I. I think that every nurse, before joining the Fund, should produce a certificate from her matron, stating her to be a respectable woman. In plain words, for the word respectable is certainly capable of most wondrous extension, the certificate should state her to be, in the matron’s belief, and to the best of her knowledge, a chaste woman, and should specify whether she be spinster, wife, or widow. In either of the latter cases, the marriage certificate, and in the last that of the husband’s death, should accompany the matron’s. The matron’s certificate should, I consider, also state her to be sober; and it would be a question whether it should not also state her to have served for not less than a year in the hospital. The vagabond class are a terrible drag upon the whole order; and some of these might, from the novelty of the thing, be disposed to join it at first. II. An important question would be: Should the matron’s certificate be renewed every year, and should the continuance of the nurse’s membership depend on its production? Men of business must advise as to this: I am quite unversed as to the details of Provident Societies. So far as regards the contributor’s own money, the contract once entered into, must certainly be open to no further question; unless there has been fraud in the preliminary statement on which it was based. With regard to any _assistance_ that may be given the question is different. III. The preliminary certificate I do consider very important, and the subsequent ones, if they can be required. [Sidenote: Hospitals are not places for Penitents.] Until the hospitals are swept of the many mothers who are not wives, now unhappily to be found in them, no real good can be done. Hospitals are not, and never can be, places for “penitents;” and they are about the most dangerous places where sham penitents can be. This is precisely what so many people of very different kinds cannot or will not see; some from ignorance, some from knowledge, some from the vague, silly, kind feeling which does such mischief when exerted on practical matters. Suffer me to submit, without wearying patience by urging proof,-- i. That real penitents are wrongly placed in hospital service, because their admission breaks down the standard which respectable women who are hospital nurses feel (quite as keenly as their superiors do in their own concerns) ought at once to restrain and to protect those engaged in this very peculiar, very trying, and very exposed work and life. (I have invariably observed that real penitents are extra-prudish, and comparatively inefficient, in their hospital duty. It will at once be perceived how inevitable this result is.) ii. That sincere but unconfirmed penitents, in addition to the above, are most dangerously and improperly placed in a situation, to them, of very peculiar trial.