which may startle the refined, or confined, notions of Englishwomen in the nineteenth century. It is not, I believe, generally known in this country that the same experiment has been lately tried, and with success, in the prisons of Piedmont, where the sisters were first employed to nurse the wretched criminals perishing with disease and despair; afterwards, and during convalescence, to read to them, to teach them to read and to knit, and in some cases to sing. The hardest of these wretches had probably some remembrance of a mother's voice and look thus recalled, or he could at least feel gratitude for sympathy from a purer higher nature. As an element of reformation, I might almost say regeneration, this use of the feminine influence has been found efficient when all other means had failed." Even in the middle of the last century Howard observed that the vast superiority of the French prisons over those of England was to be attributed to the kind offices which these religious ladies performed towards the felons.

At the commencement of the great French Revolution, the Sisterhood of Charity had four hundred and twentysix houses in France, and many in other countries. The whole number of sisters actively employed was about six thousand. During the Reign of Terror, the superior, (Malle. Duleau,) who had become a Sister of Charity at the age of nineteen, and was now sixty, endeavoured to keep the society together, although suppressed by the government, and as soon as the Consular government was established the society was recalled by an edict, which commences as follows:

Seeing that the services rendered to the sick can only be properly administered by those whose vocation it is, and who do it in the spirit of love, seeing, farther, that among the hospitals of the Repulic those are in all ways best served, wherein the female attendants have adhered to the noble example of their predecessors, whose only object was to practise a boundless love and charity; seeing that the members still existing of this society are now growing old, so that there is reason to fear that an order which is a glory to the country, may shortly become extinct :-it is decreed that the Citoyenne Duleau, formerly superior of the sisters of charity, is authorized to educate girls for the care of the hospitals, &c."

"I confess," Mrs. Jameson adds, "I should like to see an act of our parliament beginning with such a preamble."

"Previous to the Revolution, the chief military hospitals at Brest, St. Malo, and Cherbourg, had been placed under the management of the Sisters of Charity. During the Reign of Terror those sisters who refused to quit their habit and religious bond were expelled, but as soon as order was restored they were recalled by the naval and military authorities, and returned to their respective hospitals, where their reappearance was hailed with rejoicing and even with tears. At present the naval hospitals at Toulon and Marseilles, in addition to those I have mentioned, are served by these women. The whole number of women included in these charitable orders was, in the year 1848, at least twelve thousand. They seem to have a quite marvellous ubiquity. I have myself met with them not only at Paris, Vienna, Milan, Turin, Genoa, but at Montreal, Quebec, and Detroit; on the confines of civilization; in Ireland, where cholera and famine were raging, everywhere, from the uniform dress and a certain similarity in the placid expression and quiet deportment,_looking so like each other, that they seemed, wherever I met them, to be but a multiplication of one and the same person.

Another order has arisen in the Catholic Church within the last few years-I mean the Sisters of Mercy-which has spread with as wonderful rapidity as that of the Sisters of Charity. Their first house was established in Dublin, under the auspices of the late Archbishop, the Most Reverend Dr. Murray, in 1831. The foundress, Mrs. M'Auly, served her noviciate, and was professed in the Presentation Order. Within a few years the houses of the Sisters of Mercy have not only been wonderfully multiplied in these countries, but have even been established in Australia and America, where this sisterhood have already many foundations. The objects of the Sisters of Mercy are the same as those of the Sisters of Charity. Whereever a work of mercy is to be done, there are they to be found, like "ministering angels"-in the crowded hospital where pestilence reigns, in the felon's cell, in the squalid cabin by the bed-side of the destitute and the despairing, bringing relief to the body and consolation to the mind, in the lunatic asylum amongst hideous gibbering maniacs, like messengers sent by God to show that even they are not forgotten by their heavenly Father, in the school, amid the young and the innocent, teaching them, more

powerfully by their example than by their words the beauty of virtue and the deformity of vice, to love God with their whole hearts, and their neighbour as themselves. They are ministers raised up by God to show how He loves His creatures, and wherever His charity reaches, there are they not afraid or ashamed to penetrate. Yet, will it be believed that at this very time, when their devotion to the wounded soldiers, at the seat of war, is extorting the admiration even of those who were at first opposed to their mission of love, when the rough warriors amongst whom they move, exclaim on beholding them, "now we know that our country cares for us;"-the fell spirit of bigotry is so rampant, that the doors of the gaol and the workhouse have in many places been shut against them? An outcry was even raised when a hospital in Dublin was lately entrusted to the care of the Sisters of Mercy. And yet, already in a few weeks, the place is entirely changed. Order and cleanliness have succeeded confusion and squalor, and the quiet gentle sympathy of a lady, long trained in the practice of compassionate kindness, whose only motive is the love of God and of her afflicted brethren, is certainly a great improvement upon the common-place attention and mercenary kindness of even the best hired nurse. But, hired nurses are very often brutal and unfeeling to the last degree. Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig are types of a large number of those who follow this calling, and who are so hardened by the constant sight of misery that they treat the afflicted with irritation and violence, instead of tenderness and compassion. "that

It is admitted on all sides, Mrs. Jameson says, the general management of our hospitals and charitable institutions exhibit the want of female aid, such as exists in the hospitals abroad,-the want of a moral, religious, intelligent, sympathizing influence, combined with the physical cares of a common nurse. Some inquiry was made into the general character of hospital nurses, and the qualifications desired; and what were these qualifications? Obedience, presence of mind, cheerfulness, sobriety, patience, forbearance, judgment, kindness of heart, a light delicate hand, a gentle voice, a quick eye;these were the qualities enumerated, as not merely desirable, but necessary, in a good and efficient nurse-a long list of virtues not easily to be purchased for £14. 10s. a year!qualifications, indeed, which, in their union, would form

an admirable woman in any class of life, and fit her for any sphere of duty, from the highest to the lowest. In general, however, the requirements of our medical men are much more limited; they consider themselves fortunate if they ensure obedience and sobriety, even without education, tenderness, intelligence, religious feeling, or any high principle of duty. On the whole the testimony brought before us is sickening. Drunkenness, profigacy, violence of temper, horribly coarse and brutal language, these are common. We know that there are admirable exceptions. Still, the reverse of the picture is more generally true. The toil is great, the duties disgusting, the pecuniary remuneration small in comparison; so that there is nothing to invite the co-operation of a better class of women, but the highest motives which can influence a true Christian. At one moment the selfishness and irritability of the sufferers require a strong control; at another time their dejection and bodily weakness requires the utmost tenderness, sympathy, and judgment. To rebuke the self-righteous, to bind up the brokenhearted, to strengthen, to comfort the feeble, to drop the words of peace into the disturbed or softened mind just at the right moment ;-there are few nurses who could be entrusted with such a charge, or be brought to regard it as a part of their duty."

It was such considerations as these that induced Mrs. Jameson to sigh for the publication, by our government, of an edict similar to that by which the consular government of France recalled the Sisters of Charity. Yet, with strange inconsistency she considers it inexpedient to introduce communities whose members should be bound by the obligations of chastity, poverty, and obedience. However, she proves by the most unanswerable arguments that without these very obligations, no societies devoted to objects of charity and mercy can be established with the slightest hope that they will be either useful or permanent. She proves that they must not be mere voluntary associations of individuals, each of whom shall be quite independent of the others, but that they must be regularly associated bodies, acting under control, and subject to strict discipline.

"We have," she observes, "works of love and mercy for the best of our women to do in our prisons and hospitals, our reformatory schools, and I will add our work

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houses; but then we must have them such as we want them, not impelled by transient feelings, but by deep abiding motives, not amateur ladies of charity, but brave women, whose vocation is fixed, and whose faculties of every kind have been trained and disciplined to their work under competent instruction from men, and tested by a long probation. It will be said, perhaps, that when you thus train a woman's instinctive feelings of piety and tenderness for a particular purpose, to act under control and in concert with others, you take away their spontaneousness, their grace, even in some sort their sincerity; consequently their power to work good. This is like the reasoning of my Uncle Toby, who, in describing the Bèguines, says, They visit and take care of the sick by profession; but I had rather, for my own part, that they did it out of good nature.' Would Uncle Toby have admitted the necessary inference-namely, that when you train and discipline a man to be a soldier, to serve in the ranks, and obey orders under pain of being shot, you take away his valour, his manly strength, his power to use his weapon? We know it is not so. Never yet did the sense of duty diminish the force of one generous impulse in man or woman!-that sublimest of bonds, when in harmony with our true instincts, intensifies while it directs them. There is in this country a sort of scrupulousness about interfering with the individual will, which renders it peculiarly difficult to make numbers work together unless disciplined as you would discipline a regiment. obvious want of discipline and organisation in our civil service, has been a source of difficulties, and even of fatal mistakes in the commencement of this war. In any community of reasonable beings, therefore in any community of women, as of men, there must be gradations of capacity, and difference of work. To make or require vows of obedience is objectionable; yet we know that the voluntary nurses who went to the east were called upon to do what comes to the same thing-to sign an engagement to obey implicitly a controlling and administrative power-or the whole undertaking must have fallen to the ground.".

The

The manifest truth is that no community can exist without a power of government, which essentially consists in the right of some to command, and the duty of others to obey. When this duty is promised to the governing power of a body associated for the glory of God, it is what