An ebullition of wrath was as rare with Mr. Eden as an eruption of Vesuvius. His deep-rooted indignation against cruelty remained; it was a part of his nature. But his ruffled feathers smoothed themselves the moment little Hawes & Co. were out of his eye. He even said to himself, “What is the matter with me? one moment so despondent, the next irascible. I hardly know myself. I must take a little of my antidote.” So saying he proceeded to visit some of those cells into which he had introduced rational labor (anti-theft he called it). Here he found cheerful looks as well as busy hands. Here industry was relished with a gusto inconceivable to those who have never stagnated body and soul in enforced solitude and silence. Here for the time at least were honest converts to anti-theft. He had seen them dull and stupid, brutalized, drifting like inanimate bodies on the heavy waters of the Dead Sea. He had drawn them ashore and put life into them. He had taught their glazed eyes to sparkle with the stimulus of rational and interesting work, and those same eyes rewarded him by beaming on him with pleasure and gratitude whenever he came. This soothed and cheered his weary spirit vexed by the wickedness and stupidity that surrounded him and obstructed the good work. His female artisans gave him a keen pleasure, for here he benefited a sex as well as a prisoner. He had long been saying that women are as capable as men of a multitude of handicrafts, from which they are excluded by man's jealousy and grandmamma's imbecility. And this wise man hoped to raise a few Englishwomen to the industrial level of Frenchwomen and Englishmen; not by writing and prattling that the sex are at present men's equals in intelligence and energy, which is a stupid falsehood calculated to keep them forever our inferiors by persuading them they need climb no higher than they have climbed. His line was very different. “At present you are infinitely man's inferior in various energy,” said he. “Dependents are inferiors throughout the world.” If they were not so at first starting such a relation would make them so in two months. “Try and be more than mere dependents on men,” was his axiom. “Don't _talk_ that you are his equal, and then open that eloquent mouth to be fed by his hand--do something! It is by doing fifty useful and therefore lucrative things to your one that man becomes your creditor, and a creditor will be a superior to the world's end. Out of these fifty things you might have done twenty as well as he can do them, and ten much better; and those thirty, added to the domestic duties in which you do so much more than your share, would go far to balance the account and equalize the sexes.”