The French meeting came first. She crossed the Channel, reaching Paris in time to attend the principal séance of the congress. She presented her credentials, asked leave to speak, and was told "with some embarrassment" that she might speak to the officers of the society, when the public meeting should be adjourned! She makes no comment on this proceeding, but says, "I accordingly met a dozen or more of these gentlemen in a side room, where I simply spoke of my endeavors to enlist the sympathies and efforts of women in behalf of the world's peace."
Returning to London, she had "the privilege of attending as a delegate one of the great Prison Reform meetings of our day."
In 1843, Julia the bride would not have considered it a privilege to attend a meeting for prison reform. She would have shrugged her shoulders, would perhaps have pouted because the Chevalier cared more for these things than for the opera, with Grisi, Mario, and Lablache: she might even have written some funny verses about the windmill-tilting of her Don Quixote. Now, she stood in the place that failing health forbade him to fill, with a depth of interest, an earnestness of purpose, equal to his own. She, too, now heard the sorrowful sighing of the prisoners.
At one of the meetings of this congress, a jailer of the old school spoke in defence of the system of flogging refractory prisoners, and described in brutal fashion a brutal incident. Her blood was on fire: she asked leave to speak.
"It is related," she said, "of the famous Beau Brummel that a gentleman who called upon him one morning met a valet carrying away a tray of neck-cloths, more or less disordered. 'What are these?' asked the visitor; and the servant replied, 'These are our failures!' When I see the dark coach which in our country carries the criminal to his place of detention, I say, 'Society, here are your failures.'"
Her words were loudly applauded, and the punishment was voted down.
The Journal gives her further speech on this occasion: "Spoke of justice to women. They had talked of fallen women. I prayed them to leave that hopeless phrase. Every fallen woman represents a man as guilty as herself, who escapes human detection, but whose soul lies open before God. Speak of vicious, dissolute women, but don't speak of fallen women unless you recognize the fall of man, the old doctrine."
Two days before this she had preached her last sermon in London. The Journal says: "All Sunday at work upon my sermon, the last in London. 'Neither height nor depth, nor any other creature.' The sermon of high and low, and the great unity beyond all dimensions. A good and to me a most happy delivery of opinions and faith which I deeply hold.... So ended my happy ministration in London, begun in fear and anxiety, ended in certainty and renewed faith, which God continue to me."
August found her back at Oak Glen, exhausted in body and mind. She is almost too tired to write in the Journal, and such entries as there are only accentuate her fatigue.
"I am here at my table with books and papers, but feel very languid. My arms feel as if there were no marrow in their bones. I suppose this is reaction after so much work, but unless I can get up strength somehow I shall not accomplish anything. Weakness in all my limbs. Have had my Greek lesson and begun to read the Maccabees and the Apocrypha. I shall probably come up after a few days, but feel at present utterly incapable of exertion. I must help Maud—have helped her with music to-day...."