affections and the domestic duties,-what I have called the "communion of love and the communion of labor," - must be taken as the basis of all the more complicate social relations, and that the family sympathies must be carried out and developed in all the forms and duties of social existence, before we can have a prosperous, healthy, happy, and truly Christian community. Yes! I have the deepest conviction, founded not merely on my own experience and observation, but on the testimony of some of the wisest and best men among us, that to enlarge the working sphere. of woman to the measure of her faculties, to give her a more practical and authorized share in all social arrangements which have for their object the amelioration of evil and suffering, is to elevate her in the social scale; and that whatever renders womanhood respected and respectable in the estimation of the people tends to humanize and refine the people.

It is surely an anomaly that, while women are divided from men in learning and working by certain superstitions of a conventional morality, and in social position by the whole

spirit and tendency of our past legislation, their material existence and interests are regarded as identical; - identical, however, only in this sense, that the material and social interests of the woman are always supposed to be merged in those of the man; while it is never taken for granted that the true interests of the man are inseparable from those of the woman; so at the outset we are met by inconsistency and confusion, such as must inevitably disturb the security and integrity of all the mutual relations.

Here, then, I take my stand, not on any hypothesis of expediency, but on what I conceive to be an essential law of life; and I conclude that all our endowments for social

good, whatever their especial purpose or denomination, educational, sanitary, charitable, penal, — will prosper and fulfil their objects in so far as we carry out this principle of combining in due proportion the masculine and the feminine element, and will fail or become perverted into some form of evil in so far as we neglect or ignore it.

I WILL now proceed to illustrate my position by certain facts connected with the administration of various public institutions at home and abroad.

And, first, with regard to hospitals.

What is the purpose of a great hospital? Ask a physician or a surgeon, zealous in his profession: he will probably answer that a great hospital is a great medical school in which the art of healing is scientifically and experimentally taught; where the human sufferers who crowd those long vistas of beds are not men and women, but " cases to be studied: and so under one aspect it ought to be, and must be. A great, well-ordered medical school is absolutely necessary; and to be able to regard the various aspects of disease with calm discrimination, the too sensitive human sympathies must be set aside. Therefore much need is there here of all the masculine firmness of nerve and strength of understanding. But surely a great hospital has another purpose, that for which it was originally founded and endowed, namely, as a refuge and solace for disease and suffering.

Here are congregated in terrible reality all the

ills enumerated in Milton's visionary lazarhouse,

"All maladies

Of ghastly spasm or racking torture, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, wide-wasting pestilence

د,

I spare you the rest of the horrible catalogue. He goes on,

"Dire was the tossing, deep the groans; despair
Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch.”

But why must despair tend the sick? We can imagine a far different influence "busiest from couch to couch!"

There is a passage in Tennyson's poems, written long before the days of Florence Nightingale, which proves that poets have been rightly called prophets, and see "the thing that shall be as the thing that is." I will repeat the passage. He is describing the wounded warriors nursed and tended by the learned ladies,

"A kindlier influence reigned, and everywhere
Low voices with the ministering hand

Hung round the sick. The maidens came, they talked,

They sung, they read, till she, not fair, began

To gather light, and she that was, became

Her former beauty treble; to and fro,
Like creatures native unto gracious act,

And in their own clear element they moved."

This, you will say, is the poetical aspect of the scene; was it not poetical, too, when the poor soldier said that the very shadow of Florence Nightingale passing over his bed seemed to do him good?

But to proceed. The practical advantages, the absolute necessity of a better order of nurses to take the charge and supervision of the sick in our hospitals, is now so far admitted that it is superfluous to add anything to what I said in my former Lecture. It is not now maintained that a class of women, whom I have heard designated by those who employ them as drunken, vulgar, unfeeling, and inefficient, without any religious sense of responsibility, and hardened by the perpetual sight of suffering, are alone eligible to nurse and comfort the sick poor. One great cause of the cruelty and neglect charged against hospital nurses is, that they become insensibly and