houses suppressed, they followed their vocation, and by collecting and teaching the poor orphans of massacred parents, and assisting the village Curés, they prevented a mass of evil. As soon as order was restored they were reinstated, but their establishments have not since increased in number. The extension of secular schools in France and Germany, and the popularity of the Sisters of Mercy, who unite the educational duties of the Ursulines with those of the Hospitalières, have in some degree superseded them. I have, however, visited several of the Ursuline houses; and I remember one in particular which I visited five and twenty years ago. To reach the school, where more than 300 children were assembled, I had to pass through a room in which about sixty infants were lying in cradles or on mattresses, while two of the sisterhood were going about with pap, and stilling as well as they could the incessant whimpering and squealing;-it was an absurd and yet a pathetic scene. These were babies left by poor women who had gone to their daily work and were to return for them in the afternoon; and this plan has since been imitated in the admirable charity of "Les Crèches," instituted at Paris, and similar charities in this country.* Now I do not say that the education given by those good Sisters was the best possible. far from it. It did not go much beyond the a, b, c, the Catechism, and a little needlework, but it was not worse than that which many of our dame schools afforded fifty years ago; and it established as a principle that women might be permitted to teach as well as to learn; -a principle so familiar to us in these days, that we quite forget to look back to a period when it was a strange unheard-of novelty, and had to do battle against prejudices, both of the clergy and the people. It can easily be imagined that institutions like these, composed of such various ingredients, spread over such various countries and over several centuries of time, should have been subject to the influences of time; though from a deep-seated principle of vitality and necessity they seem to have escaped its vicissitudes, for they did not change in character or purpose, far less perish. That in ages of * Since this was written, an Infant Nursery on the same principle has been added to that excellent institution, the Hospital for Sick Children, in Great Ormond Street. superstition they should have been superstitious, that in ages of ignorance they should have been ignorant,—debased in evil selfish times, by some alloy of selfishness and cupidity,-in all this there is nothing to surprise us; but ohe thing does seem remarkable. While the men who professed the healing art were generally astrologers and alchymists, dealing in charms and nativities,-lost in dreams of the Elixir Vita and the Philosopher's Stone, and in such mummeries and quackeries as made them favourite subjects for comedy and satire, these simple Sisters, in their hospitals, were accumulating a vast fund of practical and traditional knowledge in the treatment of disease, and the uses of various remedies;-knowledge which was turned to account and condensed into rational theory and sound method, when in the 16th century Surgery and Medicine first rose to the rank of experimental sciences and were studied as such. The poor Hospitalières knew nothing of Galen and Hippocrates, but they could observe if they could not describe, and prescribe if they could not demonstrate. Still, in the course of time great abuses had certainly crept into these religious societies, not so bad or so flagrant, perhaps, as those which disgraced within a recent period many of our own incorporated charities,— but bad enough, and vitiating, if not destroying, their power to do good. The funds were sometimes misappropriated, the novices ill-trained for their work, the superiors careless, the Sisters mutinous, the treatment of the sick remained rude and empirical. Women of sense and feeling, who wished to enrol themselves in these communities, were shocked and discouraged by such a state of things. A reform became absolutely necessary. - This was brought about, and very effectually, about the middle of the seventeenth century. Louise de Marillac-better known as Madame Legras, when left a widow in the prime of life, could find, like Angela da Brescia, no better refuge from sorrow than in active duties, undertaken "for the love of God." She desired to join the Hospitalières, and was met at the outset by difficulties, and even horrors, which would have extinguished a less ardent vocation, a less determined will. She set herself to remedy the evils, instead of shrinking from them. She was assisted and encouraged in her good work by a man endued with great ability and piety, enthusiasm equal, and moral influence even superior, to her own. This was the famous Vincent de Paul, who had been occupied for years with a scheme to reform thoroughly the prisons and the hospitals of France. In Madame Legras he found a most efficient coadjutor. With her charitable impulses and religious enthusiasm, she united qualities not always, not often, found in union with them: a calm and patient temperament, and that administrative faculty, indispensable in those who are called to such privileged work. She was particularly distinguished by a power of selecting and preparing the instruments, and combining the means, through which she was to carry out her admirable purpose. With Vincent de Paul and Madame Legras was associated another person, Madame Goussaut, who besieged the Archbishop of Paris till what was refused to reason was granted to importunity, and they were permitted to introduce various improvements into the administration of the hospitals. Vincent de Paul and Louise Legras succeeded at last in constituting, not on a new, but on a renovated basis, the order of Hospitalières, since known as the Sisterhood of Charity. A lower class of sisters were trained to act under the direction of the more intelligent and educated women. Within twenty years this new community had two hundred houses and hospitals; in a few years more it had spread over all Europe. Madame Legras died in 1660. Already before her death the women prepared and trained under her instructions, and under the direction of Vincent de Paul (and here we have another instance of the successful communion of labour), had proved their efficiency on some extraordinary occasions. In the campaigns of 1652 and 1658 they were sent to the field of battle, in groups of two and four together, to assist the wounded. They were invited into the besieged towns to take charge of the military hospitals. They were particularly conspicuous at the siege of Dunkirk, and in the military hospitals established by Anne of Austria at Fontainebleau. When the plague broke out in Poland in 1672, they were sent to direct the hospitals at Warsaw, and to take charge of the orphans, and were thus introduced into Eastern Europe; and, stranger than all they were even sent to the prison-infirmaries where the branded forçats and condemned felons lay cursing 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 disease 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 seem in 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 |