- tical reception and familiarity with the new position of
women must necessarily be of slow growth. It must be, in fact, a life work. The children of the present generation will grow up accustomed to women doctors, respecting and trusting them, but the large majority of the adults will only hold a half-faith, and this will be a gradual growth. I am convinced that there would not be a rapidly brilliant success in England, such as some enthusiastic friends dream of.
There is a call for the work, an admirable field, but the work itself is a very slow one, the steady conquest of innumerable difficulties—a creation, in fact. The hospital scheme I think premature.
I had promised to bring it forward, and have done so, but I believe, to be successful, it must spring, as in America, out of private practice. I have no faith in its rapid success.
My own opinions and plans, then, may be briefly summed up.
There is a valuable and much-needed work to be done in England. Slow, uphill work, not remunerative (my tour was an expense to me); a repetition, to a great extent, of our last seven years' work. It would need us both to do it well; and so greatly does England want just our experience that, were it possible, I should counsel the transference of our work to this side of the water. But this we cannot do, and I shall therefore endeavour to prepare others for English work by receiving and educating students in America. In America, as here, it is a life work. I shall go back to create the institutions of which we have planted only the little germ. In ten years' time we may hope for permanent institutions there, worthy of their object, but we can during that time efficiently aid earnest young Englishwomen for their work here. Mrs. Bracebridge, who is much interested
