In this case the officers of the ward were very seriously to blame. They were indeed suspected of collusion, and without that it is difficult to understand how the prisoners could have effected their purpose. They must have been long engaged in preparing to make good their exit, and in the cellar were found great quantities of weapons, tools, cards, and other things. CHAPTER VIII THE WOMEN’S WARDS Various outbreaks among the women—Drumming on the doors—The dumb cell—What happened at Durham—The Ladies’ Association—Greatest trouble from Convicts in passage to the Antipodes—McCarthy—Anne Williams—Julia Sinclair Newman’s extraordinary persistence in wrong-doing—Supposed to be mad—Returned from Bethlehem as sane—Mr. Nihil’s vain attempts to transfer her—No strait-waistcoat or means of restraint will prevail—Finally transferred to Van Diemen’s Land. IT is a well established fact in prison logistics that the women are far worse than the men. When given to misconduct they are far more persistent in their evil ways, more outrageously violent, less amenable to reason or reproof. For this there is more than one explanation. No doubt when a woman is really bad, when all the safeguards natural and artificial with which she has been protected are removed, further deterioration is sure to be rapid and reform hopeless. Again, the means of coercion in the case of female prisoners are necessarily limited. While a prompt exhibition of force cannot fail sooner or later to bring an offending male convict to his senses, a woman continues her misconduct unchecked, because such methods cannot be put in practice against her. Although in some cases the men have made a temporarily successful fight against discipline, in the long run they have been compelled to succumb. On the other hand, there are instances known of women who have maintained for months, nay years, an unbroken warfare with authority, and who have won the day in the end. Never beaten, they continued till the day of their release to set every one at defiance. That obstinacy which has passed into a proverb against the sex, supported them throughout, of course, coupled with a species of hysterical mania, the natural outcome of the highly strung nervous system.