There are many women, daughters and widows of the middle classes, who would become valuable acquisitions to the work, but whose circumstances would compel them to find their maintenance in it. These persons would be far more useful, less troublesome, would blend better and more truly with women of the higher orders, who were in the work, and would influence better and more easily the other nurses, as head-nurses, than as ladies. Whether or not the better judgment of others agrees with mine, my meaning will be understood. In truth the only lady in a hospital should be the chief of the women, whether called Matron or Superintendent. The efficiency of her office requires that she should rank as a lady and an officer of the hospital. At the same time, I think it important that every Matron and Superintendent, (unless during war-service, when the rough-and-ready life and work required will probably be best undergone by women of a higher class) should be a person of the middle classes, and if she requires and receives a salary, so much the better. She will thus disarm one source of opposition and jealousy, and enough will remain, inseparable from her office. The quasi-spiritual dignity of Sisters of Mercy is a thing _sui generis_. But the real and faithful discharge of the duties of the wards of a General Hospital, whether with reference to superiors, companions, or patients, is incompatible with the status, as such, of ladies. The real dignity of a gentlewoman is a very high and unassailable thing, which silently encompasses her from her birth to her grave. Therefore, I can conceive no woman who knows, either from information or from experience, what hospital duties are, not feeling as strongly as I do, that either the assertion or the reception of the status as such of a lady, is against every rule and feeling of common sense, of the propriety of things, and of her own dignity. [Sidenote: Religion.] 10. The question of the mode of Religion is an all-important one, and the choice of a mode bears far more directly upon this work than may, at first sight, appear. To give up the common ground of membership of the National Church is to give up a great source of strength. [Sidenote: St. John’s House.] St. John’s House, if it steers clear of the rock of prudery, undoubtedly possesses great advantages over a system of hospital nursing by promiscuous instruments. Not because it includes a Sisterhood, a system, in which I, for one, humbly but entirely disbelieve; but because the laborious, servile, anxious, trying drudgery of real hospital work (and to be anything but a nuisance it must ever remain a very humble and very laborious drudgery), requires, like every duty, if it is to be done aright, the fear and love of God. And in practice, apart from theory, no real union can ever be formed between sects. The work now proposed, however, must essentially forbear to avail itself of the bond of union of the National Church.