You have to educate public opinion up to _wanting_ a good article. Patent pills are not proved to be good articles because the public pays heavily for them. Many matrons are dear at £30 a year. Do you suppose that if we were to offer £150 we should get a good article at once? I trow not; and I say this from no theory, but from actual experience. It is very easy to pay. It is very difficult to find good Nurses, paid or unpaid. It is _trained_ Nurses, not paid nurses, that we want. It is not the payment which makes the doctor, but the education.--It is a question of no importance in regard to any art, whether the painter, sculptor, or poet is a 'lady' or a person working for her bread, a volunteer, or a person of the 'lower middle class.' Some thirty years ago I remember reading _Rejected Addresses_. A gentleman, endeavouring to explain how a certain lady 'became the mother of the Pantalowski' observes, 'The fineness of the weather, the blueness of her riding-habit all conspired to interest me' (I quote from memory). We are pleased to hear that the weather was fine and that the habit was blue, but we do not see what they have to do with it. I am neither for nor against 'Lady Nurses' (what a ridiculous term! what would they say if _we_ were to talk about 'Gentlemen Doctors'?). I am neither for nor against 'Paid Nurses.' My principle has always been: that we should give the best training we could to any woman of any class, of any sect, paid or unpaid, who had the requisite qualifications, moral, intellectual, and physical, for the vocation of a Nurse. Unquestionably, the educated will be more likely to rise to the post of Superintendents, _not_ because they are ladies, _but_ because they are educated.--The relation of a nursing staff to the medical officers is that of the building staff to an architect. And neither can know its business if not trained to it. To pit the medical school against the nurse-training school is to pit the hour-hand against the minute-hand. The worst nursing in Europe is that of Sisterhoods, where no civil administration or medical school is admitted. The worst hospitals in Europe are those where no nurse-training schools are admitted, where the doctor is, in fact, the matron.--You ask me whether it is possible to follow out successfully the profession of Nursing except from 'higher motives.' What _are_ the 'higher motives'? That is what I want to know. Nearly all the Christian Orders will tell you: the first is to save your soul. The Roman Catholics will tell you, to serve God's Church. But they do not infer that you are to strain mind and soul and strength in finding out the laws of health. The religious motive is not higher, but lower, if the element of religion enters in to impede this search. In the perfect nurse, there ought to be what may be called (1) the physical (or natural) motive, (2) the intellectual (or professional) motive, and (3) the religious motive--_all three_. The