FOUNDERS _court_, 1. Fore street. 2. Lothbury; so called from having Founders hall in it.
FOUNDLING _Hospital_, or more properly _The Hospital for exposed and deserted Children_, in Lamb’s Conduit fields. This is one of the most useful among the numerous charities that are an honour to this age and nation. In the reign of her late majesty Queen Anne, several eminent merchants, filled with compassion for the many innocent children who were daily exposed to misery and destruction, proposed to erect an hospital for the reception of such infants, as either the misfortunes or inhumanity of their parents should leave destitute of other support; and to employ them in such a manner as to render them fit for the most laborious offices, and the lowest stations. With these laudable views they proposed a subscription, and sollicited a charter; but they sollicited in vain, from the ill-grounded prejudices of weak people, who conceived the opinion that such an undertaking would encourage persons in vice, by making too easy a provision for their illegitimate children.
However, though this suspended, it did not totally defeat this laudable design; some of these worthy persons left large benefactions for the use of such an hospital as soon as it should be erected; which coming to the ears of the humane and generous Mr. Thomas Coram, a commander of a ship in the merchants service, he left the sea to sollicit a charter for the establishment of this charity, and with unwearied assiduity spent all the remainder of his life in promoting this great design; from no other motive than his zeal for the public, and his compassion for the helpless innocents who were frequently dropped in the streets, or murdered to conceal the shame of their parents.
Before he presented any petition to his Majesty, he was advised to procure a recommendation of his design from some persons of quality and distinction. This he sollicited with unwearied diligence, by which means he procured the following memorial to be signed by the Ladies whose names are under-written.
“Whereas among the many excellent designs and institutions of charity which this nation, and especially the city of London, has hitherto encouraged and established, no expedient has yet been found out for preventing the frequent murders of poor miserable infants at their birth; or for suppressing the inhuman custom of exposing new-born infants to perish in the streets; or the putting out such unhappy foundlings to wicked and barbarous nurses, who, undertaking to bring them up for a small and trifling sum of money, do often suffer them to starve for want of due sustenance or care; or, if permitted to live, either turn them into the streets to beg or steal, or hire them out to loose persons by whom they are trained up in that infamous way of living, and sometimes are blinded, or maimed and distorted in their limbs, in order to move pity and compassion, and thereby become fitter instruments of gain to those vile merciless wretches.
