re for
them was not needed, and would be unsafe. Her repeated solicitations
were without success." The jailer must have thought he was dealing
with a woman, not with destiny. "At that time the court was in session
at East Cambridge, and she caused the case to be brought before it.
Her request was granted. The cold rooms were warmed. Thus was her
great work commenced."

Such is Dr. Nichols' brief statement, but the course of events did not
run so smoothly as we are led to suppose. The case had to be fought
through the newspapers as well as the court, and here Miss Dix showed
the generalship which she exhibited on many another hard fought
field. She never went into battle single-handed. She always managed to
have at her side the best gunners when the real battle began. In the
East Cambridge skirmish, she had Rev. Robert C. Waterston, Dr. Samuel
G. Howe, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Howe visited the jail and wrote an
account for the Boston _Advertiser_. When this statement was disputed,
as it was, Mr. Sumner, who had accompanied Dr. Howe, confirmed his
account and added details of his own. He said that the inmates "were
cramped together in rooms poorly ventilated and noisome with filth;"
that "in two cages or pens constructed of plank, within the four stone
walls of the same room" were confined, and had been for months, a
raving maniac and an interesting young woman whose mind was so
slightly obscured that it seemed any moment as if the cloud would pass
away; that "the whole prison echoed with the blasphemies of the poor
old woman, while her young and gentle fellow in suffering seemed to
shrink from her words as from blows;" that the situation was hardly
less horrid than that of "tying the living to the dead."

Where was Miss Dix during this controversy? Why, she was preparing to
investigate every jail and almshouse in the State of Massachusetts.
If this was the way the insane were treated in the city of Cambridge,
in a community distinguished for enlightenment and humanity, what
might not be going on in more backward and less favored localities?
Note-book in hand, going from city to city and from town to town, Miss
Dix devoted the two following years to answering this question
exhaustively.

Having gathered her facts, she presented them to the Legislature in a
Memorial of thirty-two octavo pages, the first of a series of
seventeen statements and appeals presented to the legislatures of
different states, as far west as Illi