not speak, and they may not hear how much I love them; have mercy on them!" I looked at them with all the love I could possibly press into my face-the love and the pity which were rending my heart; and I think they must have read it, for their steps slackened as they came round, and they paused when they got near me, with looks of kindness, or gentle curiosity, or yearning sympathy. What dear friends I could have made among that crowd of young victims ! How intensely they looked at me, and I at them, in that oppressive silence! I could not bear it. When you hear people talk of the heartless, artificial, or hardened harlot of Paris, think of these, who are the raw material, fresh from nature's hand, out of which Babylon manufactures her soulless wild beasts who become a terror to their manufacturers. I saw also in St. Lazare women grown old in misery and vice, but I will not say that even they looked to me incapable of a return to good. .. And there are other places, dear, if you can bear to hear, where the harmless, soulless are kept. There are women, quite young, whose reason has fled, whose mind has been crushed out of the frail body by the grinding tyranny and foul treatment of the dispensary, and licensed house, and Bureau, by police, and doctors, and 'mistresses.' There is nothing left but the poor shell. Men may still dishonour that, but they can no more defile the mind,