WE will then suppose a lying-in hospital, in which, for the sake of training up _men_ to the profession of mid_wives_, there are young pupils of the male-sex admitted to attend and learn the practical and manual part of the business. To obtain this end, we will not say that women of virtue and character are subjected to the inspection and palpation of a set of youths, who perhaps pay largely for their privilege of attendance; but we will grant, that the objects of this charity are entirely women, who, though they may have unfortunately forfeited their right to virtue, cannot however have lost their claim to the protection of that humanity, which, besides the great and most political attention due to population, pays especially a tender regard to the innocent burthen, though of a guilty mother. Yet among these wretched victims, there may be not a few who, if they were not even to deserve more compassion than blame, for particular circumstances of their ruin, in which the villainy of men has often a much greater share than female frailty itself, cannot surely deserve that all traces of modesty, or natural remains of regard for it, should be utterly eradicated by that hard necessity of theirs to accept of a charity, by which they must be abandoned up to the researches of a set of young men, to whose approaches their age and sex must alone give an air of petulance and wantonness not to be explained away, to the satisfaction of the poor passive sufferer, by the goodness of the intention. Every one must be sensible of the dreadful effects such a treatment must have on the mind of a poor creature in that condition, when the imagination is known to be the most weak, and susceptible of the most dangerous impressions. At that critical time, amidst all the terrors and apprehensions inseparable from her situation, she is moreover exposed to the greatest indignity that can be well imagined, that of serving for a pillar of manage to break young men into the exercise of that most unmanly profession. Nay, that very circumstance of the use she is put to, which she is in fact to consider as a kind of valuable consideration by her paid for the relief afforded her, and which in that light can scarce be called a charity; that very circumstance, I say, of her submission, at all calls, and upon all pretences of the pupils, being accounted for to her by the good intention of it, will yet hardly pass on a wretched, frightened, harrassed woman, who, whatever may be said to procure her tame acquiescence, can scarcely, if she has a spark of female modesty left in her, be reconciled to the grossness of such usage, whether she considers herself as the butt of wantonness, or the victim of experiments, or perhaps of both the one and the other. It is well if she is defended by her ignorance from any idea of those dreadful instruments, of the having practices tried upon her with which, her circumstances might but too reasonably render her apprehensive, since a