and writhing in their fetters. This was a mission for Sisters of Charity 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 of regeneration, this use of the feminine influence has been found efficient where all other means had failed. Howard-well named the Good-when inquiring into the state of prisons, about the middle of the last century, found many of those in France, bad as they generally were, far superior to those in our own country; and he attributes it to the employment and intervention of women "in a manner," he says, "which had no parallel in England." In Paris, he tells us, there were religious women "authorised to take care that the sick prisoners were properly attended to; and who furnished the felons in the dungeons with clean linen and medicine, and performed kind offices to the prisoners in general." "The provincial jails, also, have charitable patronesses, who take care that the prisoners be not defrauded of their allowance, and procure them farther relief.". This, you will observe, was at a period when in England felons, debtors, and untried prisoners were dying by inches of filth and discase and despair. No doubt we have much improved since then, but not so much as we ought to have done. A late writer observes that "it is astonishing and mortifying to consider how little progress the British legislature has made beyond adopting tardily, partially, and in a vacillating spirit, the improvements suggested seventy-nine years ago by Howard." ♦ The striking remarks and suggestions in respect to the influence of women in some of the • Combe " On the Principles of Criminal Legislation,” &c. hospitals and prisons abroad, which abound in Howard's works, do not seem to have been noticed or taken into account at all,—not even by the author of the excellent treatise from which I quote. It appears to be substantiated by the united testimony of some of the greatest medical authorities among us-by such men as Brodie, Clark, Holland, Owen, Forbes, Conolly, and Carpenter,-prefixed to the above-named treatise, that "criminal legislation and prison discipline will never attain to a scientific, consistent, practical, and efficient character until they have become based on physiology of the brain and nervous system," or, as it is elsewhere expressed, "while the influence of organism on the dispositions and capacities of men continues to be ignored." Then have we not to consider, as a next step, what is to influence the organism? Have we not to consider whether there may not exist organic influences arising out of contrasted yet harmonious organisms,— mutual influences which God has contemplated in those sacred and universal relations which bind his creation together, and which we ought reverently to use for good, instead of allowing pernicious quacks and sensualists most irreligiously to misuse and abuse for evil? It is difficult to believe in "invincible pertinacity in evil." Nevertheless, it does seem that there are some few miserable creatures who are, in respect to the moral organisation, what idiots are in respect to intellect. We know, however, that a large proportion of the convicts in our prisons, and the sick in our hospitals, and the outcasts: in our workhouses are unhappy beings, who have never been brought into contact with goodness elevated by the. religious principle, softened by the spirit of love, and. refined by habitual gentleness and modesty; and, we seemin these matters to be in such constant fear of doing mischief, that we have no courage to do good. We stand in such a dastardly terror of the ridicule which follows mistake or failure, that we ought to die of inward shame, while thus entrenching ourselves in the negative good, instead of bravely meeting the positive evil. The hardest. thing which visitors of prisons have to contend with in the wretched delinquents, is not so much the propensity to evil as the ignorance of, and disbelief in, goodness; on men. of this stamp and on young offenders, judicious female influence would probably have effect where men in autho-. rity, though not less well intentioned and equally judicious, arouse only feelings of suspicion, sullenness, and resistance. From recent inquiries I learn that the system of employing Sisters of Charity as visitors in the prisons of Piedmont continues to work well, and that none of the evils which might have been apprehended have in any instance occurred. But supposing they had occurred; a hundred mistakes and failures at the outset could not invalidate the principle that what had once succeeded on a large scale would, under similar conditions, again succeed: that the expedient of bringing the female mind and temperament to bear on the masculine brain (and of course vice versa), as a physical and moral resource, might be worth a thought, being in accordance with that law of nature or Divine ordinance which placed the two sexes under mutual and sympathetic influences; not always, as the stupid and profligate suppose, for evil and temptation, but for good and for healing; not in one or two relations of life, but in every possible relation in which they can be approximated. This suggestion I merely throw out here as not unworthy of the consideration of our physicians, moralists, and legislators. I leave it to . them and to time, and I proceed. At the commencement of the French Revolution the Sisterhood of Charity had 426 houses in France, and many more in other countries; the whole number of women then actively employed was about 6000. During the Reign of Terror, the superior (Madame 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 in the midst of the horrors of that time-when so many nuns and ecclesiastics perished miserably-it appears that the feeling of the people protected these women, and I do not learn that any of them suffered public or personal outrage. As soon as the Consular government was established, the indispensable Sisterhood was recalled by a decree of the Minister of the Interior. I cannot resist giving you a few passages from the preamble to this edict-certainly very striking and significant—as I find it quoted in a little book on "Hospitals and Sister- It begins thus: "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 Republic 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 authorised to educate girls for the care of the hospitals," &c. I confess I should like to see an Act of our Parliament beginning with such a preamble! Yes! I should like to see an Act of our Parliament beginning with a recognition that women do exist as a part of the community, whose responsibilities are to be acknowledged, and whose capabilities are to be made available, not separately, but conjointly with those of men. For that surely must be a defective legislation which takes for granted only the crimes, the vices, the mistakes of humanity, and makes no account of its virtues, its affections, and its capabilities. 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 civilisation; 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, whenever I met them, to be but a multiplication of one and the same person. In all the well-trained Sisters of Charity I have known, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, I have found a mingled bravery and tenderness, if not by nature, D by habit; and a certain tranquil self-complacency, arising, not from self-applause, but out of that very abnegation of self which had been adopted as the rule of life. I have now given you a rapid and most imperfect sketch of what has been done by an organised system of charity in the Roman Catholic church. I am no friend to nunneries. I do not like even the idea of Protestant nunneries, which I have heard discussed and warmly advocated. I conceive that any large number of women shut up together in one locality, with no occupation connecting them actively and benevolently with the world of humanity outside, with all their interests centred within their walls, would not mend each other, and that such an atmosphere could not be perfectly healthy,-spiritually, morally, or physically. There would necessarily ensue, in lighter characters, frivolity, idleness, and sick disordered fancies; and in superior minds, ascetic pride, gloom, and impatience. But it is very different with the active charitable Orders, and I should certainly like to see amongst us some institutions which, if not exactly like them, should supply their place. In speaking on the subject with intelligent and experienced men and women, I have generally met with the strongest sympathy; but sometimes also with the vague sweeping objection, that such communities are quite contrary to the spirit of the Reformed Church, and among Protestants quite impracticable. The worse for us, if it were true, but is it true? The experiment has been tried, an attempt has been made, to found such an institution in a Protestant community, though not in this country; it has not yet stood the test of centuries, but let us see what has been done within a period of thirty years. At Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, a small town near Dusseldorf, a manufactory had been established during the last war, in which the workmen employed were almost all Protestants. In 1822 the manufacturer became bankrupt, and the workmen were reduced to poverty. Their pastor, Mr. Fliedner, then a very young man, travelled through Holland and England to collect from sympathising friends the • Since this was written in 1855 a commencement has been made. |