sullen and desperate to contrition and responThe facts are recorded, and

sive kindness.

remain uncontradicted; but the natural inference to be drawn from them does not seem to have struck our medical men.

With regard to the feeling between the nurses and the patients, here is a page of testimony which can hardly be read without emotion.

"We have attended many hundreds of the sick in the British army, suffering under every form of disease, the weary, wasting, low typhus fever or dysentery; or the agonies of the frost bite; and they were surrounded by every accumulation of misery. For the fevered lips there was no cooling drink, for the sinking frame no strengthening food, for the wounded limb no soft pillow, for many no watchful hands to help; but never did we hear a murmur pass their lips. Those whose privilege it was to nurse them noticed only obedience to orders, respectful gratitude, patience, and the most self-denying consideration for those who ministered. Even when in an apparently dying state, they would look up in our faces and smile."

She adds in another place, with deep natural feeling, "It was so sad to see them die one after another; we learned to love them so!"

"We were trained," she says, "under the hospital nurses at home, receiving our instruction from them; and what we saw there of disobedience to medical orders and cruelty to patients would fill pages, and make you shudder." "More of evil language was heard in one hour in a London hospital than met my ears during months in a military one."

The drawbacks in regard to our volunteer ladies, were not want of sense nor want of zeal, but the want of robust health, experience, and sufficient training.

The experiment of a staff of the volunteer lady-nurses from St. John's House,* with paid and trained nurses under their orders, has lately been made in King's College Hospital. I think I may say that it has so far succeeded. I have the testimony of one of the gentlemen filling a high official situation at the hospital, (and who was at first opposed to the introduc

* The training institution for nurses, in Queen Square, Westminster.

tion of these ladies, or at least most doubtful of their success,) that they have up to this time succeeded; that strong prejudices have been overcome, that there has been a purifying and harmonizing influence at work since their arrival. The testimony borne by the ladies themselves to the courtesy of the medical men and the students, and the entire harmony with which they now work together, struck me even

more.

"We

The same conquest was obtained by the volunteer ladies in the East. One of them says: "So misrepresented were the armysurgeons that the Sisters and Ladies feared them more than any other horrors." were told to expect rebuff, discouragement, even insult. We never during this whole year experienced any other than assistance, encouragement, gentlemanly treatment, and, from many, the most cordial kindness.” Of course there were some exceptions, but this was to be expected; and in reference to the principle for which I am now pleading, "the communion of labor," I consider this testimony very satisfactory.

I MUST now say a few words with regard to female administration in prisons.

After the revelations made by Howard seventy or eighty years ago, and their immediate effect in rousing the attention and sympathy of Europe, one would have thought it impossible to fall back into the ghastly horrors he had discovered and exposed. Yet in 1816, his name was already almost forgotten. The acts of parliament he had procured were become a dead letter, were openly and grossly violated. The very slow progress made by moral influences in the last century is very striking, taken in connection with the cold and formal scepticism which then found favor with men who fancied themselves philosophers, but were only leading a popular reaction against the formal theological superstitions of the previous century. There was, indeed, with much intellectual movement, a deadness of feeling, an indifference to the well-being of the masses, an utterly low standard of principle, religious, moral, political, which in these days of a more awakened public conscience seems hardly conceivable. We make slow work of

it now; we want a higher standard in high places; but in this at least we are improved,

men do not now dispute that such or such things ought to be done, may be done, must be done; unhappily they do dispute endlessly as to the how, the when, and the where, till they defeat their own purposes, allow great principles to be shelved by wretched perplexities of detail, and shrink back, cowed by the passive, stolid resistance of ignorance and self-interest. Forty years after the publication of Howard's "State of Prisons," what was the state of the greatest prison in England? When Elizabeth Fry ventured into that "den of wild beasts," as it was called, the female ward in Newgate, about three hundred women were found crammed together, begging, swearing, drinking, fighting, gambling, dancing, and dressing up in men's clothes, and two jailers set to watch them, who stood jeering at the door, literally afraid to enter. Elizabeth Fry would have been as safe in the men's wards as among her own sex; she would certainly have exercised there an influence as healing, as benign, as redeeming; but she did well in