Mrs. Fry was heartily opposed to capital punishment.  She said, “It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them”; it does not lead to reformation, and “does not deter others from crime, because the crimes subject to capital punishment are gradually increasing.”

When the world is more civilized than it is to-day, when we have closed the open saloon, that is the direct cause of nearly all the murders, then we shall probably do away with hanging; or, if men and women must be killed for the safety of society, a thing not easily proven, it will be done in the most humane manner, by chloroform.

Mrs. Fry was likewise strongly opposed to solitary confinement, which usually makes the subject a mental wreck, and, as regards moral action, an imbecile.  How wonderfully in advance of her age was this gifted woman!

Mrs. Fry’s thoughts now turned to another evil.  When the women prisoners were transported to New South Wales, they were carried to the ships in open carts, the crowd jeering.  She prevailed upon government to have them carried in coaches, and promised that she would go with them.  When on board the ship, she knelt on the deck and prayed with them as they were going into banishment, and then bade them a tender good by.  Truly woman can be an angel of light.

Says Captain Martin, “Who could resist this beautiful, persuasive, and heavenly-minded woman?  To see her was to love her; to hear her was to feel as if a guardian angel had bid you follow that teaching which could alone subdue the temptations and evils of this life, and secure a Redeemer’s love in eternity.”

At this time Mrs. Fry and her brother Joseph visited Scotland and the north of England to ascertain the condition of the prisons.  They found much that was inhuman; insane persons in prison, eighteen months in dungeons!  Debtors confined night and day in dark, filthy cells, and never leaving them; men chained to the walls of their cells, or to rings in the floor, or with their limbs stretched apart till they fainted in agony; women with chains on hands, and feet, and body, while they slept on bundles of straw.  On their return a book was published, which did much to arouse England.

Mrs. Fry was not yet forty, but her work was known round the world.  The authorities of Russia, at the desire of the Empress, wrote Mrs. Fry as to the best plans for the St. Petersburg lunatic asylum and treatment of the inmates, and her suggestions were carried out to the letter.

Letters came from Amsterdam, Denmark, Paris, and elsewhere, asking counsel.  The correspondence became so great that two of her daughters were obliged to attend to it.

Again she travelled all over England, forming “Ladies’ Prison Associations,” which should not only look after the inmates of prisons, but aid them to obtain work when they were discharged, or “so provide for them that stealing should not seem a necessity.”