Whilst it was used as a Foundling Hospital, 500 infants, 200 wet nurses, belonging to the house, 200 women either expecting a child or having already laid in, and forty sick persons were indiscriminately crowded together, besides a multitude of attendants and the apothecary. The multitude of partitions impeded the circulation of the air and retained the offensive effluvia which proceeded from this multitude of children, always clothed in dirty linen. There was not one apartment of the building through which a pure draught of air passed. It was difficult to inspect so many dark rooms detached from each other, it frequently happened that two women who had just become mothers slept in the same bed. A general cleansing and whitewashing of the place was unknown. The institution was burdened with children left upon the hands of the charity, for the country nurses having been paid with assignats or paper money and thus deprived of the full value of their wages, nurses would not now offer themselves. The great influx of children required a proportionate number of house nurses, and hence arose the impossibility of selecting them, the necessity of complying with all their demands and a great want of management. The food and the linen, in consequence of the low ebb to which the credit of the house was sunk, were left to be provided by contractors. The nurses had no clothes found them, pregnant women could get none, and the infants were not even provided with linen which is an absolute necessity. These evils resulted from the prodigal waste of public money which during the Directorship was diverted from its proper objects to gorge the insatiate appetite and hungry rapacity of the officials of the Government. Indeed, I am in possession of unanswerable vouchers to prove that to this circumstance (_i.e._, public and private plunder) the present shameful and dilapidated condition of the hospitals is to be attributed. So forcible are the representations of the Consular precepts on this subject that many go so far as to boldly assert that the grants made for the support of the hospitals have been scandalously diverted from their original destination and lavished without account on less necessary purposes. However, in 1801 the Council General of the Institution were enabled to create and carry out a most necessary series of reforms. The first duty they had to discharge was to secure and regulate the payment of the country nurses.