Note 1 — BRIEF REFLEXIONS RELATIVE TO THE EMIGRANT FRENCH CLERGY.

The females of that miserable country whence these meritorious outcasts are driven, had the happiness, in former and better times, of exercising a charity as decisive for life or death as that which the females of Great Britain are now conjured to perform. St. Vincent de Paule, aumonier général des galeres, to whom France owes the chief of its humane establishments, instituted amongst the rest, the Foundling Hospital of Paris. His fund for its endowment failing, after repeated remonstrances for further general alms, which though not unsuccessful, proved insufficient, he gathered together a congregation of females, before whom he presented the innocent little objects of his prayers. His address to them was at once simple and sublime: "I call not upon you, he cried, as Christians, nor even as fellow creatures; I call upon you solely and singly to pronounce sentence as judges. To the largesses you have already bestowed, these orphans owe their natural existence: but those largesses are exhausted, and without a further supply, their existence is at an end. You are their judges—pronounce, then, their fate; do you ordain them to live? do you doom them to die?"