vious knowledge or training, must have been astonished to find what are the requisites for making a nurse in the best sense of the word. The lowest order of minds and the meanest capacities are not fitted for the office, and to such it should not be consigned. There must be the higher love and the more exalted principle which true religion alone can give, if we would elevate the office above that of the merest hireling. The love of humanity alone will not suffice: it must be the love of the Saviour prompting to works of love for His sake which will alone render the work acceptable to Him who can read the heart.
Let us each bestir ourselves in our separate spheres to do what we may be able in this great cause. Let us endeavour, by showing our respect and sympathy for the office, to induce others to enter upon so high and holy a calling, even if none of us are able to undertake it ourselves. Let us encourage and sympathize with those who have already entered upon it; let us, at least, impress upon all the greatness of the need that we should redeem our national reputation in respect of the character of our nurses. Let us hope that the race of Mrs. Gamps, now dying out, will rapidly become extinct, to be remembered only with shame and confusion of face that we ever suffered them to exist. Even now it is almost impossible to realize that such thing's once were.
