have seen that at Bombay, for instance, the cost of maintaining the four great hospitals of the town falls on the Government, although three of them were built wholly, or in great part, by private munificence. It is therefore competent for Government to appoint one or more medical women in all the departments where women are treated, and to apply a part of the hospital funds for their benefit. In this way, to a large and increasing extent, existing funds might be utilized for the benefit of the women of India, who have heretofore been singularly overlooked in the arrangements made or sanctioned by Government for medical relief. Thus we actually find Surgeon-General Beatty, in his Administration and Progress Report, writing in 1880:-"With some arrangements at the different institutions, which would give separate waiting rooms for the sexes, I have no doubt that the attendance of females would considerably increase." From this we may infer that there are parts of India where something very like an outrage is commited on the feelings of the women patients by forcing them to mingle, while waiting to be seen by the doctor, with patients of the opposite sex. A better illustration could hardly be found of the need of medical women in India, not merely for the actual treatment of patients of their own sex, but in responsible positions and for purposes of direction and organization.

It has been asserted that the life and honour of medical women would not be safe in the country districts. It does not, however, appear that considerations of this kind have weighed against the sending out into the Mofussil of nurses and midwives, to whom protection of their life. and honour is equally due. We feel disposed to view in this objection. only one more of the many intangible reasons put forward, at various times and in various countries, why women should not study and practise medicine. Wherever Government placed a woman doctor, of course it would be bound to provide her, in common with its other subjects, with reasonable protection. Perhaps even in some exposed districts, only married medical women, accompanied by their husbands, might be considered eligible.

But not to tilt at windmills, let us pass on, in conclusion, to consider the kind of organization best adapted to the circumstances of the case. What is needed is a new Medical Department, as a part of the public service in India, managed by women and responsible only to some high officer of State, working in harmony with the existing civil Medical Service, but co-ordinate and not subordinate to it. Women alone, highly trained, efficient, with the ready sympathies of their sex, can rightly inaugurate and carry out such a beneficent reform, and discover the proper means for breaking down the barriers which separate the sick millions of Indian women from the physicians and surgeons ready and able to bring to bear on them all the resources of the healing art. Sir Salar Jung considers that there might with advantage be two classes of medical women : one, ordinary practitioners for the country; * It was loudly urged formerly in England that women doctors could not go out at night to their patients, but nobody saw any impropriety or danger in midwives-that is to say, poor women-doing so.

the other, more accomplished and of a higher stamp, capable of acting as teachers (presumably of native subordinates), as well as practitioners, for the towns. The division is a practical and sensible one, and would correspond, generally speaking, to the two classes of medical women growing up in England, the holders of a University degree, and the licentiates of the Irish College of Physicians, the only licensing college which at the present time admits women. We would add to this list a third class, that of superintendents or directors, the lay bishops, so to speak, of medical dioceses.

As the women practitioners would certainly be required by their superiors to give a far larger share of time and labour to work among the poor than the average hospital or dispensary medical officer is reported to do, their salary ought to be proportionately higher. Perhaps a salary of £300 for the lower, and of £500 for the higher class of practitioners, with dispensary buildings, might be sufficient. The superintendents, of whom at first only one would be necessary, ought to have a fixed income of not less than £1,000 a year, with travelling expenses, so as to be able fairly to devote their life and energies to the work. The question of local contributions would have to be considered, and perhaps it may be found possible in the towns to secure substantial co-operation. Whether this could be relied on in the country districts is doubtful from their extreme poverty. Of course the work would begin in the Presidency towns, and perhaps in a few other centres. A dispensary would be established for the treatment of such as chose to resort to it. A small hospital would follow, or in the existing hospitals a medical women's department would be instituted. Gradually, treatment in the zenanas might be superadded to the work, and courses of instruction organized for native women in nursing and in hygiene. The extension of the system into the country districts would necessarily be slow, and regulated by local circumstances, which would have to be very carefully inquired into by the head of the department.

Our present limited space does not allow of entering into any detailed enumeration of the benefits such a medical service may be expected to confer on the women of India. To one point we cannot, however, refrain, in view of its importance, from calling special attention. It is this, that, unfortunately, barbarous mutilations and outrages by husbands and strangers on little native girls and women are by no means rare,* and that medical examinations are often ordered by magistrates to be made.

In some instances, such examinations conducted by medical men, even in the interests of the victims, are felt to be so repugnant to natural feeling and to national usage that a magistrate is content to receive instead the testimony of a native midwife. As important issues and heavy penalties are often involved in these cases, the medical profession view with great disfavour this receiving of evidence from an imperfectly * See "Medical Jurisprudence for India," by Norman Cheevers, M.D. Calcutta, 1870.

trained woman. But their scruples, and those of humane judges, and even of the injured families themselves, must surely cease if examinations by medical women voluntarily submitted to were substituted for examinations by medical men, by order of the court.

A word of encouragement to such medical women as desire to devote themselves to practice in India may here perhaps be fitly given. Their training cannot be too thorough, their knowledge and ability, and especially their surgical ability, too great, for we have it on official authority "that the people of India estimate European medical treatment more by what they see of the skill of our surgeons than by any professed faith in the value of our treatment of internal diseases. To this day, physicians have to compete with old women and exorcists, and have not yet so demonstrated to the native mind the superiority of their practice that they can command implicit faith in it. In surgery, however, the native population do admit the advantages and supe riority of European methods, and it seems a matter for regret that in this particular our dispensary practice should be so prominently weak."

Women may however take courage. There are, undoubtedly, in the Indian Medical Service, eminent physicians and clever operators, especially in the Presidency towns, but the general cry, in official records, is of the ignorance and inefficiency of at least the subordinate Medical Service,* and it may be safely predicated of women that their best achievements will be far beyond the present average of medical and surgical work in India. FRANCES ELIZABETH HOGGAN.

*To the untrustworthiness and moral obliquities of a large proportion of the members of the subordinate Medical Service in India, as well as to their professional incapacity, the latest official records bear ample testimony. The gravest offences are even sometimes hinted at, as when, for instance, the Surgeon-General with the Governor of Bengal, states in his report for 1880:-"In some small dispensaries the reception of house-patients has been stopped. An in-patient ward affords opportunities to subordinates which are better avoided, where it can show no beneficial work." In the medical report on the Hyderabad assigneddistricts for the same year, occur the following remarkable statements :-" The number of labour cases for which medical assistance was sought was very small-only forty in all. (The number of dispensaries in the said districts was thirty-five, all apparently under the charge of hospital assistants.). . . . In the majority of cases, the assistance of the village dhai is all that is necessary; besides their caste and social prejudices prevent their applying for dispensary relief in such cases, save as a last resource. Midwifery, however, is a branch of which our hospital assistants, as a rule, are totally ignorant, both practically and theoretically, and, with a few exceptions, I would not trust one of them with the conduct of a case of even natural labour.'

It must be remembered that all the above hospital assistants, officially stigmatized as ignorant of their duties, were subsidized by Government to the extent of from fifteen to twenty-five rupees a month.

The Surgeon-General with the Governor of Madras expressly states in his report for the year 1880, that the education of the civil hospital class, eighty-nine of whom, be it remarked, were in independent charge of dispensaries largely subsidized by Government, "is more restricted than that of apothecaries, and does not, until supplemented by some years of practical experience, fit them for positions in which they have to rely on their own knowledge and judgment." Recommendations are then made to place apothecaries in independent charge of dispensaries, in preference to hospital assistants, and the SurgeonGeneral continues as follows:-"The changes in question can only be brought about gradually, but I have no doubt whatever as to their necessity, if the arrangements for medical aid to the people are to be of any public benefit.”

CO-OPERATIVE AGRICULTURE IN

GERMANY.

LTHOUGH co-operation is better adapted to agriculture than to most other branches of industry, it has hitherto been less applied to it. Mr. Gurdon's two experiments at Assington, in Suffolk, have now been before the world, the one for fifty and the other thirty years, and they have been remarkably and increasingly successful; yet they have as yet found no imitators. For Mr. Lawson's generous projects at Blennerhassett, Cumberland, are not examples of the association of labourers with one another, but of labourers with capitalists, who allow the labourers and even, to some extent, the general public of the place to participate in the profits of the estate, but reserve the exclusive management in their own hands. Nor, indeed, it may be said, are the Assington experiments examples of co-operation in its purest form, for while all the labourers on the farms are shareholders in them, all the shareholders are not labourers upon them. One of the associations contains at least six members who are not agricultural labourers at all, but millers, smiths, wrights, or shoemakers; and, in fact, neither of the farms is large enough to give employment to all the members of the society that occupies it. But both societies are associations of labourers pure and simple. Though the proprietor lent them capital to start upon, he assumed no control whatever over the management of the undertaking, and seems to have in no way favoured them beyond other tenants in the matter of rent. In some of the German experiments the labourers are allowed to check the books, and to advise in the buying and selling; but though they may advise, they cannot direct, the master still retaining absolutely in his own hands the final control in all affairs of management. But at Assington the labourers share the management as well as the work and the profits, and it is as yet the only instance in Europe of agricultural co-operation in which they do so. That charac

teristic invests the Assington associations with peculiar value as proofs of the efficiency of the co-operative principle in its application to agriculture. Their members were no picked labourers; they were the average farm servants on the estate; yet they have for many years conducted profitably the cultivation of two farms, one with a rental of £200, and the other of £325. In one respect their independence of the capitalist has been advantageous to their permanence, for some of the other experiments which have been made in co-operative agriculture, have suddenly terminated with the death or retirement of the capitalist who projected or directed them. The remarkable experiments at Ralahine, in Ireland, did not survive the death of Mr. Vandeleur; and Herr Jahnke's interesting half-profits' plan was given up when he sold Bredow, because his successor did not approve of it. But while individuals perish an asso

ciation endures.

If we ask why co-operation has been to so slight an extent applied to agriculture, notwithstanding its proved adaptability to it, we shall probably find the chief reasons to be the intellectual lethargy of the agricultural labourers, and the strong prejudice existing among the landed gentry in some countries against any novel kind of social experimentation. Von Thuenen found this feeling among his fellow-proprietors to be so keen, that though he had desired for many years before 1848 to introduce his system of industrial partnership into the management of his estate of Tellow, he could not venture to do so till the revolutionary movements of that year furnished him with a fresh incentive; and Herr Jahnke, whom I have just mentioned as the originator of a striking half-profits system, made so many enemies among his own class by his scheme that he felt himself obliged to sell his estate at the termination of the first five years' contract with his men, although he declared that the experiment had proved eminently successful, both with respect to his own profits and to the income and condition of the labourers.

With the single exception of Assington, all the other modern experiments in co-operative agriculture have belonged to the modified type of industrial partnership, under which the workmen participate in the profits but not in the management. The arrangements adopted have been very various, and variety is advantageous in the present transitional condition of things; for it is only out of many different solutions that we can eventually find the fittest, which may be hoped to survive ; and besides, the circumstances of capital and labour vary so much, and the whole problem of the progressive amelioration of the labouring population is so complex, that no single panacea can be expected to suffice. The salvation of labour will fulfil itself in many ways, and for this reason it is not unimportant to learn somewhat of several very interesting experiments in agricultural co-operation which have been instituted in Germany within the last thirty years. Of these, three in particular claim attention those of Herr von Thuenen, the eminent economist, at Tellow, in Mecklenburg; of Herr Jahnke, a landed proprietor at Bredow,