Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/335

 to imitate it. Young girls here, when they leave the correctional school, are trained as farm wives, to grow fruit and vegetables, to make butter and cheese, to rear fowl; and they themselves carry to market the produce of their labour and learn to make excellent bargains. When they have earned their freedom, they are independent young women, capable of directing a farm, with all the thrift, the natural, keen intelligence and unsleeping industry of that most admirable portion of the French race, the hard-working, good-humoured women of the people.

For years past there has been raging in France a bitter war between the Catholics and the Radicals on the subject of hospital nurses. The Republic, which mistrusts the Catholic party, has sought to limit their power in every direction. It was a mistake, I think, to attack them at hospital beds, for if there is a place which belongs by divine right, if I may say so, to the nun, it is the side of a sick-bed. With their guimps and coifs, their life of religious meekness, their cheerfulness and self-abnegation, they make ideal sick nurses. Then, the patient feels that with them it is not a profession, the means to an end, that money is not their object, nor are they likely to forget their duty in a flirtation with the doctor. In England and France I have had, unfortunately, experience of both kinds of nurses, and I unhesitatingly give my preference to the French