HE Foundling Hospital is not an institution for the reception of foundlings. This will be news to five-sixths of our readers, and it is easy to imagine some of them exclaiming "But do you mean to tell us that, if we discover a human mite abandoned on someone's doorstep, and take it to the Foundling Hospital, it will not be admitted?" We do. "Why, then, call the place a Foundling Hospital?" Thereby hangs a deeply interesting story—a story of human wrong, of human suffering; of evil, of good; of sorrow, of succour—a veritable world's story, focussing the large-souled sympathy of mankind, the weakness and trust of woman, and the treachery and infidelity of man.
The institution owes its origin to one of Nature's noblemen; it is a monument equally to the head and the heart of Captain Thomas Coram. Captain Coram, in no ordinary sense of the word, went about doing good. His life was made up of attempts to improve something or somebody. Early in the eighteenth century, he used, in his walks between the City, where he had business, and Rotherhithe, where he lived, to constantly come across young children left by the wayside, "sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying." In other countries such children would be taken up by the State, and cared for; in England nothing of the sort had ever been attempted, or even perhaps dreamed of. Captain Coram's heart was touched by surely the most pitiable sight in creation, and to touch Captain Coram's heart was to set the machinery of his resourceful brain in motion. He rightly considered such exposure of infant humanity a disgrace to civilisation, and proceeded to enlist the services of the high-placed and the large-hearted in the cause. For seventeen long years he laboured against adverse circumstances, until, in 1739, his efforts were rewarded by a charter authorising the founding of an institution "for the maintenance and education of exposed and deserted young children."
A fine statue of Captain Coram, by W. C. Marshall, R.A., and a stone tablet to his memory, placed on the wall of the arcade in front of the building, are the first things to catch the visitor's eye. Coram lived, we are told, to be eighty-four, and died "poor in worldly estate, rich in good works." To help the new-born infant, he brought his grey hairs, if not in sorrow, at least in poverty to the grave. Like so many other benefactors of mankind, in striving to alleviate distress, this "indefatigable schemist"
