a regular course of training at Kaiserswerth, before she took charge of the Female Sanitarium in London.

In imitation of this establishment, a similar institution for the training of Protestant nurses and teachers has been opened at Paris; another at Strasbourg; another at Berlin. A similar establishment was founded at Dresden by the late excellent and amiable Countess Alfred Hohenthal (née Princess Biron), in which twenty-one women are under a course of instruction. There are besides ten other institutions which I find described as existing in different localities, but all emanating from the same origin, and containing in 1855 not less than 429 members. Since that time the number has at least trebled, and there are charitable houses belonging to this community at Constantinople, Smyrna, and Jerusalem, besides those in Germany, France, England, and America; so that they bid fair to emulate the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in number and usefulness.

When I was last in Paris I witnessed the reception of two ladies into the order of Protestant deaconesses, after a laborious novitiate of two years. It was essentially a religious ceremony, and the duties were undertaken in a religious spirit: they did not absolutely "take vows," as it is called, but entered into a solemn contract to serve faithfully for two years; they were then at liberty to dissolve or renew the contract. Similar institutions are springing up everywhere in England-" Homes" they are called-in which charity is administered by sisters taking various appellations, and aiming at various purposes. In some of these institutions I have found a small infirmary for sick women and children; a small school for the girls of the neighbourhood; an infant-school; a day-nursery (Crêche), where mothers employed as charwomen, &c., might deposit their infants for a few hours, paying a very small sum; the whole well managed under religious influences on a small scale, and the smaller the better, the more like a family.

It is then no longer a question as to whether, in Protestant communities, a number of women can be properly trained and organised for purposes of social benefit, authorised and employed by the Government, aided and directed by intelligent and good men, and sustained by public opinion. I consider that the question has been answered; and I must repeat my strong conviction, that such a com

munion of labour and of love as I have endeavoured to describe is not a thing of country, creed, or custom, but is. founded in the very laws of our being,-in that selfsame law which is the basis of domestic life; that it is one of the main conditions of social happiness and morals; and that the neglect of it in any country or community strikes at the heart of all that is best in men and women, increases the faults of both and their ignorance of each other, and tends consequently to the ultimate degradation and misery of all society.

For intelligible reasons I made no reference in this lecture, in its original form, to what has been considered as the particular province of all Sisters of Charity deserving the name,the management of Penitentiaries and Houses of Refuge for the erring and the fallen of their own sex. I shall merely observe that there is no department of active benevolence requiring more careful preparation and more especial instruction than this. The treatment of women whose habitual existence has been a perpetual outrage of their nature, must be special and exceptional; and I do not think that this is always well understood by the excellent and virtuous ladies who undertake to manage these scarcely manageable creatures. They are thought to be mentally and morally depraved, when in fact it is often the complete derangement of the nervous system, brought on by vice and disease, which produces those changeful moods, those fits of sullenness, excitability, obtuseness, insolence, and desperation by which I have seen the most benevolent filled with disgust and the most hopeful with despondency. I believe it to be true that women, even from the superior delicacy of the moral and physical organisation, can be more thoroughly, hopelessly, and constitutionally vitiated than men; this I have often heard urged as an argument for rejecting and punishing them when bad, never for protecting and sparing them when good. Such forms of malady in such sacrificed creatures are best treated in the country, by avoiding too much sedentary employment, by active exercise and really hard work in the open air, by talking to them and suffering them to talk as little as possible of themselves, and by gradually opening the mind to religious impressions without exciting resistance or despondency. No mere impulse of pity, no mere power of

will, can enable any one to undertake this most difficult mission, which ought to combine the vocation of charity with some of the qualifications of a physician.

Since the above was written (early in 1855), there have been strange revelations on this most painful subject openly published and discussed. The newspapers tell us that the cry is for "Refuges," which indeed are rising up in all directions. There are twelve in London and the neighbourhood under one Society only, besides many others in every large provincial town. Meetings are held; the Bishops of London, Oxford, St. David's, and the influential rectors of Marylebone and St. James's, make eloquent appeals to "pious ladies," tenderly nurtured and brought up amid all the guarded sanctities of home,-ladies "of birth, position, and refinement,"† who could not some years ago have supposed the existence of outcasts of their own sex, or of vicious excesses on the part of the other, without an imputation on their feminine decorum. A woman, urged by clerical and philanthropic friends, lends herself gladly to this work of mercy; but can these dreadful revelations be brought within range of her active charities— make a part of her experience-without producing a feeling of disgust and indignation, as well as of pain and pity? Is her reverence for the men around her, her faith in the superior strength and higher qualities of those she is called upon to love, honour, and obey, increased or diminished, when a terrible significance is given to terms once lightly used, and sins once lightly glanced at? I know nothing more horrible than the attempts which have been made to sentimentalise vice. We talk of “fallen women;" but for the far greater number there is no fall; they just, like blind creatures, walk from the darkness of ignorance into the foulness of sin. They are starving, and they sell themselves for food. What a spectacle for chaste Sisters of Mercy, and gentle anxious mothers with sons and daughters just entering into life! Are they the better or the worse for it?

But it will be said, perhaps, that even in these painful revelations may lie the seed of ultimate good. Men are awakening up to an uneasy suspicion that society is begin

The Church Penitentiary Society, with a council of thirteen bishops and about seventy other gentlemen, members of parliament and others. See the Bishop of London's Charge, p. 116.

ning to have a conscience in these matters, that they may possibly sink in the estimation of the woman they most wish to please,—may lose their manly prestige in her eyes, and be vulgarised to her imagination, when once the veil is withdrawn.

It is, I suppose, from some such instinctive alarm that we owe the sneering attacks lately made on refuges for "fallen women," and the ladies who patronise them; attacks of which those who pen them ought to be ineffably ashamed.

The fact is, however, (and God knows, men have little reason to mock at it!) that now and then one wretched creature out of hundreds may be saved or reclaimed, and where shall we look for prevention? Where but to our clergy, our schoolmasters, our physicians? With them it rests, not with us.

WORK AT HOME.

LET us now look at home, and consider what has been done in our own country. Is there any hope, any possibility, of organising into some wise and recognised system the talent and energy, the piety and tenderness, of our women for the good of the whole community?

The subject becomes one of awful importance when we consider, that in the last census of 1851, there appears an excess of the female over the male population of Great Britain of more than half a million, the proportion being 104 women to every 100 men. How shall we employ this. superfluity of the "feminine element" in society, how turn it to good and useful purposes, instead of allowing it to run to waste? to waste? Take of these 500,000 superfluous women only the one hundredth part, say 5,000 women, who are willing to work for good, to join the communion of labour, under a directing power, if only they knew how -if only they could learn how-best to do their work, and if employment were open to them, what a phalanx it would be if properly organised!

Everywhere I find the opinion of thoughtful and intelligent men corroborative of my own observations and 'conclusions. In spite of the adverse feeling of "that other public, to which we, the sensible reflecting public, are not

in the lest degree related," *—in spite of routine and prejudice, the feeling of those who in the long run will lead opinion is for us. They say, "In all our national institutions we want the help of women. In our hospitals, prisons, lunatic asylums, workhouses, reformatory schools, elementary schools,-everywhere we want efficient women, and none are to be found prepared or educated for our purpose." The men whom I have heard speak thus seem to regard this infusion of a superior class of working women into our public institutions as a new want, a new expedient. They do not seem to feel, or recognise, the profound truth, that the want now so generally felt and acknowledged arises out of a great unacknowledged law of the Creator, a law old as creation itself, which makes the moral health of the community to depend on the co-operation of woman in all work that concerns the well-being of man. For, as I have said before, it is not in one or two relations, but in all the possible relations of life, in which men and women are concerned, that they must work together for mutual improvement and the general good; and I return to the principle laid down at first, "the communion of love and the communion of labour."†

• v. Household Worlds, vol. xi. No. 254.

Since this lecture was delivered I find the following passage in a paper on "Municipal Government," published by the Manchester Statistical Society:

"In carrying out these and various other objects of importance, I am persuaded that the agency of the female sex is necessary, and that without the well organised aid of benevolent and educated women, municipal government will ever remain limited and imperfect. I do not contemplate the formal election of females to municipal offices, although this would appear from Grant on Corporations,' not to be without precedent in England, where women, we know, are still, by Law, eligible as overseers of the poor, and capable of filling the highest office in the kingdom."

"A number of years ago, in a paper read before this Society, entitled Thoughts on the Excess of Adult Females in the Population of Great Britain, with reference to its Causes and Consequences,' I endeavoured to show that the female sex, in Christian countries, are probably designed for duties more in number and in importance than have yet been assigned them. The reasons were, that above the twentieth year, in all fully peopled states, whether in Europe or in North America, women considerably out-number the other sex; and that, as this excess is produced by causes which remain in steady operation, we detect therein a natural law, and may allowably infer that it exists for beneficent social endsends, amongst others, such as those I am attempting to explain and recommend.

"I own that I cannot but regard the population of our large towns as