THE NURSE IN LEADING STRINGS.

IT is worth while to notice how we English
people hold by the word Nurse. A nurse is
a nourisher, one upon whom helpless infancy
relies for subsistence. As soon as the
French child has left off suckling, its attendant
ceases to be a nourrice and becomes
a bonne; the German Amme then
becomes a children's-waitress, and so on. We
call the attendant still, a nurse; the little
one needs sustenance though of another kind;
it is still helpless—still in want of love—we
nurse it still; we don't, as they say abroad,
"take trouble for it " (why should we name
the trouble), nor do we lay the stress of
language on the fact that we amuse it—jump it;
the main thought is that we still nourish it
with love; still, therefore, we say that it is
nursed.

In France, they take the matter in a
frivolous way, dwelling generally on the
amusing and the jumping. In Spain, they
are philosophical, and look upon the early
management of children as creation—to nurse
is criàr; in England we are simply human
and domestic. We transfer our homely word
with its fond meaning, to the occupation of
those who should cherish and sustain the sick
by their good offices; we talk of nursing the
sick, but the French talk of watching them;
the Italians talk of having care about them;
the Germans talk of waiting to perform their
duty by them, and bring into use that honest
root of theirs which expresses not only
(pflicht) duty, but a relish for the doing
of it.

We abide still, by the home thought, and
say that, in the days of helplessness, our
sick are nursed. Also we know a better title
than wise woman for her who shall aid and
comfort the young mother in her first weeks
of prostration.

Out of England a man hardly could say
that he nursed his knee without seeming to
mean that he suckled it; and in England we
hold by the word so pertinaciously that our
commercial men are sometimes to be found
nursing concerns. Even an ironmonger,
when he gives a daily rub to his bright grates
to keep the rust away, will tell us that he
nurses them.

There is no nursing in the wide world
equal to that of the English mother by the
bedside of her suffering child. Busy and fond,
and exquisitely thoughtful are the daughters
of an English house when there is sickness in
it; boundless is the devotion to her duty of an
English wife when there is a sick husband
to be tended. Sickness becomes a luxury in
a well ordered English home. But that which
is in the home a luxury, what is it in the
hospital? How is it with the sick among us
who cannot afford to make in their own
homes a luxury of pain, or who have not in
their households mother or sister, wife or
daughter, eager with the incessant service of
affection? The hired nurse enters, and too
commonly presents as her substitute for the
unbounded generosity of love, incarnate
selfishness.

Doubtless it cannot commonly be a
welcome office to a stranger, to perform many
fatiguing and repulsive duties for a man who
was unknown in his days of health and
cheerfulness, and who is seen only in the fret
and disorder of his mind and body. We
English people, be that as it may, have
among us the best nursing for love and
the worst nursing for money that can be
got in Europe, though our women are all
nurses born. We need not name the English
lady who has in these days been the
devoted nurse of the English soldier. Before
her noble deeds of mercy during the
Crimean War, gave her a fame she never
sought, and made of her an example that
awakened sleeping power in her country-
women, this lady spent some little time at the
Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine,
where under the guidance of good Pastor
Fliedner teachers and nurses of the poor are
trained in the expert performance of their
duty. Upon her return she urged, in a little
pamphlet, what she felt, and told what she
had seen. The pamphlet was issued in the
year of the Great Exhibition, and we
proceed to give here a brief summary of its
contents.

It sets out, with reference to the old legend
that the nineteenth century was to be the
"century of women." It is not, says the
writer, man's fault that the prophecy is
unfulfilled. He no longer denies her room and
space enough, and in her intellectual
development the Englishwoman has accordingly
made extraordinary progress. But her education for
action has not kept pace with her education for
acquirement, and yet it was for the
increase of wisdom, even more than knowledge,
that David prayed,—for wisdom is the
practical application of knowledge. "Not what we
know, but what we do, is our kingdom," and
woman, perhaps, feels that she has not found
her kingdom. As the world stands, young
Englishwomen are justified in their dread of
being left to die unmarried: not because they
seek the pomp and circumstance of marriage,
but because a life without love and an activity
without aim is horrible in idea and wearisome
in reality. Many good women marry,
and are happy with husbands for whom they
do not particularly care, because they find a
sphere for their activity, "though," says the
pamphlet, "it might be asked, whether it
were not better to take care of the children
who are already in the world, than to bring
more into existence in order to have them
to take care of." They do not know how to
put into the common form of visiting the
poor, a life that satisfies their souls. An
occasional hour in the Sunday school relieves
days spent in the family by daughters who
do not know what to do with themselves.