he
_entente cordiale_ extended even in some instances to the jailers and
the bench, and, as in those early days of the Quaker persecution of
which Milton's friend, Ellwood, has left record, prisoners sometimes
left their cells for a night to attend to imperative affairs, or
good-naturedly shortened or canceled their sentences at the pressing
solicitation of perturbed magistrates. Prison was purified by all these
gentle presences, and women criminals profited by the removal of the
abuses they challenged. Holloway became a home from home, in which
beaming wardresses welcomed old offenders, and to which husbands
conducted erring wives in taxicabs, much as Ellwood and his brethren
marched of themselves from Newgate to Bridewell, explaining to the
astonished citizens of London that their word was their keeper. A
suffragette's word stood higher than consols, and the war-game was
played cards on table. True, there were brutal interludes when Home
Secretaries lost their heads, or hysterical magistrates their sense of
justice, or when the chivalrous constabulary of Westminster was
replaced by Whitechapel police, dense to the courtesies of the
situation; but even these tragedies were transfused by its humors, by
the subtle duel of woman's wit and man's lumbering legalism. The
hunger-strike itself, with all its grim horrors and heroisms, was like
the plot of a Gilbertian opera. It placed the Government on the horns
of an Irish bull. Either the law must kill or torture prisoners
condemned for mild offenses, or it must permit them to dictate their
own terms of durance. The criminal code, whose dignity generations of
male rebels could not impair, the whole array of warders, lawyers,
judges, juries, and policemen, which all the scorn of a Tolstoy could
not shrivel, shrank into a laughing-stock. And the comedy of the
situation was complicated and enhanced by the fact that the Home
Office, so far from being an Inquisition, was more or less tenanted by
sympathizers with Female Suffrage, and that a Home Secretary who
secretly admired the quixotry of the hunger-strikers was forced to feed
them forcibly. He must either be denounced by the suffragettes as a
Torquemada or by the public as an incapable. Bayard himself could not
have coped with the position. There was no place like the Home Office,
and its administrators, like the Governors of the Gold Coast, had to be
relieved at frequent intervals. As for the police, their one aim in
life bec