Then, it is asked, if many women live
unmarried and so many more live through a
third part of their lives before they marry,
and if intellectual occupation be not meant to
be their end in life, what are they to do with
that thirst for action, useful action, which
every woman feels who is not diseased in
mind or body?

The answer sets out with evidence that in
the first days of Christianity—long before
there was a Roman Catholic Church—women
were employed in the service of the sick and
poor. Luther was mindful, too, that, as he
said, "women have especial grace to alleviate
woe, and the words of women move the
human being more than those of men." The
Pilgrim Fathers carried deaconesses with
them in their exile; their deaconess was
obeyed like a mother in Israel, and it is
especially said also, that she called upon the
young maidens for their services, when there
were sick. Long before Saint Vincent de
Paul established the order of Sisters of
Mercy, women among Christians of every
denomination, tied by no vows, lodged in no
cloistered cells, served in the Church as friends
of the sick and of the poor. Perhaps that
worthy custom would have fallen less into
disuse if there had been established any
systematic training in the duties of sick
nursing and teaching. But, such training is
now common in Prussia. It may be had in
Utrecht, Strasburg, Paris, and, as we shall
see presently in London: the establishment
of Kaiserswerth being the parent of them all.

There used to be a manufactory in the
small Roman Catholic town of Kaiserswerth
upon the Rhine, which gathered about its
walls a Protestant colony of workmen. In
eighteen hundred and twenty-two, the
bankruptcy of the manufacturer deprived these
people of the means of supporting a pastor.
We quote now from the account written by
Miss Nightingale in eighteen hundred and
fifty-one. "M. Fliedner being then only
twenty-two years of age, and just entering on
this cure, would not desert them. In the two
following years, he travelled through Holland
and England to collect funds sufficient to
maintain a church in his little community.
He succeeded, but this was the smallest part
of the results of his journey. In England he
became acquainted with Mrs. Fry—and his
attention having been thus turned to the
fact that prisons were a school for vice
instead of reformation, he formed at Düsseldorf,
in eighteen hundred and twenty-six,
the first German society for improving prison
discipline. He soon perceived how desolate
is the situation of the woman who, released
from prison, but often without the means of
subsistence, is, as it were, violently forced
back into crime. With one female criminal,
with one volunteer (Mademoiselle Göbel, a
friend of Madame Fliedner), who came without
pay to join the cause, he began his work
in September, eighteen hundred and thirty-
three, in a small summer-house in his garden."
Care of the one penitent woman in the
summer-house, a quarter of a century ago,
was the beginning of a work that has grown
and prospered in a way wonderful to all who
do not know how much may be accomplished
by the help of good will and unbounded
industry devoted to the achievement of a right
end.

During the first half of the next year
Pastor Fliedner received nine other penitents,
of whom eight had been more than once in
prison. In two years and-a-half an infant
school was opened under a first-rate infant
schoolmistress, Henrietta Frickershaus, who
when Miss Nightingale was at Kaiserswerth
still managed that department of the
institution, and had not only taught the young
herself, but trained more than four hundred
women in the art of guiding little ones aright.

Within six months after the foundation of
his infant school, the active Pastor Fliedner
began to work practically at the provision of
a new field of labour for the true-hearted
women who worked with him in his first
institution, and who still had time and energy
to spare. He opened a school for nurses by
establishing an hospital in the empty
manufactory, and began his hospital with one
patient, one nurse, and a cook. During the
first year, seven nurses were received, and
became members of that part of the establishment,
each after a six months' probation.
More patients were taken. In the first year
of the hospital, sixty sick persons were nursed
in the institution, besides twenty-eight at
their own homes.

Now, there is at Kaiserswerth a large
hospital, the old manufactory, with court, out-
buildings, and an acre of garden; and beyond
it, a row of houses in which other branches
of the institution—infant school, penitentiary,
orphan asylum, normal training school—were
established as they arose. Pastor Fliedner's
house and the office (which employs two
clerks) belong to the same row. Further on,
nearest the river, are the parish school,
church, and vicarage, care of which the
Pastor found it necessary to resign. Behind
the buildings, are about forty acres of land
which supply vegetables, and yield pasture
for eight cows and several horses. In the
Rhine are baths for the whole establishment.
There is no architecture, there have been no
annual dinners under the auspices of noble
chairmen, no distinguished members of
committee; there has been no sort of fanfaronnade.
Simply, quietly, but with devoted
energy, step after step was won till the
Kaiserswerth Institution became, not only a
power in itself, but a centre of activity,
scattering its influence abroad into hospitals,
parishes, and poorhouses of sundry German
and Swiss towns; making its beneficent
activity felt both in England and America; and
sending a deaconess out, even to Jerusalem.

The Kaiserswerth Hospital now contains