The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2 of 2

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THE LIFE OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO

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[Illustration: _Florence Nightingale 1887 from the picture by Sir William Richmond at Claydon_]

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THE LIFE OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

BY SIR EDWARD COOK

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II

(1862-1910)

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1913

COPYRIGHT

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CONTENTS

PART V

FOR THE HEALTH OF THE ARMY IN INDIA (1862-1865)

CHAPTER I PRELIMINARY. THE LOSS OF FRIENDS (AUGUST-DECEMBER 1861)

PAGE

Despondency after the death of Sidney Herbert--Sir George Lewis and the War Office--Lord de Grey reappointed under-secretary. II. "Saving things from the wreck"--The Herbert Hospital at Woolwich-- Captain Galton at the War Office--Barracks inquiry extended to the Mediterranean--Miss Nightingale and the Volunteers. III. The American Civil War--Miss Nightingale and the nursing--British reinforcements to Canada--Miss Nightingale "working as in the times of Sidney Herbert." IV. Miss Nightingale and Arthur Hugh Clough-- His assistance to her--His death (Nov. 1861)--Her grief--Letters of condolence--Her yearning for sympathy--Illness 3

CHAPTER II THE PROVIDENCE OF THE INDIAN ARMY (1862, 1863)

High rate of mortality among the British army in India: Miss Nightingale as a "saviour" of the army. Her determination to obtain a Royal Commission for India on the lines of the Commission of 1857 for the home army--Lord Stanley approves the idea: Sidney Herbert, chairman, succeeded by Lord Stanley--Selection of Commissioners. II. Miss Nightingale's work for the Commission (1859-1862)-- Collection of evidence from India: her circular of inquiry-- Preparation of statistical evidence at home: Miss Nightingale and Dr. Farr--Miss Nightingale and the witnesses. III. Her analysis of the written reports from India: "Observations by Miss Nightingale" thereon (1862)--Circulation of the "Observations"--Account of them --Abstract of the evidence by Miss Nightingale and Dr. Sutherland. IV. Death of Sir George Lewis--Her desire to see Lord de Grey appointed to the War Office--Press notices: letter to Lord Palmerston. V. Preparation of the Report of the Commission--Miss Nightingale's part in it--The recommendations--Her suggested machinery: (1) sanitary commissions in India, (2) supervision in England--Adoption of her policy--The Report signed (May 1863). VI. Miss Nightingale's "publicity campaign"--Distribution of early copies--Press notices--Omission of her "Observations" and Indian evidence from the cheaper official issue of the Report--Separate publication by her--Re-issue of the Report with her "Observations": circulation of the re-issue by the War Office. VII. Physical disabilities under which Miss Nightingale worked 18

CHAPTER III SETTING REFORMERS TO WORK (1863-1865)

"Reports not self-executive": Miss Nightingale's determination to put the Indian Report into execution. Correspondence with Lord Stanley--His interview with Sir Charles Wood--Miss Nightingale asked to draft "Suggestions" to be sent out to India--Departmental criticism of the Report: delay. II. Death of Lord Elgin, the Viceroy--Question of his successor--Miss Nightingale's admiration for Sir John Lawrence--His appointment--Her interview with him. III. Sir John Lawrence announces the appointment of sanitary commissions in India and begs her to expedite the dispatch of the "Suggestions."--More departmental delay--Miss Nightingale's impatience--Lord Stanley's intervention--The "Suggestions" approved and printed--Delay in sending them: circumvented by Miss Nightingale. IV. Sir John Lawrence's prompt action in India-- Correspondence with Miss Nightingale--Reforms by Sir Hugh Rose (Lord Strathnairn)--Miss Nightingale's paper, _How People may Live and not Die in India_--Criticism of the Royal Commission's Report from India--Miss Nightingale's reply--Progress of sanitary reform in the army in India. V. Miss Nightingale as consultant and inspirer in Indian sanitary reform--Sir John Lawrence's difficulties--Lord Stanley's tribute to her--Importance of the co-operation between her and Sir John Lawrence 40

CHAPTER IV ADVISORY COUNCIL TO THE WAR OFFICE (1862-1866)

Miss Nightingale and the War Office: her position as consultant. Explanation of the position--Her expert authority on certain questions--Official legatee of Sidney Herbert--Correspondence with Sir George Lewis--Her friends at the War Office. II. Death of the permanent under-secretary--Miss Nightingale and Captain Galton's appointment--Her hopes of re-organization in the War Office. III. The Army Sanitary Commission--Miss Nightingale and improvements in barracks--Nursing in military hospitals. IV. The Army Medical School, and position of army doctors--Miss Nightingale as the doctors' champion--Lord Panmure's attack on the Herbert Hospital--Miss Nightingale's case for the defence. V. Wide range of subjects referred to her advice--The Geneva Convention (1864)-- Suggestions about soldiers' and sailors' pay--Miss Nightingale's methods. VI. The State regulation of vice--Miss Nightingale's efforts on behalf of soldiers' clubs, recreation-rooms, etc. VII. Her researches into the disappearance of aboriginal races. VIII. Spiritual comfort--Memories of heroism in the Crimea 59

CHAPTER V HELPERS, VISITORS, AND FRIENDS (1862-1866)

The years of Miss Nightingale's most trying work. Her helpers--The indispensable Dr. Sutherland--His constant service--Miss Nightingale as task-mistress--Her method of "conversation" by written notes. II. Seclusion from her friends--Her strict rule of life--Letters to Madame Mohl--Visit from Garibaldi (1864)--Her account of the interview--Appreciation of Abraham Lincoln--Death of Lord Palmerston. III. Miss Nightingale's scheme for investments by the working-classes in small freeholds--Correspondence with Mr. Villiers and Mr. Gladstone. IV. Sympathetic letters to friends --Literary correspondence with M. Mohl. V. Friendship with Mr. Jowett--Their correspondence--Miss Nightingale's work for the army and for India an accidental "call"--Her yearnings for hospital work 84

CHAPTER VI NEW MASTERS (1866)

Public events in 1866 in relation to Miss Nightingale's work. Letters on those events. II. The story of a lost dispatch. Sir John Lawrence's scheme for sanitary organization in India--Miss Nightingale's anxiety to have it revised before the Liberal Government fell--The Dispatch lost at the India Office: found by Lord Ripon--His reply to it drafted, when the government fell. III. Miss Nightingale's vexation--Dr. Sutherland's absence--Visit from Lord Napier on his appointment to the governorship of Madras. IV. The Conservative Government--Miss Nightingale's desire to come in touch with the new ministers--Correspondence with Lord Cranborne (India Office) and Mr. Gathorne Hardy (Poor Law Board). V. The Austro-Prussian War--Miss Nightingale and war-nursing-- Correspondence with the Princess Alice and the Crown Princess of Prussia. VI. A holiday at Embley with her mother--Private meditations 104

PART VI

MANY THREADS (1867-1872)

CHAPTER I WORKHOUSE REFORM (1864-1867)

State of the workhouse infirmaries--Report on the Metropolitan workhouses in 1866--Miss Nightingale a prime mover in the remedial legislation of 1867. II. Her friendship with Mr. William Rathbone--His scheme for introducing trained nurses into the Workhouse Infirmary at Liverpool--Negotiations with Miss Nightingale--Her friend, Miss Agnes Jones, appointed Lady Superintendent--Reforms effected by her (1865). III. Miss Nightingale's resolve to use the Liverpool experiment as a lever for reform in London--Workhouse scandals in London--Correspondence and interviews with Mr. Villiers--Friendship with Mr. Farnall, Poor Law Inspector--Miss Nightingale's scheme of Poor Law reform (1865)--Approved by Mr. Villiers--Articles in the _Times_--Defeat of the Government. IV. Mr. Gathorne Hardy succeeds Mr. Villiers--Removal of Mr. Farnall from London--Miss Nightingale's communications with Mr. Villiers--Committee appointed by Mr. Hardy--Miss Nightingale invited to express her views: outlines her scheme in a Memorandum. V. Mr. Hardy's Bill (1867)--Various views of it--Miss Nightingale's efforts for its extension--Importance of the reforms included in the Bill: the starting-point of workhouse reform. VI. Success of Miss Agnes Jones's pioneer work--Her death (1868)--Miss Nightingale's account of her in _Good Words_--Selection of a successor--Effect of the article 123

CHAPTER II ALLIANCE WITH SIR BARTLE FRERE (1867-1868)

Miss Nightingale's concern for a better organization of the public health service in India. Approaching retirement of Sir John Lawrence: her anxiety to insert "the main-spring"--Points for which she contended. II. Lord Cranborne succeeded at the India Office by Sir Stafford Northcote--Miss Nightingale's friendship with Sir Bartle Frere--She determines to advance--The "Doors _versus_ Windows" controversy. III. Her communications with Sir S. Northcote --Interviews with him--Her scheme of organization adopted--Dispatch and other sanitary papers drafted by her. IV. Attitude of the Government of India--Letters from Sir John Lawrence--Abandonment of a female nursing scheme--Miss Nightingale's vexation. V. Continued correspondence with Sir John Lawrence--His return to England--Visit to Miss Nightingale 144

CHAPTER III PUBLIC HEALTH MISSIONARY FOR INDIA (1868-1872)

Miss Nightingale's "little Indian Department all to herself," a main pre-occupation. Rest-cure at Malvern (Dec. 1867)--Visit to her mother at Lea Hurst (July-Oct. 1868)--Miss Nightingale's movements in following years. II. Mr. Jowett's plea for less official drudgery, and more literary work--Her "Note on Pauperism" in _Fraser's Magazine_--Interest in colonization--Interview with Mr. Goschen. III. Health work for India: (1) correspondence and interviews with Indian officials--Interviews with Lord Mayo-- Correspondence with Lord Napier (Madras)--"Special cholera inquiry." IV. An episode: Miss Nightingale's intervention to save the Army Sanitary Commission and the Army Medical School from being retrenched out of existence--Statistical evidence of sanitary reform. V. Interviews with Lord Napier of Magdala--Further correspondence with Lord Mayo--Other interviews and correspondence. VI. Health work for India: (2) acquaintance and correspondence with native Indian gentlemen--Sanitary appeal to village elders. VII. Health work for India: (3) work in connection with the Sanitary Department at the India Office--Contributions to and revision of the Indian Health Annual. VIII. Ten years' progress: _How some People have Lived, not Died, in India_--How much, and yet how little! 161

CHAPTER IV ADVISER-GENERAL ON HOSPITALS AND NURSING (1868-1872)

Miss Nightingale as a central department relating to hospitals and nurses. Criticism of hospital plans--"Suggestions" for nursing organization in public institutions. II. Visits on such subjects from great personages--Interviews and correspondence with the Crown Princess of Prussia. III. Supervision of the Nightingale Training School--Personal influence--Miss Nightingale's reception of lady superintendents and nurses going out from the School to other posts. IV. Closing of the Midwifery School at King's College Hospital--Miss Nightingale's _Notes on Lying-in Institutions_. V. The Franco-German War--Miss Nightingale and the "National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded"--Communications with the Crown Princess of Germany--Red Cross Societies. VI. Miss Nightingale's continued ill-health--Dr. Sutherland's constant help 185

PART VII

WORK OF LATER YEARS (1872-1910)

CHAPTER I "OUT OF OFFICE." LITERARY WORK (1872-1874)

Miss Nightingale's thought of entering St. Thomas's Hospital (1872) --Dissuaded by Mr. Jowett--"This year I go out of office"--Meaning of her statement--Her connection with the War Office closed--Lord Northbrook did not come to her. II. Unsettlement and depression-- Mr. Jowett's plea for literary work--Mr. Mill's plea that she should speak out recalled. III. Articles in _Fraser's Magazine_ (1873): embodying some of her _Suggestions for Thought_--Froude's and Carlyle's opinions of the articles--Miss Nightingale and her critics. IV. Death of Mr. Mill--Appreciation of him by Miss Nightingale. V. Theological essays written at Mr. Jowett's suggestion--Discussions with him--Contributions to the revised edition of his _Plato_--Suggestions for his sermons--Collaboration in _The Children's Bible_--Remarks on such literary work 211

CHAPTER II THE MYSTICAL WAY

Miss Nightingale's fondness for Catholic books of devotion--Idea of making a selection--Mr. Jowett's views of mysticism. II. Miss Nightingale's Preface to her _Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages_. III. Interruption of work by the death of her father (1874)--His character--Death of Mrs. Bracebridge: Miss Nightingale's tributes to her and her husband--Family worries. IV. Her book on the _Mystics_ never finished--Her own mystical life --Her private meditations--The path to perfection 231

CHAPTER III MISS NIGHTINGALE'S SCHOOL (1872-1879)

Miss Nightingale's increased attention to the Nightingale Training School. Opening of the new buildings of St. Thomas's Hospital-- Appointment of a new Medical Instructor of the Probationers, and of a "Home Sister." II. Miss Nightingale's interviews with the probationers--Her character-sketches and other records--Her sense of humour. III. District nursing in London--Miss Florence Lees-- Selections and promotions--Some favourite pupils--Wide influence of the Nightingale nurses--Miss Nightingale's close relations with her old pupils in their new posts--Her affectionate solicitude for them --Typical letters--Extent of her correspondence. IV. Her "Addresses to Probationers"--Leading ideas in them--Style of address, reminiscent of school sermons. V. Her ideal of the nurse's calling --Her belief in individual influence, not in organization--Miss Nightingale as a "Founder" 246

CHAPTER IV AN INDIAN REFORMER (1874-1879)

Miss Nightingale's work on Indian questions. Her sources of information and industrious study: her opportunities of effective action less than in earlier years. II. Continued interest in army sanitation--Letter from Lord Napier of Magdala--Correspondence with Lord Salisbury and Lord Northbrook. III. Correspondence with Lord Salisbury and the Duke of Buckingham on the drainage of Madras. IV. Indian famines and an extension of Miss Nightingale's interests --Correspondence with Sir Arthur Cotton. V. An irrigation campaign --Miss Nightingale's appeal to Lord Salisbury for a Return of irrigation-results--Lord Salisbury on the experts--Miss Nightingale's continued advocacy of irrigation--Her article in the _Nineteenth Century_ on "The People of India" (1878)-- Correspondence with Lord Cranbrook. VI. Correspondence and interview with Mr. Gladstone--The death of Lord Lawrence. VII. Miss Nightingale's unpublished book on Indian Land Tenures and Irrigation--Her Irrigation maps. VIII. Her impatience at the slow rate of Indian reforms--Lord Salisbury's Philosophic Defence of the Policy of Draft 273

CHAPTER V HOME LIFE IN SOUTH STREET AND THE COUNTRY

Miss Nightingale's house in South Street--Sir Harry Verney's house in the same street. II. Her servants--Housekeeping. III. Miss Nightingale as a hostess--Reminiscences by a nursing friend. IV. Miss Nightingale's room--Personal appearance--Rarely out of doors--Love of birds--Note on London sky-effects. V. Sojourns out of London--A "lobster-like villa" at Norwood (1875)--Annual visits with her mother at Lea Hurst--Miss Nightingale's interest in her poorer neighbours--Mother and daughter--Impression made by Miss Nightingale on her friends--Mr. Jowett--The Grand Duchess of Baden --Lady Ashburton. VI. Letters to M. and Mme. Mohl--Death of M. Mohl (1876)--Death of Dr. Parkes--Miss Nightingale's intervention once more to save the Army Medical School--The Eastern Question--Miss Paulina Irby. VII. Was Miss Nightingale's a happy life?--Letters from Mr. Jowett 300

CHAPTER VI LORD RIPON AND GENERAL GORDON (1880-1885)

Death of Miss Nightingale's mother--Illness--Visits to the seaside and Claydon. II. The elections of 1880--Her special preoccupations and general work at this period--Visit to St. Thomas's Hospital. III. Friendship with General Gordon and his cousin, Mrs. Hawthorn--Inquiry into nursing by Orderlies in military hospitals--Letters from General Gordon. IV. Lord Ripon's Indian policy--Miss Nightingale's enthusiasm--Her efforts to support Lord Ripon--Interviews with Indian officials and politicians--Her interest in Indian agriculture and education--The Indian Civil servants at Oxford: suggestions to Arnold Toynbee--Her paper on Lord Ripon's Bengal Land Tenure Bill. V. The Egyptian campaign of 1882--Miss Nightingale and the return of the Guards--Her appearances in public--Defects in hospital arrangements in South Africa and Egypt (1880-82)--Miss Nightingale's representations--Committee of Inquiry--Miss Nightingale and Lord Wantage. VI. Royal Red Cross conferred on her (1883)--Correspondence with the Queen--The Ilbert Bill--The hospital corps--Reforms in accordance with the Committee's recommendations--Lord Wolseley and the female nurses. VII. Progress of Lord Ripon's reforms--His resignation--Miss Nightingale's interview with his successor, Lord Dufferin--Mr. Gladstone and India--Lord Ripon's return. VIII. The Soudan expedition--Miss Nightingale and the war nurses--Reminiscences of Sister Philippa--Letters to Miss Williams--Miss Nightingale's meditations--Death of old friends 323

CHAPTER VII "THE NURSES' BATTLE"; AND HEALTH IN THE VILLAGE (1885-1893)

Miss Nightingale's "Jubilee Year"--A retrospect (1837-1887). Selection of a new matron at St. Thomas's Hospital. II. Queen Victoria's "Jubilee Institute for Nurses"--Misgivings--"The Nurses' Battle": for and against Registration--Therival forces--Miss Nightingale's leadership of the "Anti's"--Course of the battle--The hearing by the Privy Council--The result--Miss Nightingale's standpoint. III. Her work for Indian sanitation--Political unsettlement at home--Miss Nightingale's interviews with Lord Roberts and others--Lord Roberts's introduction of female nurses into Indian military hospitals--Lady Dufferin's Association. IV. "The Sutherland Succession"--Threatened dissolution of the Army Sanitary Committee--Proposed abolition of the Sanitary Commissioners in India--Miss Nightingale's campaign in defence--Appeal to Lord Dufferin--Communications with Lord Cross and Mr. W. H. Smith--Resignation of Lord Randolph Churchill--Mr. Smith succeeded at the War Office by Mr. Stanhope--Resignation of Dr. Sutherland--Reconstitution of the Army Sanitary Committee. V. Draft dispatch at the India Office advocating a "forward" sanitary policy--The Indian Government's resolution for the appointment of Provincial Sanitary Boards--Lord Lansdowne succeeds Lord Dufferin. VI. Miss Nightingale and village sanitation in India--Scheme for providing funds submitted to Lord Cross--Her letter circulated to the Local Governments in India--Final reply from the Government of India (1894)--Her retrospect of her Indian work. VII. Miss Nightingale and village sanitation in England-- Death of her sister--Sir Harry Verney and Miss Nightingale--Her visits to Claydon--Her scheme of Health Missioners adopted by the Bucks County Council 353

CHAPTER VIII MR. JOWETT AND OTHER FRIENDS

Miss Nightingale's public acquaintances and private friends. Her sympathetic nature--Acquaintances made on public business passing into friendships--Sir Henry Yule. II. Affectionate sympathy with her relations--Death of her "Aunt Mai" (1889)--Letters to her younger relations--A burglary in South Street. III. Last years with Mr. Jowett--His illness in South Street (1887)--Their scheme for a "Nightingale Professorship of Statistics"--Mr. Jowett's illnesses and death (1892)--Death of Sir Harry Verney and of Mr. Shore Smith (1894). IV. Miss Nightingale on Mr. Jowett's death--Correspondence with Lord Lansdowne--Mr. Jowett's precepts on old age 385

CHAPTER IX OLD AGE. DEATH (1894-1910)

The spirit of Rabbi Ben Ezra. The latter years to be the best--Miss Nightingale's letters in this sense--Her own fullness of work. II. Continual interest in India--Lord Elgin's village sanitary inspection. III. Interest in army affairs--Letter to the Duke of Cambridge (1895)--The Hongkong barracks (1896)--Indian cantonments (1896-97)--The Victorian Era Exhibition (1897): Crimean "relics"--Note on Waterloo Day (1898)--The South African War (1899). IV. Interest in nursing--The "Nurses' Battle" again--The true "angels"--Correspondence with the Grand Duchess of Baden and Mr. Rathbone--Death of old friends and fellow-workers. V. Gradual failure of Miss Nightingale's powers--Loss of sight--Her companions--Her favourite reading--Visitors. VI. Honours--The Order of Merit (1907)--Freedom of the City (1908)--Her fame--Renewed cult of "The Popular Heroine." VII. Death and funeral--Memorials 402

CONCLUSION 424

APPENDICES

A. Chronological List of Writings by Miss Nightingale 437

B. List of Some Writings about Miss Nightingale 459

C. List of Portraits 467

INDEX 471

ILLUSTRATIONS FACE PAGE

Florence Nightingale: 1887. (_From the portrait by Sir William Richmond, K.C.B., R.A._) _Frontispiece_

Florence Nightingale in her Room at South Street. (_From a photograph by Miss E. F. Bosanquet, 1906_) 306

Florence Nightingale: 1907. (_From a water-colour drawing by Miss F. Amicia de Biden Footner_) 418

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Florence Nightingale's Handwriting: _facsimile_ of part of a letter to John Stuart Mill, August 11, 1867 216

PART V

FOR THE HEALTH OF THE ARMY IN INDIA

(1862-1865)

The question is no less an one than this: How to create a public health department for India; how to bring a higher civilization into India. What a work, what a noble task for a Government--no "inglorious period of our dominion" that, but a most glorious one! That would be creating India anew. For God places His own power, His own life-giving laws in the hands of man. He permits man to create mankind by those laws, even as He permits man to destroy mankind by neglect of those laws.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: _How People may live and not die in India_, 1864.

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY--THE LOSS OF FRIENDS

But tasks in hours of insight will'd Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd. MATTHEW ARNOLD.

The years immediately after Sidney Herbert's death were among the busiest and most useful in Miss Nightingale's life. She was engaged during them in carrying their "joint work unfinished" into a new field. In the previous volume we saw Miss Nightingale using her position as the heroine of the Crimean War in order to become the founder of modern nursing, and to initiate reforms for the welfare of the British soldier. Among those who know, it is recognized that the services which she rendered to the British army at home were hardly greater than those which she was able to render to British India, and it was this Indian work which after Sidney Herbert's death became one of the main interests of her life. She threw herself into it, as we shall hear, with full fire, and brought to it abundant energy and resource. But first she had the memory of her friend to honour and protect; and then the hours of gloom were to be deepened by the loss of another friend hardly less dear to her.

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Having finished her Paper upon Sidney Herbert, Miss Nightingale left the Burlington Hotel, never to return, and took lodgings in Hampstead (Aug.-Oct. 1861). Her mood was of deep despondency. She was inclined to shut herself off from most of her former fellow-workers. Against the outside world she double-barred her shutters. Her uncle was strictly enjoined to give no one her address; she asked that all her letters might be addressed to and from his care in London. The formula was to be that "a great and overwhelming affliction entirely precludes Miss Nightingale" from seeing or writing to anybody. "For her sake it is most earnestly to be wished," wrote her cousin Beatrice to Mr. Chadwick (Sept. 18), "that you may come into some immediate communication with her. It is your faith that her working days are not yet over, that she may work in another field, her own being now closed against her. I cannot find that any of those who have been with her lately would share this hope, less on account of her health, than of her state of extreme discouragement." It was a case not only, perhaps not chiefly, of personal loss, but also of public vexation; it was not only that the Minister had died, it was that his work seemed like to die also. The point of view appears in her letters to Dr. Farr:--

_Sept._ 10. We are grateful to you for the memorial of my dear Master which you have raised to him in the hearts of the nation.[1] Indeed it is in the hearts of the nation that he will live--not in the hearts of Ministers. There he is dead already, if indeed they have any. And before he was cold in his grave, Gladstone attends his funeral and then writes to me that he cannot pledge himself to give any assistance in carrying out his friend's reforms. The reign of intelligence at the War Office is over. The reign of muffs has begun. The only rule of conduct in the bureaucracy there and in the Horse Guards is to reverse _his_ decision, _his_ judgment, and (if they can do nothing more) _his_ words.

[1] An eloquent address delivered to the British Association at Manchester (_Times_, Sept. 9, 1861).

_October_ 2.... My poor Master has been dead two months to-day, too long a time for him not to be forgotten.... The dogs have trampled on his dead body. Alas! seven years this month I have fought the good fight with the War Office _and lost it_!

_November_ 2. My dear Master has been dead three months to-day. Poor Lady Herbert goes abroad this next week with the children and shuts up Wilton, the eldest boy going to school. It is as if the earth had opened and swallowed up even the Name which filled my whole life these five years.

But there were things to be done in her friend's name, and she turned to do them. The power of the bureaucracy to resist was strong, because the new Secretary of State was a novice at his task, and Lord Herbert, by failing to carry through any radical reorganization of the War Office, had as she said, failed to put in "the mainspring to his works." "The Commander-in-Chief rides over the learned Secretary of State as if he were straw." But there was one hopeful and helpful factor in the case. Now that the Secretary for War was in the Commons, Lord de Grey was reappointed Under-Secretary. He was a genuine reformer. He knew the mind of his former Chief. He was most sympathetic to Lady Herbert. He was acquainted with Miss Nightingale. The power of an Under-Secretary is very small, but what he could do, he would. A letter which she received from a friend, both of Lord de Grey and of herself, gave her encouragement:--

(_R. Monckton Milnes to Miss Nightingale._) _October_ 21. I knew how irreparable a loss you and your objects in life had in Herbert's death, but I should like you to know how you will find Ld. de Grey willing to do all in his power to forward your great and wise designs. I say "in his power," for that, you know, is extremely limited, but he may do something for you in an indirect way and, without much originality, he has considerable tact and adroitness. You won't like Sir G. Lewis, but somewhere or other you ought to do so; for in his sincere way of looking at things and in his critical and curious spirit he is by no means unlike yourself. He makes up his mind, no doubt, far better to the damnabilities of the work than you would do,--tho' one does not know what you would have been if you had been corrupted by public life. I write this about de Grey because I was staying with him not long ago, and he expressed himself on the subject with much earnestness.

II

So, then, there were some things perhaps which might yet, as she put it, be "saved from the wreck." Lord de Grey had already given earnest both of his good will and of his courage. He had seen Lady Herbert and asked about her husband's intentions. She knew them generally, but referred for details to Miss Nightingale, who was thus able to be of some use in carrying through Lord Herbert's scheme for a Soldiers' Home at Aldershot. Then there was the question of the General Hospital to be built at Woolwich. The Commander-in-Chief was opposed to the scheme, and asked Sir George Lewis to cancel it. Economy was, perhaps, behind the Minister tempting him. But Lord de Grey, who was present at the interview, stood firm. "Sir," he said, "it is impossible. Lord Herbert decided it, and the House of Commons voted it."[2] In the end, the Horse Guards and the War Office accepted the inevitable with a good grace; the order was given for the building to proceed, and Miss Nightingale's suggestion was adopted that it should be christened "The Herbert Hospital."

[2] Miss Nightingale related this incident in two letters--to Dr. Farr (Sept. 10), and to Harriet Martineau (Sept. 24).

Lord de Grey was also influential in securing a redefinition of Captain Galton's duties at the War Office. Lady Herbert told Lord de Grey that this was one of the last official matters on which she had heard her husband speak. Miss Nightingale again supplied the details, and to her ally was committed responsibility (under the Secretary of State) for new barrack works. On some other questions Miss Nightingale had the bitterness of seeing projects abandoned which she and Lord Herbert had almost matured. "It is really melancholy now," wrote Captain Galton to her (Aug. 19), "to see the attempts made on all hands to pull down all that Sidney Herbert laboured to build up." She recounted some of the disappointments in a letter to Harriet Martineau, and that lady, whose genuine sympathy in the cause was perhaps heightened by a journalist's scent for "copy," was eager to go on the war-path. "No harm can come," she wrote to Miss Nightingale (Oct. 4), "of an attempt to shame the Horse Guards. I have consulted my editor [of the _Daily News_], and if I can obtain a sufficiency of clear facts, I will gladly harass the Commander-in-Chief as he was never harassed before--that is, I will write a leader against him every Saturday for as many weeks as there are heads of accusation against him and his Department. We don't want to mince matters." Miss Nightingale was to supply the powder and shot; Miss Martineau was to fire the guns. The partnership was declined by Miss Nightingale. The reason she gave was that she was no longer in the way of obtaining much inside information. But she doubtless had other reasons. There were things which she had just managed to carry through. There were other possibilities of usefulness before her. She was playing a difficult game. She did not think that her hand would be strengthened by newspaper polemics, for the form of which she would not be responsible, but the information in which would be traced back to her. Among the points which she had just managed to score was the appointment of the Commission already mentioned,[3] for extending the Barracks Inquiry to the Mediterranean stations. Headquarters tried to stop it. "And I defeated them," she had told Miss Martineau (Sept. 24), "by a trick which they were too stupid to find out." Her papers do not disclose the nature of the "trick" by which this excellent piece of work was carried through.

[3] See Vol. I. p. 405.

And there was another thing which she did in order to forward Sidney Herbert's work, though in a field outside that of their collaboration: she wrote a stirring letter (Oct. 8) on the Volunteer Movement, which he had organized in 1859. It brought her several "offers," as we have heard already[4]; and, displayed in large print on a card, must have attracted many recruits. She wrote it as one who had experience of war and its lessons; as one, too, who had worked for the Army, "seven years this very month, without the intermission of one single waking hour." She made eloquent appeal to the patriotic spirit of the British people; and she included this piece of personal feeling: "On the saddest night of all my life, two months ago, when my dear chief Sidney Herbert lay dying, and I knew that with him died much of the welfare of the British Army--he was, too, so proud, so justly proud, of his Volunteers--on that night I lay listening to the bands of the Volunteers as they came marching in successively--it had been a review-day--and I said to myself, 'The nation can never go back which is capable of such a movement as this; not the spirit of an hour; these are men who have all something to give up; all men whose time is valuable for money, which is not their god, as other nations say of us.'" I do not know if the name of Florence Nightingale be still--as it ought to be--a name of power with the people. If it is, then her letter of 1861 might well be reprinted in connection with recruiting for the Territorial Force. She laid stress upon the voluntary spirit, as opposed to compulsion. But she laid stress also on the supreme importance of efficient training: "Garibaldi's Volunteers did excellently in guerilla movements; they failed before a fourth-rate regular army."

[4] Vol. I. p. 496.

III

Presently some old work in a new form came in Miss Nightingale's way. She had returned to London in November, chiefly in order to be on the spot for consultation and suggestion in connection with the Memorial to Sidney Herbert. It was her suggestion, for one thing, that the Memorial should include a Prize Medal at the Army Medical School. For this sojourn in London, Sir Harry Verney lent his house in South Street[5] to Miss Nightingale. The American Civil War now kept her busy. "Did I tell you," she wrote to Dr. Farr (Oct. 8), "that I had forwarded to the War Secretary at Washington, upon application, all our War Office Forms and Reports, statistical and other, taking the occasion to tell them that, as the U.S. had adopted our Registrar-General's nomenclature, it would be easier for them to adopt our Army Statistics Forms. It appears that they, the Northern States, are quite puzzled by their own want of any Army organization. I also took occasion to tell them of our Chinese success in reducing the Army mortality to one-tenth of what it was, and the Constantly Sick to one-seventh of what they were during the first winter of the Crimean War, due to my dear master." When the Civil War broke out, Miss Nightingale's example in the Crimea had produced an immediate effect. A "Woman's Central Association of Relief" was formed in New York. In co-operation with other bodies they petitioned the Secretary of War to appoint a Sanitary Commission, and after some delay this was done. Camps were inspected; female nurses were sent to the hospitals; contrivances for improved cooking were supplied, and in short, much of Miss Nightingale's Crimean work was reproduced.[6] Presently she became more directly concerned. At the end of the year (1861) England was on the verge of being embroiled in the conflict, and, whilst the agitation over the _Trent_ affair was at its height, the British Government decided to send reinforcements to Canada. Lord de Grey was charged with many of the preparations. He asked Miss Nightingale (Dec. 3) if he might consult her personally "as to sanitary arrangements generally." He wished to profit by her experience and judgment in relation to transports, hospitals, clothing of the troops, supplies, comforts for the sick, and generally upon "the defects and dangers to be feared," and how best to prevent them. He also asked for the names of suitable men for the position of Principal Medical Officer, and he consulted her again before making the appointment. Without a moment's loss of time, she set to work in conjunction with Dr. Sutherland, and sent in her suggestions. The draft instructions to the officers in charge of the expedition were sent to her on December 8. On December 10 Lord de Grey wrote: "I have got all your suggestions inserted in the Instructions, and am greatly obliged to you for them." "We are shipping off the Expedition to Canada as fast as we can," she wrote to Madame Mohl (Dec. 13). "I have been working just as I did in the times of Sidney Herbert. Alas! he left no organization, my dear master! But the Horse Guards were so terrified at the idea of the national indignation if they lost another army, that they have consented to everything." A few days later another draft of instructions was sent to her through Captain Galton. "We have gone over your draft very carefully," she wrote (Dec. 18), "and find that although it includes almost everything necessary, it does not define with sufficient precision the manner in which the meat is to get from the Commissariat into the soldier's kettle, or the clothing from the Army Medical General store on to the soldier's back. You must define all this. Otherwise you will have men, as you had in the Crimea, shirking the responsibility." Memoranda among Miss Nightingale's papers show the grasp of detail with which she worked out the problems. Her mind envisaged the scene of operations. She calculated the distances which might have to be covered by sledges; she counted the relays and depots; she compared the relative weights and warming capacities of blankets and buffalo robes. A great Commander was lost to her country when Florence Nightingale was born a woman. Her suggestions in the case of the Canadian reinforcements were happily not put to the test of war. The _Trent_ affair was smoothed over, largely, as is now well known, owing to the moderating counsels of the Prince Consort. It was his last service to his adopted country. Miss Nightingale felt his death to be a national loss. "He neither liked," she said of him, "nor was liked. But what he has done for our country no one knows."

[5] No. 32 at that time; now renumbered, No. 4.

[6] See on this subject Bibliography B, No. 23. The Secretary of another body, the United States Christian Communion, in sending reports and papers to Miss Nightingale (July 26, 1865) wrote: "Your influence and our indebtedness to you can never be known. Only this is true that everywhere throughout our broad country during these years of inventive and earnest benevolence in the constant endeavour to succour and sustain our heroic defenders, the name and work of Florence Nightingale have been an encouragement and inspiration." In the same year the plans of an Emigrant Hospital on Ward Island were sent to her. In return she sent engravings of the Departure and the Arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers: "Presented to the Commissioners of Emigration of New York for the new Emigrant Hospital on Ward Island by Florence Nightingale as a slight sign of her deepest reverence and her warmest sympathy for the noble act by which they have so magnificently provided for--not their own sick, but--those of the Old Country."

IV

Miss Nightingale's work in connection with the Canadian expedition was done in the midst of a personal sorrow of her own, second only in poignancy, if second at all, to that caused by the death of Sidney Herbert. This was the death of Arthur Hugh Clough. He had broken down in health and been ordered abroad in April 1861, and she had urged him to go. He died, however, at Florence on November 12. They had been close friends since her return to England from the Crimea. His sweetness of disposition, his humour, his lofty moral feeling, alike attracted her. He on his side had deep admiration for her, and he devoted such strength--alas! but little--as remained to him from work in the Privy Council Office to her service. He fetched and carried for her. He made arrangements for her journeys, as we have heard, and escorted her. He saw her printers, he corrected her proofs. He became, at a modest salary, secretary to the Nightingale Fund. It was poor work to set a poet to, but he did it with cheerful modesty. He was intent, he told Miss Nightingale, upon "doing plain work"; he had "studied and taught," he said, "too much for a man's own moral good." In 1860 his health began to fail. Miss Nightingale was sometimes a little impatient. His loyalty and zeal she could never have doubted; but she was inclined to think him lacking in initiative and energy. She was always inclined to drive willing horses a little hardly. In the case of Clough, as in that of Sidney Herbert, she sometimes attributed to infirmity of will what was in fact due to infirmity of body. And in each case her grief, when the end came, was not free, I think, from some element of self-reproach. "I have always felt," she had written to her uncle (Dec. 7, 1860), "that I have been a great drag on Arthur's health and spirits, a much greater one than I should have chosen to be, if I had not promised him to die sooner." "She saw my father," wrote her cousin Beatrice to Mr. Nightingale (Dec. 4), "to speak only of Arthur, as only she can speak. She was quite natural, very affectionate, very, very much moved." But in her state of loneliness and nervous exhaustion her feeling for lost friends was sometimes morbid. She said that for months after the death of Sidney Herbert, and again after that of Clough, she could not bear to open a newspaper for dread of seeing some mention of a beloved name. Some years later she was sent a book by Mrs. Clough. "I like very much," she replied (Nov. 13, 1865)--"how much I cannot say--to receive that book from you. But it would be impossible to me to read it or look at it, not from want of time or strength, but from too much of both spent on his memory, from thinking, not too little, but too much on him. But I don't say this for others. I believe it is a morbid peculiarity of long illness, of the loss of power of resistance to morbid thoughts. I cannot bear to see a portrait of those who are gone." The depth of her grief at the death of Mr. Clough is expressed or reflected in letters which she wrote or received at the time:--

(_Benjamin Jowett to Miss Nightingale._) BALLIOL, _Nov._ 19 [1861]. Thank you for writing to me. I am very much grieved at the tidings which your letter brought me. I agree entirely in your estimate of our dear friend's character. It was in 1836 (the anniversary is next week) that I first saw him when he was elected to the Balliol Scholarship. No one who only knew him in later life would imagine what a noble, striking-looking youth he was before he got worried with false views of religion and the world. I never met with any one who was more thoroughly high-minded: I believe he acted all through life simply from the feeling of what was right. He certainly had great genius, but some want of will or some want of harmony with things around him prevented his creating anything worthy of himself. I am glad he was married: life was dark to him, and his wife and children made him as happy as he was capable of being made. He was naturally very religious, and I think that he never recovered the rude shock which his religion received during his first years at Oxford. He did not see and yet he believed in the great belief of all--to do rightly. Did I quote to you ever an expression which Neander used to me of Blanco White: _einer Christ mehr in Unbewusstseyn als in Bewusstseyn_? It grieves me that you should have lost so invaluable a friend. No earthly trial can be greater than to pursue without friends the work that you began with them. And yet it is the more needed because it rests on one only. If there be any way in this world to be like Christ it must be by pursuing in solitude and illness, without the support of sympathy or public opinion, works for the good of mankind. I hope you will sometimes let me hear from you. Let me assure you that I shall never cease to take an interest in your objects and writings.--Ever yours sincerely, B. JOWETT.

(_Miss Nightingale to Sir John McNeill._) SOUTH STREET, _Nov._ 18.... He was a man of rare mind and temper. The more so because he would gladly do "plain work." To me, seeing the blundering harasses which were the uses to which we put him, he seemed like a race-horse harnessed to a coal truck. This not because he did "plain work" and did it so well. For the best of us can be put to no better use than that. He helped me immensely, though not officially, by his sound judgment and constant sympathy. "Oh, Jonathan, my brother Jonathan, my love to thee was very great, passing the love of woman." Now, not one man remains (that I can call a man) of all those whom these five years I have worked with. But, as you say, "we are all dying."

(_Sir John McNeill to Miss Nightingale._) EDINBURGH, _November_ 19. I should find it difficult to tell you how much your letter has distressed me. I do not know that I have ever cared so much for any man of whom I had seen so little as I did for Clough. Perhaps it may not have been all on his own account, for to know that he was near you was a comfort, but if he had not been altogether estimable in head and heart this mixed feeling could not have arisen. His death leaves you dreadfully alone in the midst of your work, but that work is your life and you can do it alone. There is no feeling more sustaining than that of being alone--at least I have ever found it so. To mount my horse and ride over the desert alone with the sky closing the circle in which my horse and I were the only living things, I have always found intensely elating. To work out views in which no one helped me has all my life been to me a source of vitality and strength. So I doubt not it will be to you, for you have a strength and a power for good to which I never could pretend. It is a small matter to die a few days sooner than usual. It is a great matter to work while it is day, and so to husband one's power as to make the most of the days that are given us. This you will do. Herbert and Clough and many more may fall around you, but you are destined to do a great work and you cannot die till it is substantially, if not apparently, done. You are leaving your impress on the age in which you live, and the print of your foot will be traced by generations yet unborn. Go on--to you the accidents of mortality ought to be as the falling of the leaves in autumn. Ever respectfully and sincerely yours, JOHN MCNEILL.

Miss Nightingale was able, as her friends predicted, to pursue in hours of gloom the tasks which in hours of insight she had willed; and to continue, without the same sympathy from close friends as before, the kind of work which she had once done with Sidney Herbert's co-operation or with Clough's advice. But she yearned for sympathy none the less; in a noble, though an exacting, way. For by "sympathy" she understood not such feeling as would be expressed merely in affectionate behaviour or personal consideration for herself, but a fellow-feeling for her objects expressed in readiness to follow her in serving them with something of her own practical devotion. She did not think of herself apart from her mission.

(_Miss Nightingale to Madame Mohl._) 32 SOUTH STREET, LONDON, _Dec_. 13 [1861]. I have read half your book thro' [_Madame Récamier_], and am immensely charmed by it. But some things I disagree with and more I do not understand. This does not apply to the characters, but to your conclusions, _e.g._ you say "women are more sympathetic than men." Now if I were to write a book out of my experience, I should begin _Women have no sympathy_. Yours is the tradition. Mine is the conviction of experience. I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions. Now look at my experience of men. A statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century, out of sympathy with me, remodels his whole life and policy--learns a science the driest, the most technical, the most difficult, that of administration, as far as it concerns the lives of men,--not, as I learnt it, in the field from stirring experience, but by writing dry regulations in a London room by my sofa with me. This is what I call real sympathy. Another (Alexander, whom I made Director-General) does very nearly the same thing. He is dead too. Clough, a poet born if ever there was one, takes to nursing-administration in the same way, for me. I only mention three whose whole lives were remodelled by sympathy for me. But I could mention very many others--Farr, McNeill, Tulloch, Storks, Martin, who in a lesser degree have altered their work by my opinions. And, the most wonderful of all, a man born without a soul, like Undine--all these elderly men.

Now just look at the degree in which women have sympathy--as far as my experience is concerned. And my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. I have lived and slept in the same bed with English Countesses and Prussian Bäuerinnen. No Roman Catholic Supérieure has ever had charge of women of the different creeds that I have had. No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me. My doctrines have taken no hold among women. Not one of my Crimean following learnt anything from me, or gave herself for one moment after she came home to carry out the lesson of that war or of those hospitals.... No woman that I know has ever _appris à apprendre_. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. You say somewhere that women have no attention. Yes. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. Nothing makes me so impatient as people complaining of their want of memory. How can you remember what you have never heard?... It makes me mad, the Women's Rights talk about "the want of a field" for them--when I know that I would gladly give £500 a year for a Woman Secretary. And two English Lady Superintendents have told me the same thing. And we can't get _one_.... They don't know the names of the Cabinet Ministers. They don't know the offices at the Horse Guards. They don't know who of the men of the day is dead and who is alive. They don't know which of the Churches has Bishops and which not. Now I'm sure I did not know these things. When I went to the Crimea I did not know a Colonel from a Corporal. But there are such things as Army Lists and Almanacs. Yet I never could find a woman who, out of sympathy, would consult one--for my work. The only woman I ever influenced by sympathy was one of those Lady Superintendents I have named. Yet she is like me, overwhelmed with her own business.... In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe says. But how? _In having sympathy._ I am sure I have nothing else. I am sure I have no genius. I am sure that my contemporaries, Parthe, Hilary, Marianne, Lady Dunsany, were all cleverer than I was, and several of them more unselfish. But not one had a bit of sympathy. Now Sidney Herbert's wife just did the Secretary's work for her husband (which I have had to do without) out of pure sympathy. She did not understand his policy. Yet she could write his letters for him "like a man." I should think M^{me} Récamier was another specimen of pure sympathy.... Women crave _for being loved_, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so.... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?...

You say of M^{me} Récamier that her existence was "empty but brilliant." And you attribute it to want of family. Oh, dear friend, don't give in to that sort of tradition. People often say to me, You don't know what a wife and mother feels. No, I say, I don't and I'm very glad I don't. And _they_ don't know what I _feel_.... I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from his own experience. Ezekiel went running about naked, "for a sign." I can't run about naked because it is not the custom of the country. But I would mount three widows' caps on my head, "for a sign." And I would cry, This is for Sidney Herbert, This is for Arthur Clough, and This, the biggest widow's cap of all, is for the loss of all sympathy on the part of my dearest and nearest.[7] ...

I cannot understand how M^{me} Récamier could give "advice and sympathy" to such opposite people as, _e.g._ M^{me} Salvage and Chateaubriand. Neither can I understand how she could give "support" without recommending a distinct line of policy,--by merely keeping up the tone to a high one. It is as if I had said to Sidney Herbert, Be a statesman, be a statesman--instead of indicating to him a definite course of statesmanship to follow. Also I am sure I never could have given "advice and sympathy" to Gladstone and S. Herbert--men pursuing opposite lines of policy. Also I am sure I never could have been the friend and adviser of Sidney Herbert, of Alexander, and of others, by simply keeping up the tone of general conversation on promiscuous matters. We debated and settled _measures_ together. That is the way we did it. Adieu, dear friend.... I have had two consultations. They say that all this worry has brought on congestion of the spine which leads straight to paralysis....

[7] The reference here is to the Aunt who, in earlier years, had been in close companionship with her. At this time there was some misunderstanding between them. Mrs. Smith's advancing age and home claims brought a cessation of her constant activity in Miss Nightingale's service; but in later years aunt and niece took much counsel together in a resumed study of the religious subjects upon which they had formerly held intimate converse: see below, pp. 353, 387.

(_Miss Nightingale to her Mother._) 9 CHESTERFIELD ST., W., _March_ 7 [1862]. DEAREST MOTHER--So far from your letters being a "bore," you are the only person who tells me any news. I have never been able to get over the morbid feeling at seeing my lost two's names in the paper, so that I see no paper. I did not know of the deaths you mention.... But they and others do not know how much they are spared by having no bitterness mingled with their grief. Such unspeakable bitterness has been connected with each one of my losses--far, far greater than the grief.... Sometimes I wonder that I should be so impatient for death. Had I only to stand and wait, I think it would be nothing, though the pain is so great that I wonder how anybody can dread an operation.... I think what I have felt most (during my last three months of extreme weakness) is the not having one single person to give me one inspiring word or even one correct fact. I am glad to end a day which never can come back, gladder to end a night, gladdest to end a month. I have felt this much more in setting up (for the first time in my life) a fashionable old maid's house in a fashionable quarter (tho' grateful to Papa's liberality for enabling me to do so), because it is, as it were, deciding upon a new and independent course in my broken old age.... Thank you very much for the weekly box. I could not help sending the game, chicken, vegetables and flowers to King's College Hospital. I never see the spring without thinking of my Clough. He used to tell me how the leaves were coming out--always remembering that, without his eyes, I should never see the spring again. Thank God! my lost two are in brighter springs than ours. Poor Mrs. Herbert told me that her chief comfort was in a little Chinese dog of his, which he was not very fond of either (he always said he liked Christians better than beasts), but which used to come and kiss her eyelids and lick the tears from her cheeks. I remember thinking this childish. But now I don't. My cat does just the same to me. Dumb beasts observe you so much more than talking beings; and know so much better what you are thinking of.... Ever, dear Mama, your loving child, F.

At the turn of the year, 1861-62, Miss Nightingale had been very ill; and two physicians, Dr. Williams and Dr. Sutherland, were in daily attendance. Happily, however, the case was by no means so serious as she had reported to Madame Mohl, and in 1862 she was able to devote unremitting labour to one of the heaviest, and most useful, pieces of work which she ever did.

CHAPTER II

THE PROVIDENCE OF THE INDIAN ARMY

(1862, 1863)

In this case you are doing much more than providing for the health of the Troops; for, to be effectual, the improvement must extend to the civil population, and thus another great element of Civilization will be introduced.--SIR CHARLES TREVELYAN (_Letter to Florence Nightingale_, Aug. 11, 1862).

It is a commonplace that the British Empire in India was won and is held by British arms. And this, though not the whole truth of the tenure by which the Empire is held, is true. What is also true, but less generally known, is that there have been heavier sacrifices than those demanded in war and rendered glorious by British valour. The greater part of the British lives that were shed in India were lost, not in battle, but by disease. Burke said of British rule in India in his time: "England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations. Were we driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the ourang-outang or the tiger."[8] That was no longer true at the time with which we are here concerned. The era had begun in which it has been a song of the English to "drive the road and bridge the ford." But the land was not yet "cleared of evil." The British soldier was still sent out to India to die ingloriously by the neglect of sanitary laws.

In 1859 it was found that the average annual death-rate among the British soldiers in India since the year 1817 had been 69 per 1000. To-day it is little over 5 per 1000. The changes in barracks and military sanitation in India, which are primarily accountable for this great saving of life, are directly traceable to the recommendations of the Royal Commission which was appointed by Lord Stanley in 1859, and which reported in 1863. Thus much the reader may find stated in any trustworthy book of reference or other standard authority. What he will not find generally stated is that the appointment of the Royal Commission is directly traceable to Miss Nightingale, that by her the greater part of its Report was written, and that the suggestions for reform founded upon it were also her work. At an International Congress held in London in 1860 a French delegate, as already related, spoke of Florence Nightingale as "the Providence of the English Army." She was no less the Providence of the Indian Army. To the British soldier in India, as at home, she was "a saviour." In introducing this subject, we must go back a little in point of time, for the Indian work had begun a few years before the death of Sidney Herbert.

[8] Speech on Fox's East India Bill, Dec. 1, 1783 (_Burke's Speeches_, 1816, vol. ii. p. 430).

* * * * *

"I must tell you a secret," wrote Miss Nightingale to Harriet Martineau in 1859 (May 19), "because I think it will please you. For eight long months I have been 'importunate-widowing' my 'unjust judge,' viz. Lord Stanley, to give us a Royal Sanitary Commission to do exactly the same thing for the Armies in India which the last did for the Army at home. We have just won it. The Queen has signed the Warrant. So it is safe. Mr. Sidney Herbert is Chairman of course. Drs. Sutherland, Martin, Farr, and Alexander, whose names will be known to you, and Sir R. Vivian and Sir P. Cautley, of the India Council, are on it."

Miss Nightingale had made up her mind two years before to do this thing. The Indian Mutiny, which filled some minds only with thoughts of vengeance and repression against the native soldiers, filled hers rather with thoughts of pity and reform on behalf of the British soldiers. She had gone into the figures of mortality in the Indian army at the time when she was analysing those in the army at home. There was "murder" committed not only by the Sepoys. It was murder also to doom British soldiers to death by neglect of sanitary precautions. At the end of her _Notes on the Army_ (1857), she inserted a fly-leaf, which foreshadowed her Indian campaign:--

While the sheets were passing through the press, those lamentable occurrences took place in India which have led to an universal conviction that this vast Empire must henceforth be held by British troops. If we were to be led by past experience of the presumed effect of Indian climates on European constitutions, our country might almost despair of being able to supply men enough.... The British race has carried with it into those regions of the sun its habits, its customs, and its vices, without considering that under a low temperature man may do with impunity what under a higher one is death. Our vast Indian Empire consists of many zones, of many regions, of many climates. On the mere question of climate, it is surely within human possibility, even in the great majority of instances, so to arrange the stations, and so to connect them, by railroads and telegraphs, that the troops would hardly be required to occupy unhealthy districts. Even with regard to such districts the question arises to what extent the unhealthiness is inevitable, and to what extent it would be remediable.... As an illustration of the necessity of Government interference in this matter, it may be stated, on the very first authority, that, after a campaign perhaps one of the most arduous and successful on record, and when the smallness of the British force and the season of the year required every sanitary precaution to be taken for the preservation of the force, a certain earnest, energetic Officer appointed a sanitary inspector to attend to the cleansing of a captured city, and to the burial of some thousand dead bodies of men, horses, asses, bullocks, camels, and elephants, which were poisoning the air. The Bombay Government, to which the appointment was referred, "would not sanction it," "_because there was no precedent for it_"! In future, it ought to be the duty of the Indian Government to require no precedents for such procedure. The observance of Sanitary laws should be as much part of the future _régime_ of India as the holding of Military positions or as Civil government itself. It would be a noble beginning of the new order of things to use hygiene as the handmaid of civilization.

Everything that Miss Nightingale thus said should be done, was done; and to the doing of it, she supplied, first, the propelling force, and, then, much of the detailed direction.

First came the movement for getting the appointment of a Royal Commission agreed to in principle. Miss Nightingale's reference to Lord Stanley as her "unjust judge" need not be taken too seriously. He was her very good friend, as we know;[9] and it was when he was transferred from the Colonial to the India Office (1858) that she felt her time to have come. And Lord Stanley agreed at once to her suggestion of appointing _a_ Commission. It was when the consideration of _the_ Commission was reached that the delay began. Who should approach Lord Stanley on the details? And how should it be done? Miss Nightingale and what I have called her cabinet of reformers were equally interested in the Sub-Commissions still sitting on Army Sanitation at home. Lord Stanley wanted Mr. Herbert to undertake the chairmanship of the India Commission. Should he accept it, at risk of diverting some of his attention from these other reforms? Miss Nightingale and her friends hit upon a plan, as she hoped, for killing two birds with one stone. It was intimated to Lord Stanley that Mr. Herbert would accept the chairmanship on condition that the pending reforms at home were hastened. I do not know if the Indian Secretary came to terms with the War Secretary in that sense; if he did, I fear that General Peel interpreted "haste" as _festina lente_. Anyhow, Mr. Herbert accepted the chairmanship, and then some months were spent in arranging the membership and the terms of reference. There were to be three sanitary experts, a statistician, and two members of the India Council. Of the two latter, one (Sir R. Vivian) was a friend of Miss Nightingale's uncle, Mr. Smith; and of Sir Proby Cautley she had heard good reports. The sanitarians--Drs. Sutherland, Martin, and Alexander--and Dr. Farr, the statistician, were all of her inner circle. At the last moment there was a fresh delay. The list was submitted for the royal approval, and Her Majesty required that "a Queen's officer of acknowledged experience in India" should be added to the Commission. Mr. Herbert asked Miss Nightingale to supply a suitable man, by which he meant a man whose acknowledged experience included some belief in sanitary science. She took great pains, and employed some wile in obtaining the best opinions. She wrote, for one thing, to her uncle, telling him (May 19, 1859) to get at Sir John Lawrence, through his friend Sir R. Vivian, and ask for suggestions. "Vivian must be soaped," she added, "so as not to let him think that we undervalue _his_ opinion." Sir John Lawrence did not, however, on this occasion prove very resourceful; Miss Nightingale sent in the name of an officer, Colonel E. H. Greathed, who had been commended to her through another channel, and he was duly added to the Commission. At an earlier stage she had thrown out the interesting suggestion that John Stuart Mill, lately retired from the East India House, should be asked to serve, but this did not meet with favour. "Our business," wrote one of her circle, "is with spades and wheelbarrows," and he doubted whether "Compte" [sic] could be put to such purposes. Miss Nightingale always thought that this ally of hers, though invaluable in many ways, was a little wanting in soul. So then the Commission was appointed. The Warrant was issued on May 31, 1859. The Commission reported on May 19, 1863. There were some changes in its personnel from death and other causes. On the overthrow of the Derby Government, Mr. Herbert went to the War Office, and he presently resigned the chairmanship. Lord Stanley succeeded him. The members of the Commission on whom both Mr. Herbert and Lord Stanley most relied were Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Farr, and a third, who was yet not a member--Miss Nightingale. And among these three the lion's share of the work was done by her.

[9] See Vol. I. p. 339.

II

She had not waited for the actual appointment of the Commission to begin collecting, preparing, and digesting evidence for it. Her first concern was to draft a circular of inquiry which should be sent to all the Stations in India. It lacked nothing, as will be supposed, in requiring fulness of statistical detail. When she had prepared it, she sent it in proof to Sir John McNeill for his suggestions, asking him also (May 9, 1859) "kindly to give an opinion as to the general direction which the Enquiry should take." In cases where she was personally acquainted with Governors or high military or medical officers in India, she wrote soliciting their good offices. Sir Charles Trevelyan, then Governor of Madras, promised cordial co-operation. Then she and Dr. Farr set to work on such statistical records as were obtainable from the East India House. There is a bundle of correspondence amongst her Papers relating to the difficulties she encountered, and surmounted, in obtaining official sanction for clerical work in this regard. Dr. Farr's appetite for statistics was as insatiable as hers, and she had taken means to lay in ample supplies:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Dr. Farr._) HIGHGATE, _June_ 2, [1859]. Your Commission was gazetted on May 31 and Mr. Herbert is in town. As it will be necessary to obtain the Statistics of Sickness, Mortality, and Invaliding of the Indian Army from the Medical Boards there, would not some of the proposed forms for the Army Medical Dep. be better than any other, filled up for each station with the Diseases annually for a period say of 10 years? Or would it be necessary to provide others? We must, of course, have the most minute Statistics--both for Soldiers and Officers in the Queen's, Company's and native troops. And these we should get by this method for 10 years. I suppose the Medical Boards have the Presidency Medical Book Records. Would it be necessary to get the Returns for each Corps separately? Would it not be important to get the ages--age and time of service at Death or Invaliding?

HAMPSTEAD, _Dec._ 6 [1859]. In consequence of your intemperate desire to have the Indian Medical Service Regulations, we have applied at the Great House for copies. And the answer is that they have only one Office copy, and if we want any we must send to India. Knowing their weakness, we had (in our "Queries") previously sent to two hundred Stations in India for copies of all "Regulations," and we hope the result will satisfy your literary appetite.

Dr. Farr, then, was being fed with statistics. Officials in India were being kept busy with forms to be filled up, and with the preparation of other written evidence. In November 1859 the Commission began taking oral evidence in London, but this was a comparatively minor part of its labours, and during 1860 no public sittings were held. They were resumed in 1861. Lord Stanley had then succeeded Mr. Herbert in the chair, but Miss Nightingale's grip upon the Commission was not relaxed. Two of the Commissioners, Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Farr, were in close touch with her. The former was with her almost every day; the latter asked her to send him questions which he should put to witnesses. As in the case of the former Royal Commission, so now Miss Nightingale saw some of the witnesses before they gave their evidence. Among her visitors in this sort was Sir John Lawrence, as already mentioned, and a friendship began which had important consequences. Seeing that everything was thus in good train, Miss Nightingale was able during the years 1859-60-61 to devote her main work to those other matters with which we have been concerned in preceding Parts. In 1862, her main interest was in the Indian Commission, and the amount of work which she gave to it during 1862-1863 was enormous.

Her manner of life during these years was similar to that described in a previous chapter. Work for the Commission required her constant attendance in London or within easy distance of it. In 1862 she lived either in a hotel (Peary's, 31 Dover Street), a hired house (9 Chesterfield Street), or Sir Harry Verney's house in South Street. During August and September she took a house in Oak Hill Park, Hampstead. In 1863 she divided her time between Hampstead, hired houses in Cleveland Row, and Sir Harry Verney's. Her affectionate friend, Mrs. Sutherland, did all the house-hunting for her. Cleveland Row was selected for its nearness to the War Office; and the convenience of the site so far constrained Dr. Sutherland's sanitary conscience that he declared Cleveland Row to be "the airiest place in London."

III

Few of my readers have come to close quarters, I suppose, with the _Indian Sanitary Commission's Report_. It is a very formidable thing, consisting of two bulky volumes, containing respectively 1069 and 959 pages--in all 2028 pages, mostly in small print. Of this mountainous mass, the greater part bears in one way or another the impress of Miss Nightingale. It was she, in the first place, as already stated, who drafted the questions which were sent to every military station in India. The replies, signed in each case by the commanding officer, the engineer officer, and the medical officer, occupy the whole of the second volume. The replies, as they came in from India, were sent to her to analyse. There were van-loads of them, she said, which cost her £4:10s. to move whenever she changed houses. With the analysis made by her and Dr. Sutherland, these replies anticipated, as she afterwards noted,[10] the Statistical Survey of India which Lord Mayo ordered ten years later. It was said at the time that such a complete picture of life in India, both British and native, was contained in no other book in existence. In October 1861 she was formally requested by the Commission to submit remarks on these Stational Reports. She had completed the task by August 1862. The "Observations by Miss Nightingale," which occupy twenty-three pages of the Report, are among the most remarkable of her Works, and in their results among the most beneficent. They are also extremely readable; and to make them more instructive, she included a number of woodcuts illustrating, not only Indian hospitals and barracks, but native customs in connection with water-supply and drainage.[11] The Treasury--horrified perhaps at the idea of popularizing a Blue-book--made some demur to the cost, but Miss Nightingale was allowed to solve the difficulty by paying for the printing, as well as for the illustrations, out of her private purse.

[10] In her _marginalia_ to Sir William Hunter's _Earl of Mayo_ (1891).

[11] Indian officers (and especially Colonel Young) supplied her with sketches, some of which were touched up by her cousin, Miss Hilary Bonham Carter.

She made full use of the opening which the niggardliness of the Treasury gave her. She hurried the printers, and had a large number of her "Observations" struck off for private use. "I have looked once more," wrote Lord Stanley (Nov. 21), "through your Remarks, and like them better the oftener I read them. The style alone (apart from the authority which your name carries with it) will ensure their being studied by many who know nothing of the subject. They will admirably relieve the dryness of our official Report. I hope every Indian and English newspaper will reprint them, in extracts at least. They must be circulated with our Report, separately from the too voluminous mass of evidence which we can't help appending. You have added one more to your many and invaluable services in the cause." "Miss Nightingale's Paper," wrote Dr. Farr to Dr. Sutherland (Dec. 1), "is a masterpiece, in her best style; and will rile the enemy very considerable--all for his good, poor creature."[12] But it was not only among the Commissioners that she circulated her Paper. She sent it confidentially to many of her influential friends. "The picture is terrible," wrote Sir John McNeill (Aug. 9), "but it is all true. There is no one statement from beginning to end that I feel disposed to question, and there are many which my own observation and experience enable me to confirm." A copy went to John Stuart Mill, who was much pleased with the "Observations," and was certain that "the publication of them would do vast good." Miss Nightingale had a copy bound for the Queen, and sent it--as also a copy of her Paper on Sidney Herbert--through Sir James Clark, who marked passages for the Queen to read. Her Majesty, he found from conversation, had not confined her reading to those passages. The Queen in return sent a copy of her Collection of Prince Albert's Speeches. "The Queen," wrote Miss Nightingale to M. Mohl (Feb. 14, 1863), "has sent me her book with such a touching inscription. She always reminds me of the Greek chorus with her hands clasped above her head wailing out her irrepressible despair."[13] Miss Nightingale sent her "Observations" also to Sir John Lawrence, who studied them closely, and corresponded with her on the subject. Another copy went to Sir Charles Trevelyan.[14] "Having," he wrote (Oct. 31, 1862), "undertaken the duties of Financial Member of the Council of India, I may now be able to give some help in carrying the recommendations of your Commission into practical effect. You must not expect from me as much as Sidney Herbert did, for my power will not be the same. The Governor-General and the local Governors will alone be in that position. But I shall do _what I can_. Perhaps you will send me a copy of your Abstract of the Evidence, and direct my attention to the points of more immediate importance. I shall be obliged for any hints." Miss Nightingale responded by sending him papers enough to occupy all his time on the voyage. She seems at this time to have entertained some hope that her health would permit her, when the Report was out, to visit India in person; for one of Sir Charles's letters refers to such a visit, and expresses the pleasure which it would give to Lady Trevelyan and himself to receive her as their guest, and in every way to assist her mission. But this was not to be. Her knowledge of India and Indian questions was already great, and presently it became so minute as to encourage a legend that she herself had once been there.[15] But she never saw the country. It is not always either the "life-long resident," or, on the other hand, "Padgett, M.P.," who is better qualified than the student to perceive and serve a country's need.

[12] A true prediction: see Sir Bartle Frere's saying, below, p. 158.

[13] The inscription is: "To Miss Florence Nightingale in recollection of the greatest and best of Princes from the beloved Prince's broken-hearted Widow, Victoria R. Osborne, Jan. 13, 1863."

[14] He had been recalled from Madras in 1860.

[15] "It will be remembered that Miss Florence Nightingale came to this country and was impressed with the idea that if India needed anything it was village sanitation. She collected a mass of facts and has since been agitating in England": _Amrita Bazar Patrika_ (Calcutta), June 29, 1892, reprinted in the _Indian Spectator_, July 10.

Miss Nightingale's "Observations" form a synopsis of the whole subject. Giving chapter and verse from the Stational reports for each of her statements, she shows, first, that the prevailing diseases were camp diseases such as she had seen in the Crimean War--largely due to the selection of unsuitable sites. Among the causes were Bad Water, Bad Drainage, Filthy Bazaars, Want of Ventilation, and Surface Overcrowding in barrack-huts and sick-wards. Her remarks under these several heads are often characteristically racy. "Where tests have been used, the composition of the water reads like a very intricate prescription, containing nearly all the chlorides, sulphates, nitrates, and carbonates in the pharmacopoeia, besides silica and quantities of animal and vegetable matter, which the reports apparently consider nutritive." "If the facilities for washing were as great as those for drink, our Indian army would be the cleanest body of men in the world." "There is no drainage, in any sense in which we understand the word. The reports speak of cesspits as if they were dressingrooms." "Except where the two Lawrences have been--there one can always recognize their traces--the bazaars are simply in the first savage stage of social savage life." Under the head of "Overcrowding," she brings together various instances with figures and woodcuts; she quotes one report which said that the men (300 men per room!) "are generally accommodated in the barrack without inconvenient overcrowding," and she asks, "What is _convenient_ overcrowding?" "At some stations the floors are of earth, varnished over periodically with cow-dung: a practice borrowed from the natives. Like Mahomet and the mountain, if men won't go to the dunghill, the dunghill, it appears, comes to them." Her next section, on "Intemperance," is scathing. In India, as at home,[16] it was a current opinion of the time that the soldier is by nature a drunken animal; the only question seemed to be as to how he had better get drunk. At one station, though the men were reported as "mostly temperate," she found that on a ten years' average one man in three was admitted into hospital directly from drink. "The men are killed by liver disease on canteen spirits to save them from being killed by liver disease on bazaar spirits. May there not be some middle course whereby the men may be killed by neither?" Under "Diet," she notes the absurdity of a uniform ration, in amount and quality, in all seasons and climates; and ventures to doubt whether cesspits are desirable adjuncts of kitchens. Her next head is "Want of Occupation and Exercise"--a fruitful source of vice and disease. It is a most interesting chapter, full of valuable hints and illustrated by an amusing drawing, sent to her by Colonel Young, of "Daily Means of Occupation and Amusement _passim_." Here, as in much else of Miss Nightingale's work, she collected all the better opinions; she picked out from the returns before her any hopeful experiments; enlarged upon them, and drove the moral home. Her chapter on "Indian Hospitals" is naturally very full and detailed. She discusses the prevalent structural defects; suggests improvements in the internal arrangements; and notes that there were "neither trained orderlies nor female nurses." On the subject of "Hill Stations," Miss Nightingale's "Observations" show a fear lest too much reliance should be placed upon their superior salubrity. She quotes instances of terrible sanitary defects on hill stations, and enforces the moral that "the salvation of the Indian army must be brought about by sanitary measures everywhere." After discussing "Native Towns," "Soldiers' Wives," and "Statistics," Miss Nightingale insisted generally on the importance of instituting a proper system of sanitary service in India. Henceforth, to the end almost of her long life, she regarded herself, and in large measure was able to act, as a sanitary servant to the army and peoples of India.

[16] See Vol. I. p. 277.

Miss Nightingale's "Observations" were only part of her share in the labours of the Commission. They were followed in the Report by an Abstract, arranged under Presidencies, of the Returns on which the "Observations" were founded. This analysis, occupying nearly a hundred pages, was drawn up, as already stated, by Miss Nightingale and Dr. Sutherland. The manuscript of it, preserved amongst her papers, is mainly in her handwriting. And she did much more, as will presently be related.

IV

When the Commission of the Army in India was nearing the end of its labours, an event happened which seemed to Miss Nightingale of crucial importance. On April 14, 1863, she heard from Sir Harry Verney that Sir George Lewis, the Secretary for War, had died suddenly on the previous day. Sir Harry added that at the Service Clubs, Lord de Grey was talked of as a probable successor, but that Lord Panmure's name was also mentioned. From another and a better-informed source she heard that Lord de Grey hoped to get the appointment, but that there were believed to be two difficulties in the way. The Queen might object to the War Office being given to a Minister who had not yet been in the Cabinet, and pressure might be put upon Lord Palmerston from other quarters not to appoint a Peer. Should either or both of these factors prevail, Mr. Cardwell was believed to be the most probable successor. Now it seemed to Miss Nightingale all-important that, when the Report on the health of the army in India came out, the Secretary of State for War should be a proved sanitarian. She did not want to have once more to "bully the Bison," and she did not know much of Mr. Cardwell. She did know Lord de Grey, and she knew him as a sympathiser in her cause. Without a moment's delay she set herself to bring to bear in his favour such influence as she might possess, either on her own account or as the public legatee, as it were, of Sidney Herbert. A telegram written _en clair_ and preserved by the recipient shows how a good press was secured for Lord de Grey's appointment:--

_From_ Florence Nightingale to Harriet Martineau.--Agitate, agitate, for Lord de Grey to succeed Sir George Lewis.

The world was duly informed next day (April 17) through the columns of the _Daily News_ that public opinion expected the appointment of Lord de Grey. But Miss Nightingale took other measures. She wrote a letter to Lord Palmerston, and to his principal colleague, Mr. Gladstone, she sent a copy of it. Mr. Gladstone, in reply, did not doubt that Lord Palmerston had a very high opinion of Lord de Grey, but added on his own part that he saw great difficulty in not having the head of the War Office, with its vast expenditure, in the House of Commons. The letter to Lord Palmerston, meanwhile, was delivered by a special messenger, who had been strictly charged to make sure that the Minister read it at once. The sequel, describing a somewhat curious scene, had better be given in Sir Harry Verney's own words:--

CLEVELAND ROW, _Ap._ 15 [2.30]. From Hampstead I returned to South Street, and found your letter. Thence to Cambridge House. Lord Palmerston was so good as to admit me. I said that I had seen you this morning, and that by your desire I requested him to allow me to read a letter to him from you. He said, "Certainly"; and I read it to him rather slowly. Having read it, I said that you had mentioned this morning that within a fortnight of Lord Herbert's death, he had said to you more than once that he hoped Lord de Grey might be his successor. I then added, "I have not to request any reply or observations on Miss Nightingale's letter. I have only to thank you for your kindness in allowing me to read it." He took the letter and put it in his pocket. He then asked how you are, and where, and I told him. There is a Cabinet at 5.30 this afternoon. I think that if Gladstone has your note before going to it, it might be well.

She had anticipated Sir Harry's suggestion, as we have seen. The Prime Minister put her letter into his pocket, but it did not stay there. He took it with him to Windsor and read it to the Queen. On April 22 it was announced that Her Majesty had been pleased to approve the appointment of Lord de Grey as Secretary of State for War.

V

Miss Nightingale thus felt assured that when the Indian Report came out she would have a sympathetic chief at the War Office, and she turned with the greater zest to the next stage in her labours; namely, the preparation of the Report by the Commissioners. The manuscript of the first page or two (explaining the delay in issuing the Report and the procedure of the Commission) is in Lord Stanley's handwriting (preserved among Miss Nightingale's papers). He entrusted the preparation of the first draft of the rest of the Report, for statistics to Dr. Farr, and for the rest to Miss Nightingale and Dr. Sutherland. She had written a first draft of the greater part of her sections of the Report as early as April 1862. By August it was in type and corrected by Lord Stanley, who "pledged himself to carry it through the Commission next month."[17] But Dr. Farr's section was not so far advanced, and there were other delays at which Miss Nightingale chafed not a little. In May 1863 the last stage was reached. "I have done and shall do all in my power," Lord Stanley wrote to her (July 10), "to make it public that to Dr. Sutherland and you we mainly owe it that the Report has assumed its present shape." Among her papers is a collection of proofs of the Report in various stages; some corrected by Dr. Farr and Dr. Sutherland, others corrected and re-corrected by her. The descriptive portion of the Report is in substance a repetition of her "Observations," in the colder language which is held to add weight and dignity to such documents; though here and there Miss Nightingale's touch may be felt. The magnitude of the evils which needed to be remedied is put in an arresting way. "Besides deaths from natural causes [9 per 1000], 60 head per 1000 of our troops perish annually in India. It is at that expense that we have held dominion there for a century; a company out of every regiment has been sacrificed every twenty months. These companies fade away in the prime of life; leave few children; and have to be replaced, at great cost, by successive shiploads of recruits." The cost of preventable sickness in the Indian army was calculated at £388,000 a year. The list of Recommendations with which the Report concludes may be described as a Sanitary Charter for the Army in India--a Charter which during many successive years was gradually put into force.

[17] Letter to Sir J. McNeill, Aug. 8, 1862.

Last of all came what Miss Nightingale considered the most vital point of all--namely, the suggestion of practical machinery by which, if the Government adopted it, the recommendations of the Commission might be carried out. At this crucial point, she had a very stiff fight. The machinery, as she had devised it, was to be twofold. First, there were to be Sanitary Commissions appointed for each Presidency in India. On this point, all the Commissioners seem to have been agreed; but it was different with Miss Nightingale's second point. The reports which she had read and marked from the Indian stations filled her with a fear that if the whole of the initiative were left to India the work would in some cases be negligently or unintelligently done. There had not yet been in that country the same education of public opinion amongst the governing class in the science of sanitation that had been in progress in England. She deemed it essential that the machinery recommended by the Commission should in one way or another include provision to secure for India the experience already obtained in dealing with all kinds of sanitary questions in England. She had formulated her own plans to this end at an early stage of the Commission. What she first suggested was a Sanitary Department at the India Office, and this, as we shall hear in a later chapter (p. 153), was ultimately established. It had been well if the suggestion had been accepted from the beginning, for the compromise which was substituted led to some confused friction between the War Office and the India Office. As the second-best plan, Miss Nightingale wanted the standing Sanitary Committee at the War Office,[18] reinforced by one or two representatives of India, to be invested with authority over Indian sanitation, and she wanted, secondly, a Sanitary Code to be issued for India by the Home Government. She had named the two Indian officials, and had urged the addition of Mr. Rawlinson, at that time the leading sanitary engineer in England.[19] But on all this there was some difference of opinion. She was kept informed from day to day of the currents of thought among the Commissioners, and of the course of the discussions. The letters, minutes, memoranda in which she urged her views are many. She had first to persuade Lord Stanley, and this in personal interviews she succeeded in doing. She begged him to open the subject to Sir Charles Wood, the Secretary for India, who did not take the suggestion amiss. There were still, however, some contrary opinions, but ultimately her policy prevailed. "I cannot help telling you, in the joy of my heart," she wrote to Harriet Martineau (May 19), "that the final meeting of the Indian Sanitary Commission was held to-day--that the Report was signed--and that after a very tough battle, lasting three days, to convince these people that a Report was not self-executive, our Working Commission was carried, not quite in the original form proposed, but in what may prove a better working form because grafted on what exists. This is the dawn of a new day for India in sanitary things, not only as regards our Army, but as regards the native population." But Miss Nightingale was never content to let the light steal in gradually; she wanted to secure for the Report of the Commission the fullest possible glare of publicity.

[18] The Barrack and Hospital Commission, re-named the Army Sanitary Committee in 1865; see p. 65.

[19] Her nominations were, in the end, all approved. The Indian representatives were Sir Proby Cautley and Sir James Ranald Martin.

Her first concern was to get early notices of the Report in the newspapers. The daring, the celerity, the energy of her moves might excite the admiration even of the greatest experts in this sort of our own day. The gist of the Report, so far as its statement of the facts was concerned, was contained in her own "Observations"; and, as explained above, she had already circulated these both in India and at home. Having thus, as it were, salted the ground, she prepared for the official publication. As one of the principal authors of the Report, she was obviously entitled to some copies. She obtained a note from Lord Stanley, the Chairman, to that effect. The Queen's printer, Mr. Spottiswoode, was her very good friend, having been associated with her in more than one philanthropic enterprise, and, after seeing Lord Stanley's note, he promised to use every expedition and to let Miss Nightingale have some of the very earliest copies. She sent them off immediately; to various influential friends (Sir John Lawrence among the number), but principally to writers for the press; and with regard to these latter, there was no reason why she should tell each recipient of the special early copy that he was not the only individual so favoured. A Blue-book of 2028 pages is not mastered in a minute, and people wondered how so many of the newspapers and magazines were able to notice the Report so fully on the instant. "Mr. Baker [the Clerk to the Commission] has regained his equanimity," wrote the printer (July 23); "but for three days he could not recover the shock of your rapid action." Miss Nightingale's celerity may well have seemed indecent to the leisurely official mind; for six months were allowed to pass before the Government of India was officially provided with copies of the Report! This delay may seem incredible to those not well versed in such affairs, but it is recorded in a Government Dispatch,[20] and an investigation made by Miss Nightingale into another delay of a like kind may perhaps afford an explanation.[21] Meanwhile, in July 1863, she had, for some days previous to the issue of the Report, been arranging for reviews in newspapers and magazines, in Edinburgh and Dublin as well as in London. Mr. W. R. Greg was especially helpful; he contributed notices to three important periodicals--the _Economist_, the _National Review_, and the _Spectator_. Miss Nightingale was diligent also in coaching Harriet Martineau, writing at great length to explain the points on which public opinion might most usefully declare itself. Miss Martineau wrote on the Report in the _Daily News_, _Macmillan's Magazine_, and _Once a Week_; and on her own part she had a contribution to make to the cause. She was an old friend of Lord and Lady Elgin. Should she write to them? The indefatigable Miss Nightingale at once sent her the heads of a letter on the subject which should go immediately to the Viceroy.

[20] "On the 5th February 1864, the Government of India informed the Secretary of State that, in consequence of the non-arrival of the Report of the Royal Commission, it had not been possible to carry out the measures indicated in the despatch of the 15th August, but that having just received a few copies, &c., &c." (_Memorandum on Measures adopted for Sanitary Improvements in India up to the end of 1867_, p. 2).

[21] See below, p. 49 _n._

Though Miss Nightingale attached importance to notices in the press, she was equally eager that the Report itself should attract the attention of influential individuals in and out of Parliament. And here at the outset she met with a severe check which, however, by her energy and resource was turned to the greater advantage of the cause. The Blue-books were of enormous bulk, and a smaller edition had been prepared, apparently by the Clerk. Owing to what was officially described as "a mistake," it was this smaller edition that was "presented to both Houses of Parliament by command." It alone was placed on sale to the public; the 1000 copies of the complete work (of which the printer had been ordered to break up the type) were reserved for the press and for official purposes. They could be obtained (on application) by members of Parliament, but were not accessible to the public. The smaller edition, which the officials designed for public use, did not contain Miss Nightingale's "Observations" (though these were referred to in the Report) and did not contain the evidence from the Indian Stations. It gave instead a "précis of evidence" made by the Clerk. This, as Miss Nightingale thought, was badly done, and, moreover, referred in the margin to passages which again were not accessible to the public. Miss Nightingale was naturally and justly indignant at a proceeding which thus left the recommendations of the Commission unsupported, so far as the public were concerned, by the essential facts. She set herself with characteristic energy to rectify the official "mistake," or, as she suspected, to circumvent the design. If indeed there were any intention to withhold from the public eye the full extent of the terrible state of things in India, the authors of the design had counted without the formidable Lady-in-Chief. As for the partial suppression of her own "Observations," that was easily rectified. Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Farr, incensed at the treatment which she had received, promptly made arrangements with a publisher for the separate issue of her "Observations."[22] This little "red book" had a large sale, and was widely reviewed in the press. Thereby the subject received a second series of notices. "It is not a book," said one of the reviewers, "but a great action." But Miss Nightingale herself was more concerned with the wide circulation of the Blue-books themselves. First, she wrote round to every member of Parliament whom she knew, informing them of the facts and begging them to apply for the unmutilated edition. One of the answers she received was from Lord Shaftesbury (Aug. 22): "I will immediately apply for the copy of evidence you mention, but ought we not to insist when Parliament meets that it be fully circulated like any other document? Sir C. Wood may have made a 'mistake,' but a far greater mistake would be to bury this important matter in the 'tomb of all the Capulets.' ... You have achieved very grand things; and you must thank God that He has called you to such a work, and has so blessed it. I have much to talk to you about."[23] Secondly, she extracted a promise that inquirers at Hansard's office should be informed that copies of the unmutilated edition could be obtained by the public on application at the Burial Board Office.[24] She took very good care that they should not be buried there. She prompted all sorts and conditions of persons among her acquaintances to apply, and there was a run on the book. Next, and chiefly, she was anxious that the essential parts of the Report should come under the notice of every officer and every official in India who was in any degree responsible for the health of the army and who might be brought by a knowledge of the facts to further the cause of sanitary reform. The way in which she achieved her purpose was characteristic. Miss Nightingale had a personal grievance in this matter; and she used it, as on a previous occasion she had used her personal prestige, to gain a public end. To an intimate friend in the War Office, she was downright: "Done in some way or other, I am determined it shall be." But to the great men above him, she was suave--insidiously and dangerously suave. She entirely agreed that it would be expensive to reprint, and absurd to circulate widely, two enormous Blue-books of 2028 pages. Nobody would read them. But on the other hand was it not a little unfair to her to circulate an abridged edition, from which was excluded all the material upon which, at the request of the Commission, she had spent years of labour? But what was to be done? She knew how busy all Government officials were; but she would willingly undertake the task of putting together an amended edition of the smaller issue. Would the Treasury object to the cost? If so, she would bear it. In one way and another, she said, she had spent £700 in connection with the former Report on the British Army; the cost of similar work in connection with India would be less, and she would gladly defray it. Lord de Grey authorized her to proceed on August 26, and for the next three months she was busy in preparing the Report in the form in which it was to be circulated among military and medical officers.[25] But she was not quite satisfied yet. She had provided means for bringing her horses to water, but who was to make them drink? Her amended report was to be circulated amongst the Army in India, but would it be read? She was afraid not, unless the Secretary of State specially commended it to the attention of his subordinates. Did the War Office shrink from taking initiative in a matter which also concerned the India Office? "But surely Sir Charles Wood will be very grateful to you for remedying his mistake." The Minister assented, and a preface was added to Miss Nightingale's edition of the Report, in which the Secretary for War explained that it was circulated "with a view of affording information on the subject to Commanding, Engineering, and Medical Officers." Of course there were official delays, and this edition of the Report was not issued till August 1864, but it gave Miss Nightingale opportunity of organizing yet another press crusade. Through Sidney Herbert's friend, Count Strzelechi, who was also a friend of Delane, she was able to secure a series of articles in the _Times_ on the sanitary needs of India.[26] The Count was very proud of what he had been able to do for her. None of Miss Nightingale's official works obtained a wider circulation than the "Observations"; nor, I suppose, did any Blue-book on such a subject ever attain a greater amount of publicity.

[22] Bibliography A, No. 34.

[23] Miss Nightingale's letter to Lord Shaftesbury is printed in his _Life_, p. 581.

[24] This was not designedly a practical joke. The Clerk to the Commission held a post in the Board.

[25] See Bibliography A, No, 33 (3).

[26] A leading article appeared on August 23, introducing a series of "special articles" which began on the following day.

VI

But all this was only a preliminary. Public attention had been aroused, and every one said vaguely that something must be done. It remained for Government to do it. The steps which Miss Nightingale took to this end, the obstacles which she encountered, the measure of success which she attained, will be described in the next chapter.

The work, which has been described in foregoing pages and which Miss Nightingale continued during the following year, was very heavy, and it was all done under grievous physical disability. In 1857-58, when she was doing like work in connection with the Royal Commission on the Home Army, though she was in very delicate health, she had yet been able to move about. When Sidney Herbert could not come to see her, she could go to see him. But now in 1863, when work for the Commission on the Indian Army was at its height, she was bedridden. When she invited a nursing friend to her house, the formula was "Will you come and spend Saturday to Monday in bed with me?" She could only receive her visitors, if at all, in her own room, and all her writing was done in bed. She was sustained through these disabilities partly, it may be, by the consciousness of power and by satisfaction in its exercise, but principally by passionate devotion to her cause. And there was another feeling which gave her strength, as appears from many a passage in her private letters. She was carrying out, as best she could alone, the "joint work" which had been left "unfinished" at Sidney Herbert's death. "There is no feeling more sustaining," Sir John McNeill had said to her, when Arthur Clough was also taken from her, "than that of being alone." So, in some sort, I think, she found it. And sometimes, as to one who stretches out his hands in yearning for the further shore, there seemed to come to her voices of encouragement. "I heard the other day," she said in 1863, "of two Englishmen who were nearly lost by being caught by the tide on the coast of France, and a little French fisher-girl ran all along the wet sands to show them the only rock, half a mile from the shore, which the tide did not cover, where of course she was obliged to stay with them. It got quite dark, the water rose above their knees, but presently they heard a sound, faint and far off, and the little girl said, 'They think the tide is turning, they are shouting to cheer us!' I often think I hear those on the far-off shore who are shouting to cheer me."

CHAPTER III

SETTING REFORMERS TO WORK

(1863-1865)

I am more hopeful than you appear to be in regard to the good likely to be effected by the Report. Although our Indian administration has great difficulties to contend with owing to the nature of the country and the people, it is both honest and able; and I never knew a public measure, the advantage of which was generally admitted, which ultimately was not properly taken in hand.--SIR CHARLES TREVELYAN (_Letter to Florence Nightingale_, Aug. 24, 1862).

In the last chapter we traced Miss Nightingale's hand throughout the famous Report of the Indian Sanitary Commission. We saw how she worked for the inclusion, in the Commissioners' recommendations, of machinery for getting the other recommendations adopted; we saw, too, how cleverly she man[oe]uvred to obtain wide publicity and discussion for the whole subject. But this was not enough for her. She had created a favourable atmosphere; she had provided suitable machinery; it remained to set the wheels going round. "Reports are not self-executive": she applied her words in this fresh direction; and, as in the case of the Home Commission five years before, so now she gave not a moment's rest to herself or to anybody else whom she could influence until reforms, recommended by the Report, were set on foot.

Miss Nightingale was as eager, in as great a hurry to begin, as determined to have her way, as before; but the difficulties were now greater. In the case of the Home Army, only one department (though that, to be sure, was a dual one) was concerned; in the case of Sanitary measures for the Army in India, there were the India Office and the Government of India to be considered as well as the War Office. And everybody, who knows anything about public affairs, knows what it means to the cause of prompt efficiency if departments begin wrangling with each other. And then Miss Nightingale had no longer her "dear master." Lord Stanley, the Chairman of the Indian Commission, was friendly, and sincerely desirous to see things done; but he was not an enthusiast. His temperament was cool; his judgment, critical. But, as I have already said, he had a great belief in Miss Nightingale, and though she did not always find him an easy man to drive, she did it. The moment the Report was signed she was up and at him. He must do as Sidney Herbert did; that is, go at once to Ministers and insist on immediate steps being taken to put the recommendations of the Report into operation. Otherwise, all their labour might dissolve in air. Lord Stanley proposed to wait and see:--

(_Lord Stanley to Miss Nightingale._) _July_ 10, 1863. ... Do not fear that Lord Herbert's work will be left unfinished: sanitary ideas have taken root in the public mind, and they cannot be treated as visionary. The test of experience is conclusive. The ground that has been gained cannot be lost again.----_July_ 12.... The first step is to ask what the War and India departments will do. If on consideration they consent to the appointment of the commissions recommended with or without modification of our plan, the thing is fairly started. I am inclined to believe that they will be found willing. But we must give them time to read the report. If they object to do anything, other methods may be tried. We have friends in the Indian Council, and Lord de Grey is a Sanitarist. I quite agree in what you say as to its being a duty to help the ministry of the day in working out their plans. Practically I have acted on this rule. Few matters pass in the India Office that do not come before me. But such help cannot be offered by an outsider--it must be asked by those who are responsible. If Sir C. Wood desires assistance in giving effect to the sanitary projects, I will not refuse it. There is ample time to consider all this.

So Lord Stanley was waiting to be asked. Then it became Miss Nightingale's business to contrive that he should be asked. She saw Lord de Grey, begged him to go forthwith to the India Office, and to suggest to Sir Charles Wood that he should talk matters over with Lord Stanley. The thing was done:--

(_Lord Stanley to Miss Nightingale._) _July_ 24. I have had several conversations with Sir C. Wood, and from the language he now holds, I consider it settled that the report of the commissioners will be acted upon--the W.O. Commission being enlarged for the purpose of dealing with Indian questions. I have also arranged with him for the settlement of all personal claims arising out of our enquiry.[27] I hope, therefore, that we may look on our work as done for the present. It is probable that difficulties will arise out of the conflicting claims of the Indian and home authorities: but these we must be prepared for, and deal with as they come up. So far, all has gone well.

[27] Mr. Herbert had promised, but apparently only by word of mouth, that the services rendered by Dr. Farr and Dr. Sutherland to the Commission should be paid. Miss Nightingale was able to confirm the promise.

The Duke of Newcastle wrote to her to like effect (Aug. 31): "The Report on the Indian Army is attracting much attention, and I have no doubt it will do a great deal of good, tho' there is supposed to be still a very strong obstructive power in the India Office." For a time, it seemed as if official measures would be taken with reasonable celerity. Two members, to represent India, were added to the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission. The Secretary for India sent a dispatch (Aug. 15) suggesting the formation of Sanitary Commissions as recommended in the Report. Miss Nightingale was asked to draft a code of suggestions which might be sent out to India. But soon there was a hitch. The military element in the India Office quarrelled with the Report, and it was intimated that there might be similar criticism from the military element in the Government of India. The accuracy of Dr. Farr's statistics was to be impugned; and it was to be objected that Miss Nightingale's "Observations" did not in all cases reflect the present state of the Indian stations. As if reports, which had taken and must have taken months and months to collect, could possibly have been brought up to the last moment! And as if the mere fact that such reports had been called for was not likely to lead to some improvement! These things need not detain us. They were, as Miss Nightingale put it, "the Crimea over again," "these and those" protesting that things were not so bad as they had been painted, and that in any case it was not A who was to blame, but B. But meanwhile everything was hung up. Lord Stanley, the Chairman of the Commission, whose Report was impugned, was in the country. Miss Nightingale "urged and baited him" (so she described it) to come up to London and return to the charge. He came in November, and had an interview with her before seeing Sir Charles Wood.

II

And now an event occurred which was followed by results of consequence to her cause. Lord Elgin, the Viceroy, while travelling in the Himalayas, was stricken down by a heart complaint from which he was not expected to recover. The question of a successor became urgent. The minds of many turned to Sir John Lawrence, but, with one exception, no Indian civilian since Warren Hastings had permanently held the office of Viceroy. Miss Nightingale had unbounded admiration for him. The soldier's heart in her loved his heroic deeds. "What would Homer have been," she once said, "if he had had such heroes as the Lawrences to sing?"[28] Personal intercourse had filled her with closer admiration for what Lord Stanley called "a certain heroic simplicity" in the man, for his unaffected piety, his rugged honesty, his deep sympathy with human suffering. In later years a photograph of Watts's portrait of Lawrence always hung in Miss Nightingale's room. At the moment with which we are now concerned, she regarded him as the indispensable man for India, not more on account of the threatening border war on the north-west frontier (the consideration which doubtless most moved Lord Palmerston), than on account of his sympathy with the cause of sanitary reform. An opportunity came for putting in her word. Sir Charles Wood consulted his predecessor at the India Office, and Lord Stanley in turn talked matters over with Miss Nightingale. She urged him with fervent eagerness to do everything in his power to promote the appointment of Sir John Lawrence. Lord Elgin died on November 20. Lawrence was appointed on November 30, and was to start for India immediately:--

(_Lord Stanley to Miss Nightingale._) _Dec._ 1. I saw Sir C. Wood yesterday. The sanitary question was gone into, tho' not so fully as I could have wished. Sir J. Lawrence's appointment is a great step gained. He knows what is wanted, and has no prejudices in favour of the existing military administration. I shall see him to-night and shall probably be able to have some talk with him on the subject. But why should not he see you? The plans are in the main yours; no one can explain them better: you have been in frequent correspondence with him. I believe there will now be but little difficulty in India.... Let me repeat--you must manage to see Sir John Lawrence. He does not go till the 10th. Your position in respect of this whole subject is so peculiar that advice from you will come with greater weight than from anyone else.

[28] Letter to Harriet Martineau (Feb. 2, 1865).

Miss Nightingale was among the first to offer congratulations to the new Viceroy; the terms in which she addressed him expressed what she sincerely and intensely believed:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Sir John Lawrence._) Among the multitude of affairs and congratulations which will be pouring in upon you, there is no more fervent joy, there are no stronger good wishes, than those of one of the humblest of your servants. For there is no greater position for usefulness under heaven than that of the government of the vast Empire you saved for us. And you are the only man to fill it. So thought a statesman with whom I worked not daily, but hourly, for five years, Sidney Herbert--when the last appointment was made. In the midst of your pressure pray think of us, and of our sanitary things on which such millions of lives and health depend.[29]

[29] From the _Life of Lord Lawrence_, by R. Bosworth Smith, 1885, vol. ii. p. 278.

Prompted by Lord Stanley, Miss Nightingale asked the new Viceroy to call. He was the first of a succession of high Indian officials who made a point of coming to Miss Nightingale before leaving for their posts. The interview took place on December 4. Miss Nightingale never forgot either the interview itself or Lord Stanley's kindly anxiety that it should take place. Thirty years later (Feb. 17, 1893), in sending Aitchison's Memoir of Lord Lawrence to Sir Harry Verney, she wrote: "How many touches--short but sweet--I could add to the book! The real tale of Sir J. Lawrence's appointment as Viceroy will never be told. During the only ten days left to Lawrence before he started, he came to see me. How kind it was of Lord Stanley. He came like a footman to my door, and, without giving his name, sent up to ask whether Sir John Lawrence was coming. The interview was one never to be forgotten."

Sir John Lawrence discussed the sanitary question with Miss Nightingale in all its bearings, and they exchanged views further by correspondence before he left London:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Dr. Farr._) _Dec._ 10. I have had the great joy of being in constant communication with Sir John Lawrence, and of receiving his commands to do what I had almost lost the hope of being allowed to do--viz. of sending out full statements and schemes of what we want the Presidency Commissions to do. I should be glad to submit to you copies of papers of mine which he desired me to write and which he took out with him, as to the constitution of the Presidency Commissions, if you care to see them. They are, of course, confidential. I have also seen Lord Stanley more than once during these busy days. And with Sir John Lawrence's command, we feel ourselves empowered to begin the Home Commission,[30] and to further our plans upon it. Sir John Lawrence, so far from considering our Report exaggerated, considers it under the mark.

[30] That is the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission (Army Sanitary Committee), reinforced by India Office representatives, which was to issue Sanitary Suggestions for the Government of India.

Thus was preparation made for putting the Report into execution in India. During Lawrence's Viceroyalty, Sir Bartle Frere was governor of Bombay. "Men used to say," he told Miss Nightingale, "that they always knew when the Viceroy had received a letter from Florence Nightingale: it was like the ringing of a bell to call for sanitary progress."

III

Within a month of his arrival in India, Sir John Lawrence had set the Sanitary Commissions on foot, and nothing was wanting except hints and instructions from home:--

(_Sir John Lawrence to Miss Nightingale._) CALCUTTA, _Feb._ 5 [1864]. I write a line to say that we have commenced work by establishing our Sanitary Committees for Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. They are composed of five members. A Civilian is at their head, and a Medical Officer as Secretary. I hope that you will expedite the transmission to India of the codes and rules and plans which have been approved of for home and the colonies. We shall then have an idea in a practical shape of the main features of the sanitary system, and can readily adapt it to the peculiar circumstances of the country. Without such a guide we shall often be perhaps working in direct opposition to your views. Where we differ, it will become our duty to set forth the grounds for so doing, in sending our plans and reports home. Pray excuse this hurried scrawl, and believe me, Sincerely yours, JOHN LAWRENCE.

It was not Miss Nightingale's fault that this plea for expedition was necessary. In December 1863 Lord de Grey had again asked her to draft a letter to the India Office, as from the War Office, on the measures recommended by the Royal Commission, and she had done it. But days, weeks, months passed, and nothing happened. In January 1864 her "Suggestions in regard to Sanitary Works required for the Improvement of Indian Stations,"[31] written at the urgent request of the Governor-General, were ready, Dr. Sutherland, Dr. Farr, and Mr. Rawlinson collaborating with her. Again months passed and nothing happened. The Barrack and Hospital Improvement Committee had been officially informed in December of the appointment of the Indian members, and requested to report on any matters which might be referred to it by the Secretary for India or the Secretary for War; but as yet no Indian reference had been made. Miss Nightingale chafed sorely at the needless delay. The Governor-General wrote to her again and again pressing for the Suggestions. She had done her part long ago; the War Office had been in possession of her Draft for months. She tried plain pressure, and pressure barbed with sarcasm. "Poor man!" she wrote in forwarding to the War Office one of the Governor-General's letters (March 10); "he really expects despatch. He thinks we can write a letter in three months! He must be more fit for a Lunatic Asylum than for a Governor-Generalship." Or, when the Government had been having a close division in the House,[32] she tried to play the India Office against the War Office. "You will all be 'out' this session," she wrote to the War Office (March 7, 1864); "after which I shall be able to get what I like from Lord Stanley [I.O.], but _you_ will not be able to get what you like from Gen. Peel [W.O.]. It is therefore very desirable that this letter should be written now at once while you are still 'in.'" It turned out that the reason of the delay was this: the War Office _had_ sent a preliminary letter to the India Office, and the India Office resented it. Sir Charles Wood, it was explained to Miss Nightingale, had "snubbed" Lord de Grey. The War Office was sulking in its tents accordingly. The India Office, on its part, was standing on its dignity, and was not going to place itself in the humiliating position of taking action proposed to it by the War Office. And this was the reason why Miss Nightingale's Suggestions, for which the Governor-General was asking, were still pigeon-holed. As for minor recommendations in the Royal Commission's Report, it was quite true that many of them could be carried out by administrative order, and some of them were; but the difficulty in the case of others was that it had hitherto passed the wit of man to discover with whom the power, or the responsibility, of making the order lay. Well may Miss Nightingale have written, as she did in more than one letter of this time (Jan. 1864): "No impression in all my life was ever 'borne in upon me' more strongly than this, that the Ministers have never considered the respective jurisdictions of the W.O. and the I.O., and that I.O., W.O., Horse Guards at home, Commander-in-Chief in India, Governor-General in India are as little defined as to the respective powers and duties as if India were the Sandwich Islands."

[31] Bibliography A, No. 24.

[32] On March 1, on a debate on the Yeomanry, the majority had been 1.

On the major matter, the dispatch of sanitary suggestions to guide the Indian authorities, Miss Nightingale now resolved that the delay should come to an end. She had drafted an ultimatum to the War Office, threatening an attack in the House of Commons, when Lord Stanley, a prominent member of the Opposition, appeared on the scene. He had forewarned Miss Nightingale, as we have heard, that departmental jealousies would cause some delay; but seven months had now passed since the Report of his Commission had been issued, and he seems to have thought that this was time enough to allow for the two offices to let off steam between themselves. He wrote to Miss Nightingale suggesting that he should come to see her, and offering, if she approved, to put pressure either upon Lord de Grey or upon Sir Charles Wood. Miss Nightingale loyally gave her friends at the War Office a last chance, but they did not care to take it. Lord Stanley saw Sir Charles Wood accordingly, promised him parliamentary support in any action which he might take, and matters were at last arranged. Miss Nightingale's draft "Suggestions" were submitted to the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission, and with slight alterations were adopted by that body. It was a War Office Commission, but the dignity of the India Office was consulted by the statement on the title-page of the Blue-book, that the Suggestions had been prepared by the said Commission "in accordance with Letters from the Secretary of State for India in Council." The fact was that they were prepared by Miss Nightingale in accordance with the wishes of Sir John Lawrence.

When once the "Suggestions" had been passed officially, it was within her power, by the simple expedient of laying in a stock of early copies, to prevent a moment's further delay. She used the power; and could not deny herself a few genial taunts at her official friends. "I beg to inform you," she wrote to Captain Galton at the War Office (Aug. 8), "that by the first mail after signature I sent off by H.M.'s book-post, at an enormous expense (I have a good mind to charge it to you!), to Sir John Lawrence direct no end of copies of _Suggestions_ (also to the Presidency Commissions); and that, as he is always more ready to hear than you are to pray (you sinners!), I have not the least doubt that they will have been _put in execution_ long before the India Office has even begun to send them."[33] She was not far wrong; six or seven weeks elapsed before the official copies were sent,[34] and meanwhile Miss Nightingale was able to get in another gibe. She heard from Sir John Lawrence that he had ordered the _Suggestions_ to be reprinted in India. "It might be as well," she wrote to the War Office, "to hurry your copies for the India Office, who will otherwise receive them first from India."

[33] This was no idle taunt. The Government of India had already put in force some of the recommendations of the Royal Commission before it had officially received copies of the Report: see above, p. 34 and _n._

[34] Miss Nightingale conducted a secret inquiry, which would have done credit to a detective-inspector, into the causes of this delay. According to "information received," the first cause was that the final printing order was delayed while communications went to and fro between the War Office and the India Office upon the number of copies required. Then the supply ultimately ordered by the latter passed leisurely from one sub-department to another. Finally, the stock reposed a while at a warehouse across the water, until there were sufficient official papers to fill certain regulation cases of a regulation size.

IV

In India itself, advance, with Sir John Lawrence at the helm, was rapid. The President and the Secretary of each Sanitary Commission were required to devote their whole attention to the work. They were charged to "consider and afford advice and assistance in all matters relative to the health of the Army, and to supervise the gradual introduction of sanitary improvements in Barracks, Hospitals, and Stations, as well as in Towns in proximity to Military Stations." Of every step taken, Miss Nightingale was kept informed. Sir John wrote to her frequently to report progress; he described to her the condition of all the Stations he had inspected on his way up to Simla; he applied to her for information on special points. His private secretary, Dr. Hathaway, who also had seen Miss Nightingale before he left England, wrote yet more fully and frequently. The President of the Bengal Commission was Mr. Strachey.[35] He, too, had made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance, and they corresponded at great length. Dr. J. P. Walker, a surgeon in the Indian Army, was in England in December 1863. He wrote to Miss Nightingale, as a devoted follower of her school. He went out to India, was appointed Secretary of the Bengal Commission, and at every stage consulted her and reported to her. Mr. R. J. Ellis, President of the Madras Commission, and Dr. Leith, President of the Bombay one, also corresponded with her. To any official in India, from the Governor-General downwards, who was ready to listen, Miss Nightingale had much to say. The correspondence with Sir John Lawrence is the most interesting:--

(_Sir John Lawrence to Miss Nightingale._) SIMLEH, _June_ 12 [1864]. It was truly kind of you to write and give me so nice an account of my children.... What an exciting time must Garibaldi's visit to England have been. He is indeed a noble fellow, and fully worthy of all our sympathies. I only trust that he will be persuaded to keep quiet and bide his time. A good day for his country, if the people only deserve it, must surely come. I am doing what I can to put things in order out here; but it is a very uphill work, and many influences have to be managed and overcome. I often think of the last visit I paid you before leaving England and of your conversation on that occasion. You will recollect how much I dwelt on the difficulties which meet one on every side. These have been exemplified in a way I could scarcely understand or anticipate, by the good folks of England really believing that I had sanctioned an attack on the religion of the Hindoos, because I desired to improve the health of the people in Calcutta!

[35] John Strachey (1823-1907); afterwards Chief Commissioner of Oudh, Lieut.-Governor of the N.W. Provinces, financial member of the Governor-General's Council; knighted, 1872; G.C.S.I., 1878; and member of the Secretary of State's Council.

(_Miss Nightingale to Sir John Lawrence._) 32 SOUTH STREET, _Sept._ 26 [1864]. MY DEAR SIR JOHN LAWRENCE--I always feel it a kind of presumption in me to write to you--and a kind of wonder at your permitting it. I always feel that you are the greatest figure in history, and yours the greatest work in history, in modern times. But that is my very reason. We have but one Sir John Lawrence. Your Bengal Sanitary Commission is doing its work, like men--like martyrs, in fact,--and what a work it is! All we have in Europe is mere child's play to it. Health is the product of civilization, _i.e._ of real civilization. In Europe we have a kind of civilization to proceed upon. In India your work represents, not only diminished Mortality as with us, but increase of energy, increase of power of the populations. I always feel, as if God had said: mankind is to create mankind. In this sense you are the greatest creator of mankind in modern history....

Would there be any impropriety in your Sanitary Commissions sending copies of their printed Minutes to the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission here, through the India Office--merely for information? As far as your Bengal Commission goes: these men don't want urging: they have not now to be taught. Anything which might even appear to interfere with the responsibilities of your Commissions, unless at their own request, is not only undesirable: but, as far as the Bengal Comm^n. is concerned, useless. But, if you saw no objection to sending the Minutes for information to the War Office Commission here, I am sure they would very much like it. Or, if that would be too formal and official (as regards the India Office here), if they, the Minutes, might be sent to me, with permission to shew them to one or two, such as Lord Stanley (our late Chairman of the Royal Commission), Dr. Sutherland, and Capt. Galton, of the War Office, &c., it would answer the same purpose. The India Office here does not shew _now_ the least jealousy of the Barrack and Hosp^l. (War Office) Commission. On the contrary, one can scarcely help smiling at the small things it is glad to throw off its responsibility for upon said Commission.

There are three glaring (tho' lesser) evils in Calcutta about which I know you have been employed--lesser tho' they are--and your attention and Dr. Hathaway's have been aroused by them. These are: (1) The Police Hospitals (or state of Hosp^l. accommodation) for sick poor at Calcutta. The Police establishments seem about as bad as possible. Indeed the poor wretches are brought in mostly to die. The Parisian system of relief is very good: every Police station at Paris has means of temporary help in cases of emergency until the sufferers can be removed to Hospital. Some such arrangement with a thorough reform of the Hospitals, and such additional accommodation as may be wanted, might meet Calcutta's case.

(2) The condition of Jails and Lunatic Asylums in India. Certainly it is not for me to draw your attention or Dr. Hathaway's to this. Probably he knows more about them than any man living. The reports and recommendations of one or two of the Jail Inspectors shew that they want experience: as I am sure Dr. Hathaway will agree with me. Perhaps we might help you by sending out such Reports on the subject as may be useful.

(3) The seamen at the great Ports. You have already done so much. But Rome can't be built in a day. Bad water, bad food bought in Bazaars, and bad drinks cause a vast amount of disease and death. Self-supporting Institutions, such as our Sailors' Homes (of which, indeed, I believe you have already founded more than one), would give the men wholesome food and drink, and lodgings and day-rooms at little cost. So many men perish for want of this kind of accommodation at Calcutta, where the evil seems greatest.

It seems to me so base to be writing while you are doing. Oh that I could come out to Calcutta and organize at least the Hospital accommodation for the poor wretches in the streets. There is nothing I should like so much. But it is nonsense to wish for what is an impossibility. I am sure you will be glad to hear that one of my life-long wishes, viz. the nursing of Workhouse Infirmaries by proper Nurses, is about to be fulfilled. By the munificence of a Liverpool man (who actually gives £1200 a year for the object, but desires not to be named), we undertake next month the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary (of 1000 beds)--the first Workhouse that ever has been nursed--with 15 Head Nurses, trained by ourselves, and a Lady (Volunteer) Matron (who underwent a most serious course of training at our Nurses' School at St. Thomas' Hospital), 15 Assistants, and 52 ex-pauper women, whom we are to train as Nurses.[36] I am sure it is not for us to talk of Civilization. For I have seen, in our English Workhouse Infirmaries, neglect, cruelty, and malversation such as can scarcely be surpassed in semi-barbarous countries. And it was then I felt I must found a school for Nurses for Workhouses, &c. The opportunity has come too late for me to do the Workhouse Nursing myself. But, so it is well done, we care not how. I think with the greatest satisfaction upon your re-union with Lady Lawrence and (some of) your children. God bless you.--I am yours devotedly, FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.

_P.S._--The Calcutta Municipality does not seem yet to have wakened up to a sense of its existence. It does not know that it exists: much less, what it exists for. Still, you are conquering India anew by civilization, taking possession of the Empire for the first time by knowledge instead of by the sword.--F. N.

[36] On this subject, see below, p. 128.

The Commander-in-Chief in India, Sir Hugh Rose (Lord Strathnairn) was hardly less helpful in the cause than the Governor-General. The War Office had sent to him, through the Horse Guards, a letter inviting his attention to the regimental recommendations in the Royal Commission's Report. His reply was most sympathetic, and his period of command was marked, amongst other things, by two reforms specially near to Miss Nightingale's desires: he introduced regimental workshops and soldiers' gardens in cantonments. The War Office forwarded his letter to Miss Nightingale. "It is quite worth while," she wrote in reply (Aug. 11, 1864), "all that has been suffered,--to have this letter from Sir Hugh Rose. And I forgive everybody everything." "I sing for joy every day," she had written previously (June 6), "at Sir John Lawrence's Government." She made public thanksgiving. To the Social Science Congress at Edinburgh in October 1863, she had contributed a paper, entitled, "How People may Live and not Die in India," in which she gave, in concise and popular form, a _résumé_ of the Royal Commission's Report. The reading of her paper had been followed by "Three Cheers for Florence Nightingale." She now (Aug. 1864) republished the Paper, with a Preface, in which, as it were, she gave "Three Cheers for Sir John Lawrence." She described how the Commissions of Health had been appointed in India, and how they had now been put in possession of all the more recent results of sanitary works and measures which had been of use at home. Then she turned to the military authorities, and described how "several of the worst personal causes of ill-health to which the soldier was in former times exposed have been, or are being, removed." "The men," she wrote, "have begun to find out that it is better to work than to sleep and drink, even during the heat of the day. One regiment marching into a Station, where cholera had been raging for two years, were chaffed by the regiments marching out, and told they would never come out of it alive. The men of the entering battalion answered, they would see; we _won't_ have cholera, they think. And they made gardens with such good effect that they had the pleasure, not only of eating their own vegetables, but of being paid for them too by the Commissariat. And this in a soil which no regiment had been able to cultivate before. And not a man had cholera. These good soldiers fought against disease, too, by workshops and gymnasia."[37] She gave account of trades, savings' banks, games, libraries; noting what had been done and what yet remained to be done. "In the meantime the regulation two drams have been reduced to one. A Legislative Act imposes a heavy fine or imprisonment on the illicit sale of spirits near cantonments. Where there _are_ recreation rooms, refreshments (prices all marked) are spread on a nice clean table." All these things, which in 1864 were new or exceptional, became in later years well-established and the rule. The main causes of disease among the Army in India were, however, as Miss Nightingale went on to say, want of drainage, want of proper water-supply, want of proper barracks and hospitals. But in these respects she had set the reformers to a work which has continued from that day to this.

[37] This incident was told in Sir Hugh Rose's letter.

There was, indeed, some criticism at the start, but this touched only the past, and did not seriously affect the future. Indian officials felt aggrieved, as I have already said, at the strictures contained in the Report of the Royal Commission, and this movement came to a head in two documents--one, a counter-Report by Dr. Leith, the Chairman of the Bombay Sanitary Commission (Oct. 1864); the other, a dispatch (Dec. 8) from the Government of India (Sir John Lawrence on an important point dissenting). Lord Stanley thought that Dr. Leith ought to be answered at once, and wrote to Miss Nightingale (Oct. 25) for her advice on the subject. She suggested that the answer should be sent in the form of a Report on Dr. Leith's letter by the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission--an ingenious plan, as it gave opportunity to that expert body for giving further advice to one of the Presidency Commissions. Miss Nightingale and Dr. Sutherland drafted the Report, which was adopted by the Commission on January 6, 1865. "I have pleasure," wrote Lord Stanley to her (Dec. 26), "in sending back the draft reply to Dr. Leith with only one or two verbal amendments suggested. It seems to me well done, moderate in tone, and conclusive in argument." A reply to the Indian Government's Dispatch, signed by Lord Stanley, Dr. Farr, and Dr. Sutherland, was sent on May 20. Miss Nightingale in her eagerness was much annoyed by these criticisms,[38] and Lord Stanley often told her that she made too much of what were only temporary ebullitions. "Don't be discouraged, dear Miss Nightingale," he wrote (Jan. 22) when the Government of India's dispatch arrived; "the practical work may go on while the controversy is proceeding. My idea of the matter is that the Indian authorities only want time to set things a little in order--that they are willing to mend, but not inclined to give us the credit of having first put them in the right way. That is human nature." Lord Stanley was a true prophet. The Indian authorities did mend; and so successfully has the work been carried out by a long line of Commanders, Administrators, and Engineers that the death-rate from preventable disease among the British Army in India has fallen far below the figure which the Royal Commission named as a counsel of perfection.[39]

[38] If any reader should desire to follow up the criticisms and the replies, he will find the Reply to Dr. Leith in Parliamentary Papers, 1865, No. 329; and the Government of India's dispatch with the Reply, in Nos. 108 and 324. Dr. Leith's Report does not appear to have been reprinted as a Parliamentary Paper. A copy of it, printed at Bombay, 1864, is among Miss Nightingale's papers.

[39] The Commission looked forward to a rate of not more than 10 per 1000. The rate in 1911 was, as already stated, 5.04.

V

In this work of "salvation" Miss Nightingale was for many years to play a part as consultant, and sometimes as inspirer. In November 1864 the Governor-General in Council intimated his readiness to consider a scheme for the employment of nurses in Military Hospitals, and thereupon the Bengal Sanitary Commission requested Miss Nightingale to aid them by her advice. She wrote in collaboration with Sir John McNeill a comprehensive series of Suggestions in the following February.[40] Throughout the year (1865) Miss Nightingale was engaged from time to time in Indian sanitary business; and her house served as headquarters for the sanitary reformers. Mr. Ellis, the President of the Madras Commission, came home in the middle of the year in order to study sanitary reforms in this country. Miss Nightingale invited him to use her rooms; sent Dr. Sutherland to accompany him on visits of inspection to hospitals and barracks; arranged meetings between him and Lord Stanley; conferred with him on changes which Sir John Lawrence was proposing to make in the constitution of the Presidency Commissions. The Governor-General himself communicated with her freely on the same subject. The Secretary of the Bengal Commission applied to her for information on trustworthy tests for the discovery of organic matter in water. Being unable to obtain what was wanted from Dr. Parkes, she applied to Dr. Angus Smith (inventor of an air-test also), who wrote a pamphlet for her on the subject. It was printed at her expense. She had it approved by the War Office Sanitary Committee, and a large number of copies was distributed throughout India. She had impressed upon the Governor-General the importance of stirring up the Indian municipalities. The Indian Towns Municipal Improvement Bill (1865) was submitted for her criticism, and she wrote a "Note on the relations which should exist between the powers of raising and spending taxes proposed to be granted to local authorities, and the proper execution of sanitary works and measures in India." Her friend, Sir Charles Trevelyan, retired from the post of Financial Minister in India in 1865, and she made the acquaintance of his successor, Mr. W. N. Massey. She was very jubilant when she "got a vote of seven millions for my Indian barracks." She was depressed when the Governor-General wrote to her from time to time saying that the great obstacle in the way of speedier reform was want of money; but she made excuses for her hero. "Sir John Lawrence," she wrote to Madame Mohl (March 20, 1865), "is just as much hampered with the Horse Guards out there as I am here. He is always writing to me to apologize for the little progress he makes. By the very last mail he says I shall think him 'timid and perhaps even time-serving.' I could not help laughing. Certainly Sir J. Lawrence is the only man who ever called Sir J. Lawrence a time-server,--except in the highest possible sense, of serving his country at her greatest time of need in the highest possible way." She was constantly corresponding with Lord Stanley, urging him to win points for her from the Indian Secretary. "I have just seen Sir Charles Wood," wrote Lord Stanley (Feb. 10). "He agrees as to the expediency of sending home a yearly report of the sanitary stations in each Presidency." "Pray never speak of being troublesome," he wrote again (May 15): "it is a real pleasure to me to help you a little in the great work: I know no other way in which my time can be made equally useful." He frequently saw Sir Charles Wood on matters which she urged, and he won what was almost her highest praise. "Lord Stanley," she said, "is a splendid worker." His cool common sense was perhaps a wholesome antidote sometimes to her almost feverish eagerness. "Publicity," he said (Aug. 17), "will in the long-run do what we want. People won't stand being poisoned when they know it." The annual Reports from the Presidencies, obtained by Miss Nightingale some years later (p. 155), were submitted for her "Observations"; and in many other ways, as we shall hear, it was remarkable how close a touch upon the course of sanitary reform in India was maintained by this lady from a bedroom in Mayfair. But essentially Miss Nightingale's work was that of inspirer and pioneer. These chapters will have shown, I think, that a compliment paid to her by the Chairman of the Indian Sanitary Commission was no less true than graceful:--

(_Lord Stanley to Miss Nightingale._) ST. JAMES'S SQUARE, _July_ 25 [1864]. I don't wonder that the delays of the "savage tribe" should try your patience; and I admire the more the care and success with which you keep outward show of annoyance to yourself. I had rather be criticised by any one rather than you! I am only passing through town to-day, there being nothing left to do; but shall be again in this place on Thursday, and ready to wait upon you if any matters want settling. If not, I can only wish you health--success is sure to come--and beg that you will remember the value of your own public service, and not by overwork endanger its continuance. Pray excuse a caution which I am sure I am not the first to give. Every day convinces me more of two things: first, the vast influence on the public mind of the Sanitary Commissions of the last few years--I mean in the way of speeding ideas which otherwise would have been confined to a few persons; and next, that all this has been due to you, and to you almost alone.

[40] Bibliography A, No. 44. For the subsequent fate of this scheme, see below, p. 157.

In one of many moments of vexation at the delays of the "savages" in their red-tape, Miss Nightingale wrote thus to Captain Galton (June 23, 1864): "The Horse Guards say that they were quite aware of Sir John Lawrence's application and of the delay, but that 'it is Sir J. Lawrence's one and only object of interest, while it is _one out of a thousand_ of the War Office's.' They ought to have the V.C. for their cool intrepidity in the face of truth. I have told Sir J. Lawrence of the opinion of these dining-out _freliquets_ as to his hard work. And I think I shall publish it after my death." But "unlicked cubs," as she said at Scutari, "grow up into good old bears"[41]; and it is not in order to pay off a score against the "puppies" that I quote this letter. Behind the remark which excited Miss Nightingale's righteous anger there was an element of unconscious truth, and it is one which sums up this and the preceding chapter. It was, indeed, an ignorant untruth to say that Sir John Lawrence had no other work or interest than the promotion of sanitary improvements for the Army in India; and it would be untrue also, as later chapters will show, to say the same thing of Miss Nightingale. Yet it made all the difference for the promotion of that work in India that there was at the head of affairs a man whose heart and soul were in it. And at home, it made all the difference that there was one resolute will, combined with a clear head, determined to give impetus and direction to the work. It was probably quite true to say that to many, perhaps to most, of the men at the War Office and the Horse Guards this question of Army sanitation in India appeared as only "one out of a thousand" questions. To Miss Nightingale it was, in a very literal and instant sense, a matter of life and death; and it was her passionate conviction that supplied the initiating and driving force which compelled reform. If the Governor-General of the time had been hostile or apathetic, even her persistence might yet have been foiled. But, as things were, the co-operation between Sir John Lawrence and Florence Nightingale was as beneficent in its results upon the welfare of the British Army in India, as the co-operation between her and Sidney Herbert had been in the case of the Army at home.

[41] See Vol. I. p. 184.

CHAPTER IV

ADVISORY COUNCIL TO THE WAR OFFICE

(1862-1866)

We are trying to reduce chaos into shape. It is three years to-day since I first felt what an awful wreck I had got myself into. I interfering with Government affairs; and the captain of my ship, without whom I should never have done it, dying and leaving me, a woman, in charge. What nonsense people do talk, to be sure, about people finding themselves in suitable positions and looking out for congenial work! I am sure if any body in all the world is most unsuited for writing and official work, it is I. And yet I have done nothing else for seven years but write Regulations.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (_Letter to Julius Mohl_, Jan 1. 1864).

Though Miss Nightingale's main work during these years was connected with the Army in India, she was also continuously engaged in work for the War Office in relation to the army at home. Indeed in some respects the work was as constant, and it was quite as varied, if not as far-reaching in range, as in the days when Sidney Herbert was Secretary of State. She was a kind of Advisory Council to the War Office on all subjects within her sphere, and on some outside it; but the references to her were far more frequent than is commonly the case with those somewhat shadowy bodies; and besides she was a privileged person, with the right of initiating suggestions. The picture of her relations to the War Office as it is disclosed in her papers is remarkable. There are scores of letters from the Ministers. There are hundreds from one of the (non-political) Under-Secretaries. Her own letters in reply are equally numerous. There is a large collection of Drafts, Minutes, Warrants, Regulations. Her private letters tell of frequent interviews with one of the Ministers. Was there ever another case in which nearly every vexed question in War Office administration (other than of a purely military kind) was referred almost as a matter of course to a private lady, and that lady an invalid in her bed? It is not likely that the situation will ever exist again; and it becomes of interest to trace "the Nightingale power" in this matter to its sources.

* * * * *

The primary explanation is simple. In a large class of questions which were occupying the attention of the War Office at this time Miss Nightingale was regarded as the first expert of the day. One sees this in the fact that she was consulted in connection with work, within her sphere, for other departments than the War Office. Thus in 1865 Mr. R. S. Wright (afterwards the judge) was appointed by the Colonial Office to prepare a Report on the condition of Colonial Prisons. He went to Miss Nightingale, asking (April 27) "to be allowed to submit to you for your criticism the conclusions at which I may arrive. Supposing them to be approved by you, it will be a great advantage if I may state that you approve them."[42] Then, in the second place,--to repeat a phrase which I have already applied to her, she was the official legatee of Sidney Herbert. Everyone who was behind the scenes knew that his work had also been her work, and Sidney Herbert's repute as a reformer stood very high. The official Army world at this time was divided into two camps--those who desired to complete Herbert's work, and those who tried to undo it. Miss Nightingale, as the repository of the Herbert tradition, was the indispensable ally of the former party against the latter. Her friend, Lady Herbert, put the case from her point of view, when she wrote (March 7, 1862), in reply to a letter telling of much weakness and weariness, "If you never wish to live for your own sake, yet bear to live, dearest, for a time to carry out his work, and to keep his memory fresh in the hearts of men." Some questions of reform arose to which Sir Benjamin Hawes had raised copious objections. "Would Miss Nightingale oblige the Political Under-Secretary by suggesting an answer to Hawes's points?" Sometimes she was the only person who possessed the necessary documents. "Have you got a copy of the Report of the Committee on the Organization of a Medical School? The War Office actually have _no_ copy, and the Army Medical Department only a proof not signed and supposed to have been altered?"

[42] Miss Nightingale must have enjoyed the correspondence that ensued; for not only was Mr. Wright sound on sanitary matters ("it is no part of a prisoner's sentence that he should be black-holed"), but he wrote to her in a racy style. "I send you (Oct. 23) a specimen of the materials sent home by colonial prison authorities with the endorsement of a colonial Governor:--_Question_: What is the mode of treating lunatic or maniacal prisoners? _Answer_: Maniacles is not nor ever has been in use in this prison."

But besides all this there were personal factors in the case. Miss Nightingale had no longer, it is true, an intimate friend at the head of the War Office, and with Lord Herbert's successor, Sir George Lewis, she was not otherwise than by correspondence acquainted. Early in 1862 he had made overtures through Sir Harry Verney, desiring to be given the honour of making Miss Nightingale's personal acquaintance. She was, however, too ill to receive him, and knowing perhaps her proficiency in the classics he sent her some of his _jeux d'esprit_. The offering had anything but a propitiatory effect. Many of her letters express indignation that the Secretary for War should be writing trifles in Latin instead of reforming the War Office. She was equally indignant when he presently published learned works on Ancient Astronomy and Egyptology. Mr. Jowett was somewhat of the same mind: "I agree with you about Sir G. Lewis and his book. I felt the same disgust at Gladstone for writing nonsense about Homer while the East India Bill was passing through the House." It does not seem to follow, however, that Mr. Gladstone would have been the more interested in the East India Bill if he had not been engaged in finding the Trinity on Mount Olympus, or that Sir George Lewis would have been any more in the mood to reorganize the War Office if he had not been applying the Egyptological method to modern history, or turning "Hey diddle diddle" into Latin verse. There is a keener point in another of Miss Nightingale's reflections on the Minister (Feb. 19, 1863): "If Sir George Lewis, instead of writing a 'Dialogue on the Best Forms of Government' would write (or rather silently act) a _Monologue_ on the Dual Form being the Worst form of Government, the War Office would be much the gainer." But during his term of office the Under-Secretary was Lord de Grey; and with him she was on very friendly terms, and he, as is obvious from the correspondence, had the highest opinion of her knowledge, her ability, and her influence. The part she played in Lord de Grey's appointment as Secretary of State, after the death of Sir G. Lewis, has already been described. Then in Captain Galton she had throughout these years a standing ally within the War Office, and her daily attendant, Dr. Sutherland, was a member of the Army Sanitary Committee. And in the last resort, if a difficulty worthy of such adjustment arose, she had the ear of the Prime Minister.

II

Such occasion did arise when, on May 15, 1862, death removed from the War Office Miss Nightingale's old opponent Sir Benjamin Hawes, the Permanent Under-Secretary. She had tried to reorganize him into insignificance in 1861, but "Ben had beaten Sidney Herbert."[43] Now was a chance of carrying out the plan which Mr. Herbert and she had often discussed--of breaking the bureaucracy, and of dividing up the office. Hitherto the Departments had reported through the Permanent Under-Secretary; the reform scheme was that they should report direct to the Secretary of State. Sir E. Lugard, Military Under-Secretary, was already in part-possession. Let Captain Galton resign his commission, and take the other half, as a civilian (and, what was equally in her mind, a convinced and professional sanitarian). She carried the case to the Prime Minister, and convinced him. Lord Palmerston told her afterwards that when the appointment was first mentioned to the Horse Guards they said it was "simply impossible." But the Prime Minister advised Sir George Lewis to make the appointment nevertheless:--

(_Miss Nightingale to her Father._) 9 CHESTERFIELD STREET, _Poor Queen's Birthday_, 1862. I must tell you the first joy I have had since poor Sidney Herbert's death. Lord Palmerston has forced Sir G. Lewis to carry out Mr. Herbert's and my plan for the reorganization of the War Office _in some measure_. Hawes's place is not to be filled up. Galton is to do his work as Assistant Under-Secretary. This brings with it some other reforms. Lord de Grey says that he can reorganize the War Office with Captain Galton, because Sir G. Lewis will know nothing about it and never inquires. Sir G. Lewis wrote it (innocently) to the Queen yesterday, and Captain Galton was appointed to-day, resigning the Army of course. No, Sir Charles Trevelyan would not have done at all [in Hawes's place]. It would have been perpetuating the principle (which I have been fighting against in all my official life, _i.e._, for eight years) of having a dictator, an autocrat, irresponsible to Parliament, quite unassailable from any quarter, immovable in the middle of a (so-called) constitutional government, and under a Secretary of State who is responsible to Parliament. And, inasmuch as Trevelyan is a better and abler man than Hawes, it would have been _worse_ for any reform of principle. I don't mean to say that I am the first person who has laid down this. But I do believe I am the first person who has felt it so bitterly, keenly, constantly as to give up life, health, joy, congenial occupation for a thankless work like this.... It has come too late to give happiness to Galton, as it has come too late for me. He seems more depressed than pleased. And I do believe, if he feels any pleasure, it is that now he can carry out Sidney Herbert's plans in some measure. And it may seem to you some compensation for the enormous expense I cause you that, if I had not been here, it would not have been done. Would that Sidney Herbert could have lived to do it himself! Would that poor Clough could have lived to see it! He wished for it so much--for my sake....

[43] See Vol. I. p. 405.

The high hopes which Miss Nightingale entertained from this slight reorganization were doomed to disappointment. Neither as Under-Secretary, nor after April 1863, when he became Secretary of State, did Lord de Grey manage, and I do not know that he seriously attempted, to reform the War Office root and branch.[44] He and Captain Galton had, according to Miss Nightingale, "miscalculated their power." She preached the necessity of reform to them unceasingly--in season and, as they may sometimes have thought, out of season too, for she was a very persistent person; and, with Dr. Sutherland's assistance, she provided them with detailed schemes. Her principles were as admirable, as was her criticism scathing when any breach of them came under her notice. There must in all things, she said, be a clear definition of responsibility, with a logical differentiation of functions; and the business of the War Office was to prepare for war--not to jog along with an organization which might hold together in peace, but would break down in the field. Some papers were submitted to her criticism (June 1862). "What strikes me in them," she wrote, "is the black ignorance, the total want of imagination, as to a state of _war_ in which the _War_ Office seems to be. Really if it was a Joint Stock Company for the manufacture of skins, it could not, as far as appears, be less accustomed to contemplate or to imagine or to remember a state of war." I am afraid that most of us have lived through times when the same criticism could have been made. Let us hope that it is all a matter of ancient history now. Papers were sent to her dealing with the questions of Purveying and Commissariat. The Commissariat had hitherto been the bankers of the army, and some of the permanent officials saw no reason for a change. From her experience in the Crimea she gave them the reason. The confusion of functions worked badly in the field.[45] As it was bound to do, for it was absurd. "Is a man who buys bullocks the best man to be a banker? Would it not be better to have a separate Treasurer for the Army to receive all moneys and issue them to all departments? In private life nobody makes his steward or butler his banker. It would not be economical. Finance is as much a specialty as marketing, and as much so, to say the least of it, in the Army as in private life."

[44] There is a succinct account of organizations and reorganizations between 1854 and 1868 in a _Memorandum on the Organization of the War Office_ by Captain Galton, dated November 1868.

[45] See Vol. I. p. 231.

III

Complete reform of the War Office was, then, to remain a task for the future; but Miss Nightingale thought that Lord de Grey and Captain Galton did the administrative work well. Much of it was done with her assistance. From Miss Nightingale's point of view, the most important thing done under the Lewis-De Grey régime was the placing on a permanent footing of the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission. It was important, first, as keeping sound sanitary principles to the forefront in the execution of new works at home. It also, as already explained, provided machinery for promoting sanitary improvements in India. The point, next to its permanence, on which she most insisted was that the Commission should not be under the Army Medical Department, but should be directly responsible to the Secretary of State. "Lord de Grey said," wrote Captain Galton (June 25, 1862), "that he had adopted exactly your Minute about the Instructions to the Commission." With its Secretary, Mr. J. J. Frederick, Miss Nightingale was on very friendly terms, and Dr. Sutherland was its most active member. Most of the plans for new barracks or hospitals were submitted to her, and her inspection and criticism of them were searching. Then in 1862 the Government was about to build a new Military General Hospital at Malta. With Dr. Sutherland's aid, she went into every detail, and her Report on the plans occupies twenty-four pages of manuscript. In 1865 Sir Hope Grant succeeded Sir Richard Airey as Quarter-master General, and in that capacity as chairman of the Barrack Commission, the name of which was now changed to the Army Sanitary Committee. He went to see Miss Nightingale, "proud to think that she remembered him"; and the conversation must have been satisfactory; for "our new President is a Trump," reported Dr. Sutherland to her.

In examining plans, she always had a thought for the horses. When the plans for some cavalry barracks were sent for her criticism she put in a plea (June 4, 1863) for windows in the loose-boxes out of which the horses could see. "I do not speak from hearsay," she wrote to Captain Galton, "but from actual personal acquaintance with horses of an intimate kind. And I assure you they tell me it is of the utmost importance to their health and spirits when in the loose-box to have a window to look out at. A small bull's-eye will do. I have told Dr. Sutherland but he has no feeling." To which Dr. Sutherland added: "We have provided such a window and every horse can see out if he chooses to stand on his hind legs with his fore-feet against the wall. It is the least exertion he can put himself to, and if your doctrine is right, he will no doubt do it." Miss Nightingale had learnt to love the army horse in the Crimea. Many years later, some very bad barracks were closed in Ireland, and men and horses were moved to the Curragh. It was the horses, she wrote, who had done it. "If we are not moved, they said, we shall mutiny. _Military_ horses are quite capable of organizing movements. Did you ever hear of Jack? Jack was a riderless horse (his master having been killed) at the Charge of Balaclava. And he was seen collecting about 30 riderless horses, and at the head of his troop leading them back to, I suppose, Cavalry Headquarters. I have failed to discover whether Jack allowed horseless men to mount some of his horses. These men certainly returned on horseback--but when they found that a comrade, or an officer, was missing, they rode back, one and another, mounted the wounded man, and fought their way out of the Russian melée, but many died in the attempt--a glorious death. And when I see in the hansom-cabs horses who by their beautiful legs must have been hunters or even racers, galloping up Park Lane as long as they can stand, I say too 'a glorious death'; and horses should teach _us_, not we them, duty--do you think."[46]

[46] Letter of April 12, 1896, to Mrs. Henry Bonham Carter.

All regulations for military hospitals and for their nursing staff were similarly submitted to Miss Nightingale. She had a poor opinion of the capacity of the male mind to frame rules for female nurses. "By the united skill," she wrote (Feb. 16, 1863), of "Mess^{rs.} ---- and ----, the following Regulations for Female Hospitals were put together:--(1) Kennel your nurses and chain them up till wanted; (2) When the number of Patients does not exceed----, chain up the Nurses without food; (3) Let the number of Nurses vary every day as the number of Patients varies. I send you an _amended_ copy which, if you approve, might be put into type." She was constantly appealed to in connection with disputes caused at Netley by the difficult temper of Mrs. Shaw Stewart, the Superintendent of the Female Nursing Staff. She and Miss Nightingale were no longer close friends, but Miss Nightingale's sense of justice was strong, and she continuously supported Mrs. Stewart's authority.

IV

Another large batch of the semi-official correspondence is concerned with Miss Nightingale's favourite child, the Army Medical School, and with the position of the Army doctors generally. The troubles of the professors were still many; the relation of the School to the Secretary of State on the one hand, and to the Army Medical Department on the other, was much vexed; and, when the School was moved to Netley (1863), a fresh set of difficulties cropped up. Miss Nightingale was constantly appealed to, sometimes by the staff, sometimes by the War Office, to smooth over difficulties, to suggest ways out, to settle disputed questions. She was recognized by the War Office as a kind of super-professor. One of the staff sought official sanction for a book on the work of the School: "Lord de Grey wants to know whether he is capable; also whether his proposed syllabus is good. Also to have any critical suggestions upon it which Miss Nightingale could kindly communicate." Her verdict was favourable. I have been told that some Army doctors of to-day, knowing little about Miss Nightingale except that she found fault with medical arrangements in the Crimea, suppose her not to have been their friend. Nothing could be further from the truth. What she blamed was not the doctors (for most of whom she had the greatest admiration), but the system. From first to last, she was the most efficient friend that the Army Medical Service ever had. In 1862-63 there is a long series of letters from her to the War Office, in which she persistently pleaded for improvement in their status and emoluments. It was in connection with this matter that she wrote to Captain Galton (Dec. 24, 1863): "_In re_ Medical Warrant, I am meek and humble, but 'I cut up rough.' I am the animal of whom Buffon spoke, _Cet animal féroce mord tous ceux qui veulent le tuer_. You must do something for these doctors; or they will do for you, simply by not coming to you." A series of letters to Sir James Clark in the following year shows with what pertinacity she fought the battle of the Army doctors, and how indignant she was at any slights cast upon them:--

_April_ 6 [1864]. I have written threatening letters both to Lord de Grey and to Captain Galton about the [Medical Officers'] Warrant; and after pointing out that both restoration of Warrant and increase of pay are now necessary, I have shown how, when we are exacting duties from the Medical Officer, such as sanitary recommendations to his Commanding Officer, which essentially require him to have the standing of a gentleman with his Commanding Officer,--we are doing things, such as dismounting him at parade, depriving him of presidency at Boards, etc., which in military life, to a degree we have no idea of in civil life, deprive him of the weight of a gentleman among gentlemen.

_April_ 7. The W.O. seem now willing to listen to some kind of terms. They are frightened. They sent me your letter. It was very good, very firm. Don't be conciliatory.

_April_ 9. I wrote _for the tenth time_ a statement of eight pages, with permission to make any use of it they pleased, with my signature, as to Lord Herbert's intentions. But I positively refused to write to Mr. Gladstone, who certainly ought not to grant me what the Secretary of State of War does not urge.

_April_ 11. What is wanted is to put a muzzle on the Duke of Cambridge, and to tell him that he _must not_ alter a Royal Warrant.

_April_ 15. You may think I am not wise in being so angry. But I assure you, when I write civilly, I have a civil answer--_and nothing is done_. When I write furiously, I have a rude letter--_and something is done_ (not even then always, _but only then_).

In the following year there was a debate in the House of Lords upon the Military Hospitals which greatly interested, and personally affected, Miss Nightingale. Early in March Lord Dalhousie (the Lord Panmure of earlier days)[47] gave notice of a motion to call attention to the expenditure on the Netley Hospital and the Herbert Hospital respectively, and it was rumoured that the ex-Minister intended to deliver a set attack upon two of his successors, the late Lord Herbert and Lord de Grey. The War Office, in order to be fully prepared, sent to Miss Nightingale for a brief. She gladly supplied it, and she entered into the fray with great spirit. She was very angry that the memory of her "dear master" should be assailed, but I think that she enjoyed not a little the prospect of yet another encounter with "the Bison." She had beaten him before, and was determined that he should be beaten now. She advised Lord de Grey to avoid giving an advantage to the enemy by withholding any credit to which he was justly entitled. She recalled that at the last time they met, Lord Panmure had complained to her that she ascribed every sanitary reform in the Army to Sidney Herbert, though some of the reforms had been started by himself. She admitted, and advised Lord de Grey to admit, that Lord Panmure had deserved well of the Army by the measures which he took in the Crimea, and by initiating some steps for reducing the mortality at home. These things being admitted, the defence of Lord Herbert would carry the more weight. Having armed the Secretary of State with materials to meet any attack that might be made, Miss Nightingale turned to organize a second line of defence. Sir Harry Verney was dispatched to ask Mr. Gladstone's advice. Mr. Gladstone thought that Lord Harrowby should be retained for the defence, and he was approached. Miss Nightingale sent watching briefs also to her own friends, Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Houghton.[48] When Lord Dalhousie's motion was taken, the rumours turned out to be well founded. He extolled his Netley (the non-"pavilion" hospital) as perfect, and criticized the Herbert Hospital ("pavilion") as a costly toy in the "glass-and-glare" style, and in a long speech attacked the "wasteful" system which Lord Herbert had introduced by paying attention to "hygienists who had carried their opinions too far." He had, I suppose, "that turbulent fellow," Miss Nightingale, in his mind when "he could not help thinking that all these unnecessary knick-knacks in hospitals were introduced partly from the habit, which prevailed at the War Office, of consulting hygienists not connected with the army." The personal animus in the attack was thought so obvious that the speech fell very flat. And Lord de Grey's reply--"quite admirable" according to Miss Nightingale--was so courteous, yet so conclusive, that her "counsel" were unanimously of opinion that not another word was necessary. Apart from any personal question, Lord Dalhousie's speech[49] has a certain historical interest as embodying some of the prejudices against which Miss Nightingale as a Hospital Reformer had to contend. A little later in the year a military attack on the sanitarians was threatened in the House of Commons, but this only took the form of questions about the vote under which payment by the War Office to Dr. Sutherland appeared.[50] Miss Nightingale sent a note to the War Office, setting forth the facts and emphasizing the value of his services in the cause of sanitary improvement.

[47] He had succeeded to the earldom of Dalhousie on the death of his cousin, the 10th earl and first marquis, in Dec. 1860.

[48] Mr. R. Monckton Milnes had been created Baron Houghton in 1863.

[49] It is in _Hansard_ on March 6, 1865.

[50] _Hansard_, June 19 and 30, 1865.

V

These were subjects in which Miss Nightingale was directly concerned, but questions of many other kinds were referred to her. I find in the correspondence with the War Office during these years that, in addition to matters otherwise mentioned in this chapter, her advice was asked upon such subjects as an Apothecaries' Warrant, barracks for Ceylon, "Fever Tinctures," Instructions for Cholera, fittings for Military Hospitals, the proposed amalgamation of the Home and Indian Medical Services, the organization of Hospitals for Soldiers' Wives, Sanitary Instructions for New Zealand, revision of soldiers' rations, staff appointments at Netley, appointment of West Indian staff surgeons, an outbreak of Yellow Fever in Bermuda, the relation of Commissariat Barracks and Purveying at Foreign Stations, victualling on transports and the Mhow court-martial.[51] On one occasion she was asked to send hints for a speech in the House of Commons. Lord Hartington, then Under-Secretary for War, would have to defend a large increase in the votes for Hospital and Medical Service. The Crimean War and Miss Nightingale's crusade had raised the expenditure from £97,000 in 1853-54 to £295,000 in 1864-65. "Could you send me a paragraph for Lord Hartington's speech," she was asked, "to show the salient points of what the nation gets for its money? Something pithy, put in your best manner." "There is nothing in the world I should like so much," she replied (Feb. 29, 1864), "as to have to do Lord Hartington's speech and stand in his shoes on such an occasion." She sent some pithy comparisons; and, in case the Minister wanted something heavier, a detailed memorandum. I suppose Lord Hartington chose the heaviness and rejected the pith; for when Miss Nightingale read the parliamentary report, she thought the speech a poor performance.[52] The same kind of references to Miss Nightingale went on when in 1866, on Lord de Grey's transference to the India Office,[53] Lord Hartington became Secretary of State for War. "Can you throw light," she was asked (June 21, 1866), "on the position of the medical officers of the _Guards_? This is very pressing. The whole matter is an awful mess, and Lord Hartington is anxious to leave it in some way of settlement." On the following day a lucid and exhaustive Memorandum on the subject went in from her.

[51] The history of this affair, which excited a prodigious interest in Parliament and the press, may be read by the curious in vol. xxxiii. of the Parliamentary Papers of 1863, and vol. xxxv. of those of 1864. Miss Nightingale's good offices were asked by the War Office to parry an attack by "Jacob Omnium," for whose part in the affair see _Essays on Social Subjects_, by Matthew John Higgins, 1875, pp. lvi.-lx.

[52] It certainly was dull: see _Hansard_, March 3, 1864.

[53] See below, p. 108.

In July 1864 Miss Nightingale was engaged on a piece of work for the War Office which was closely associated with her Crimean experiences and with her European repute. It was in August of that year that the international congress was held which framed the famous Geneva Convention. The British delegates were Miss Nightingale's friend, Dr. Longmore, and Dr. Rutherford, and she drafted their Instructions. The principle of the Convention was the neutralization of the wounded under the Red Cross. Societies formed under the Red Cross were soon organized throughout Europe, and the movement led to a great development of volunteer-nursing in war time.

Sometimes Miss Nightingale sent in suggestions on her own account. She was in close touch with soldiers and sailors, and a woman's sympathetic insight appears in this letter:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Captain Galton._) _Sept._ 21 [1863]. People are complaining that when a Regiment sails, many of their wives and children are left behind, and the soldiers are unable to make any provision for their support until they have reached their destination, say China or Calcutta (after a four months' voyage round the Cape), and have been able to send money through their Captains to their families at home. Meanwhile the families have gone through five or six months of distress. For sailors leaving a port in England or Ireland, the Admiralty provides power to leave a standing order that a certain amount of pay is to be sent regularly to their families. The W.O. objects that a similar arrangement would "involve a change in their book-keeping." It would involve no change. It would involve a small addition. I am willing to go the length of 6d. to furnish an account-book to the W.O., which would enable them to keep these additional accounts. The W.O. also objects that it would deprive the Captain of the chance of fining the soldiers for any military offence. But they can learn the Admiralty system; and whilst there are other ways of "doing" the soldiers, their pay is the only means of providing bread for their families starving (or doing worse) at home. Surely the soldiers might be allowed to leave, for the probable duration of their voyage, and for a month or two beyond it, a sum to be paid weekly to their representatives at home. Sir E. Lugard has been tried and failed. Pray set this right. But the W.O. would not be the W.O., if such things as these were not. And when they have ceased to be, the War Office will have ceased to be.

Satire was not the only weapon which Miss Nightingale employed in order to get things done. Sometimes she appealed to the motive of rivalry. Was the Minister hanging back? Well, all she could say was that Sidney Herbert would have done the thing in a moment. There were difficulties in the way, were there? The subordinate officials were piling up what they were pleased to call "reasons" to the contrary, were they? Well, "on this day many years ago," she wrote (June 18, 1862), "the French guns kept coming up again and again to get us out of the yard at Hougomont, and we answered in strong language, often repeated, till we kept the ground that we had won. I never heard the French guns called reasons. And I advise you to answer in the same way, because there is no other way of answering. Lord de Grey's Minute is the gun which just has to be fired over again." And sometimes she resorted, as of old, to a little bullying. "I send you," she wrote (March 26, 1863), "my protest about the Medical School. Make what use of it you like. But, if we fail, I shall refer it to Lord Palmerston who, as you know, befriended us on a former occasion (after Hawes's death)"--a home thrust, this, as it was by a personal reference to Lord Palmerston that she had secured Captain Galton's appointment.

There was one occasion when, for a wonder, the pressure to be prompt and decided came not from her, but from the War Office. The Governorship of the Woolwich Hospital fell vacant; she had been sent a list of names with a request to advise upon them, and she had not immediately replied. "I wrote," she explained (Feb. 11, 1863), "to various authorities the very moment your and Lord de Grey's letters were put into my hands. The answers cannot be long delayed. But what would you think of my opinion if I volunteered it about men whom I know only by name? Had you asked me about Lord William Paulet or Colonel Storks or Sir Richard Airey, I could have given you an opinion off-hand with the utmost want of modesty. The very moment I have any reliable information you shall have it. But it takes some time to make such an inquiry, or what would it be worth? And Woolwich, I suppose, is not on fire, or with the enemy at the gates?" But for some reason or other, the War Office was in a hurry, and the appointment was made before her inquiries were completed. Her conscientiousness thus lost her the chance of deciding a piece of patronage. Not, indeed, that she felt any loss in such a case. She was nothing of a jobber. She pulled wires, as I have told, in some special appointments where she believed that a high public cause was at stake; but she was never actuated by personal favouritism, or by the love of personal influence on behalf of individuals. For this very post, she had received fifty letters of application, she said, but she had taken no action upon them. Only once, she said on another occasion, had she solicited anything as a personal favour from the War Office. It was an appointment for a Presbyterian Chaplain, who was not personally known to her, but whose hard and deserving case (as she thought it) had been brought to her notice. She was once sent a list of the Army Medical Service, and asked by a Minister to mark the names, for his private and confidential use, with her approbation or otherwise. This she respectfully declined to do. When she was asked a specific question about an officer whom she had known in the Crimea or elsewhere, she gave an opinion freely, and generally managed to put it pointedly; as of a certain Commandant: "As you often see in those round-headed, red-faced men, he has a great deal of conscience and very little judgment."

VI

A subject, in which Miss Nightingale took great and painful interest during these years, was the State regulation of vice. The legislation of 1864, 1866, and 1869 was already being promoted and considered in 1862. The subject was odious to Miss Nightingale, but her experiences in foreign hospitals and at Scutari had made her peculiarly familiar with it. Her private correspondence with doctors and military officers shows that for some years before 1862 she had given much thought and study to the question, and had carefully tested conclusions drawn from her personal observations by statistics and by the opinions of other persons. She hated the system of regulation on moral grounds, but she was equally convinced that the case for it had not been satisfactorily established by statistical evidence on hygienic grounds. On this point, two of the medical men, upon whose judgment she placed most reliance--Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Graham Balfour (the head of the Army Statistical Department)--agreed with her. With their assistance she worked up the case against the continental system, and at the request of Sir George Lewis, who was considering the matter in 1862, she wrote a private paper, which was circulated among some members of the Government and others. "Your facts," wrote Captain Galton to her (April 29, 1862), "have shaken Lord de Grey's views on the subject of police inspection." With Mr. Gladstone, she was less successful. He found her Paper "of deep interest and full of important fact and argument," and said that, as a result of reading it and her letters, he should approach the subject "with much of circumspection as well as of anxiety"; but he "doubted the possibility of making a standing army a moral institution." Therein she profoundly differed, and she urged, in rejoinder, that nothing should be done on his assumption, at least until the other had been given a fair trial--by increasing the soldiers' facilities for marriage, by giving them better opportunities for instruction and recreation, by encouraging physical exercise and manual handicrafts. Official opinion steadily hardened, however, in the direction of regulation; and presently public opinion was tested by a series of articles in the _Times_ in favour of the continental system. Miss Nightingale thereupon supplied Harriet Martineau with facts and figures, and the _Times_ was answered by the _Daily News_. Miss Nightingale also printed her own Paper for a more extended, though still "private and confidential," circulation. Dr. Sutherland chivalrously assumed the sole authorship, and was acrimoniously attacked by some of his professional brethren. The Army Medical Department was working hard for regulation, and some person therein, suspecting Miss Nightingale as the real leader of the opposition, disgraced himself by sending her an anonymous letter of vulgar abuse. This of course did not deter her, and, when legislation was proposed, she lobbied indefatigably (through correspondence) against it. The opinion of the House of Commons was, however, overwhelmingly in its favour. When the legislation was passed, the War Office invited her assistance in the selection of medical officers under the Act; but she refused to touch what she regarded as an accursed thing. It was left to another of the remarkable women of the nineteenth century, to secure, after a struggle of sixteen years, the repeal of the Acts; but though Miss Nightingale shrank from taking a public part in that crusade, she gave support privately to Mrs. Josephine Butler. At a later time, however, Miss Nightingale somewhat modified her views.[54]

[54] Below, p. 408.

Miss Nightingale's failure during the years 1862-64 to arrest the movement of public opinion in the direction which she detested, increased her eagerness to promote what she considered the more excellent way. She was the life and soul at headquarters of the movement for increasing the supply of Reading-rooms, Soldiers' Clubs, Recreation-rooms, and facilities for useful employment. "I will tell you," she wrote to the Reverend Mother of the Bermondsey Convent (Jan. 3, 1864), "how I spent my Christmas Day and the Sunday after, those being two holidays: in preparing a scheme, by desire of Lord de Grey, for employing soldiers in trades." She wrote a Memorandum on "Methods of Starting an Exhibition (Soldiers' Trades)," and such an exhibition was held at Aldershot in the summer of 1864.[55] Whenever there was a difficulty to be overcome, or an opportunity to be seized, Miss Nightingale was appealed to. For instance, there was a fight for a certain disused Iron House at Aldershot. Miss Nightingale's party (supported at the War Office) wanted it for a Men's Recreation Room; the Horse Guards wanted it for an Officers' Club. A promise had already been given in favour of the former, but Sir George Lewis was wavering. "Lord de Grey thinks," wrote Captain Galton (April 29, 1862), "that the best course for the Iron House is for Sir H. Verney to ask Sir G. L. in the House about it, alluding to his former promise, and if it could be arranged that Monckton Milnes, Gen. Lindsay, or any other persons could cheer or support the proposals, it would pledge Sir G. L. to act at once." Miss Nightingale set her parliamentary friends to work, and the fight for the Iron House was won. Lord de Grey succeeded in getting a vote on the Estimates for the encouragement of such places. Miss Nightingale revised for him a set of Regulations for Reading-Rooms. She also, at his request, drew up (in concert with Captain Pilkington Jackson) an inventory of the appropriate furniture and other fitments. Her zeal in this matter was known abroad; at Montreal and Halifax and Gibraltar commanding-officers who were trying to start or develop instructions of the kind applied to her. She often succeeded in obtaining War Office grants for them, and these she supplemented by gifts of her own. No inconsiderable portion of her resources at this time went in subscriptions of this sort, either in money or in kind (carpentering equipment, bagatelle boards, books, prints, and the like). It is pleasant to read the letters in which the non-commissioned officers and men of regiments, which had been served by Miss Nightingale in the Crimea, sent thanks, through their commanding officers, to "that noble lady for her continued interest in the welfare of the British soldiers."

[55] Attention was called to it, and the moral was pointed, by a leading article in the _Daily News_ (July 8), doubtless written by Harriet Martineau.

It was a cause of great pleasure to Miss Nightingale that in 1864 her old friend of the Scutari days, General Storks, who had encouraged her there in work of this kind,[56] was appointed to the command at Malta. "I am very grateful to you," he wrote (Nov. 10), "for seeing me the other day, and can only express the great gratification I experienced on that occasion. I can never forget the time when I was associated with you in the great work which has produced such satisfactory results, and for which the whole army will ever thank you. When one reflects on the condition of the soldier ten years ago and what it is now, there is cause for wonder at the difficulties you have overcome, and the results you have achieved.... (Nov. 18.) All the arrangements contemplated at Malta, both legislative (if necessary) and administrative, shall be submitted for your consideration and approval in draft before they are acted upon, and I need not say how grateful I shall be for your kind assistance." In later years Miss Nightingale took a friendly interest in the Soldiers' Institute at Portsmouth, founded by Miss Sarah Robinson. A meeting was held in its support at the Mansion House in 1877, at which Lord Wolseley presided, and a letter from Miss Nightingale was read. "If you knew," she said, "as I do (or once did), the difference between our soldiers cared for in body, mind, and morals, and our soldiers uncared for--the last, 'hell's carnival' (the words are not my own), the first, the finest fellows of God's making; if you knew how troops immediately on landing are beset with invitations to bad of all kinds, you would hasten to supply them with invitations to, and means for, good of all kinds: remembering that the soldier is of all men the man whose life is made for him by the necessities of his Service. We may not hope to make 'saints' of all, but we can make men of them instead of brutes. If you knew these things as I do, you would forgive me for asking you, if my poor name may still be that of the soldiers' ever faithful servant, to support Miss Robinson's work in making men of them at Portsmouth, the place of all others of temptation to be brutes."

[56] See Vol. I. p. 279.

VII

Even the multifarious interest described in preceding pages and chapters do not tell the whole tale of Miss Nightingale's labours during this time. It was not only the British soldiers at home and in India whom she took under her protection; nor only the War Office and the India Office with which she had some connection. She was open to any human appeal for help, and her acquaintance with Sir George Grey led her, through a friendly Minister at the Colonial Office, to make an attempt for the protection of the aboriginal races in the British Dominions. She had met Sir George Grey in 1859 and 1860, and he had talked to her about the gradual disappearance of those races when brought into touch with civilization. This was a subject which appealed strongly to Miss Nightingale. Her mission in life was to be a "saviour" of men. It shamed her to think that her country in colonizing so large a part of the world should so often come into contact with inferior races only to destroy them. In the course of conversation with Sir George Grey, the question was raised whether the disappearance of the aboriginal races was in any degree due to the effect of European school usages and school education. Miss Nightingale determined to investigate the matter. She drew up schedules of inquiry, and the Duke of Newcastle (then Colonial Secretary) officially circulated them to Colonial Schools and Colonial Hospitals (1860). As each return came in during following years, it was forwarded from the Colonial Office to Miss Nightingale. Her inquiries were far more searching and detailed, I notice on looking through the papers, than were the answers. There were not many passionate statisticians in those days among the schoolmasters or doctors attached to native schools or hospitals in distant colonies, and the results of Miss Nightingale's researches in this obscure field were somewhat disappointing. She summarized the information in a Paper which she contributed to the Social Science Congress at Edinburgh in 1863, and which she printed as a pamphlet.[57] The Duke of Newcastle sent the pamphlet to colonial governors and other officials, and invited their remarks. To the Congress in 1864 Miss Nightingale contributed a further Paper (also printed as a pamphlet[58]), embodying the substance of some of the later information thus obtained. The documents which she received from the Colonial Office during several years are preserved amongst her papers, and form what is, I suppose, a unique collection of information on a curious subject. Though her researches did not lead to any positive conclusions in relation to the effect of education as such upon the deterioration of the wild races, they disclosed much neglect of sanitary precautions. She pointed out mistakes that were made in the kind of clothing into which in the name of decency the native children were put. She applied in a wider way the principle that their open-air habits should be remembered, insisting especially on the importance of physical and manual training. The returns from colonial hospitals showed again that preventable causes--bad drainage, bad water, and so forth--were to blame for much of the mortality. "Incivilization with its inherent diseases, when brought into contact with civilization without adopting specific precautions for preserving health, will always carry with it a large increase of mortality on account of the greater susceptibility of its subjects to those causes of disease which can, to a certain extent, be endured without as great a risk by civilized communities born among them." But principally Miss Nightingale based upon the results of her inquiries a moral appeal to the conscience of popular opinion and governments in the Colonies and in Downing Street. "The decaying races are chiefly in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and perhaps in certain parts of South Africa. They appear to consist chiefly of tribes which have never been civilized enough, or had force of character enough, to form fixed settlements or to build towns. Such tribes have few fixed habits or none. But the papers show that they are naturally, in their uncivilized condition, possessed of far stronger stamina, and that they resist the effects of frightful wounds and injuries far better than civilized men. This latter fact tells strongly against any natural proclivity to diseased action." The course of history does not show that such appeals as Miss Nightingale's have been wholly successful. It seems to be, as Mr. Froude said, that with men, as with orders of creation, only those wild races will survive who can domesticate themselves into servants of the newer forms. Where there is such ability, where the labour of the coloured races is required by the white men, the aboriginal races survive, and even thrive and multiply; where those conditions do not exist, they do not survive. So far, however, as the extinction of native races has been arrested, Miss Nightingale was among the pioneers in pointing out the way. Her clear intelligence, acting upon the mass of evidence which she had collected, perceived certain principles which have guided all practical statesmen who sought to protect aborigines, and to free civilization from one of its disgraces. She urged that "provision of land should be made for the exclusive use of existing tribes." She pleaded passionately for the suppression of the liquor traffic.[59] She argued that in the formal education, and in all other means of endeavouring to improve the natives, "there should be as little interference as possible with their born habits and conditions," that interference should be wise and gradual, and that above all "physical training and a large amount of out-door work are essentially necessary to success." She did not succeed in arresting the decline of the aboriginal races; but she contributed something to their protection.

[57] Bibliography A, Nos. 39 and 40.

[58] _Ibid._ No. 47.

[59] A letter to her on this subject (Dec. 6, 1864) from the permanent Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office is printed in _Letters of Frederick Lord Blachford_, 1896, p. 251.

VIII

Thus, then, in all the various ways described in this chapter did Miss Nightingale labour, but especially in the cause of the British Army. The rôle of the Soldiers' Friend which she had filled in the Crimea was enacted on a conspicuous stage. Her work was now all done behind the scenes; and done, as I have already described, under heavy physical disability. Much of the work was, moreover, dull and even uncongenial; but she fed her soul on higher things:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Mrs. Moore._) 32 SOUTH STREET, _Dec._ 15 [1863]. DEAREST REVD. MOTHER--I am here, as you see--(My brother-in-law's house--where you were so good as to see me last year--to think of that being more than a year ago) and have been here a good bit. But I have had all your dear letters. And you cannot think how much they have encouraged me. They are almost the only earthly encouragement I have. I have been so very ill--and even the little change of moving here knocks me down for a month. But God is so good as to let me still struggle on with my business. But with so much difficulty that it was quite impossible to me to write even to you. And I only write now, because I hear you are ill. I have felt so horribly ungrateful for never having thanked you for your books. S. Jean de la Croix's life I keep thankfully. I am never tired of reading that part where he prays for the return for all his services, _Domine, pati et contemni pro te_. I am afraid I never could ask that. But in return for very little service, I get it. It is quite impossible to describe how harassing, how heart-breaking my work has been since the beginning of July. I have always, with all my heart and soul, offered myself to God for the greatest bitterness on my own part, if His (War Office) work could be done. But lately nothing was done, and always because there was not one man like Sidney Herbert to do it.... I don't think S. Jean de la Croix need have prayed to be dismissed from superiorships before he died. For as the Mère de Bréchard says, there are more opportunities to humble oneself, to mortify oneself, to throw oneself entirely on God, in them than in anything else. I return the life of S. Catherine of Genoa. I like it so much. It is a very singular and suggestive life. I am so glad she accepted the being Directress of the Hospital. For I think it was much better for her to make the Hospital servants go right than to receive their "injures"--however submissively--much better for the poor Patients, I mean.

I am quite ashamed to keep Ste. Thérése so long. But there is a good deal of reading in her. And I am only able to read at night--and then not always a large, close-printed book. Pray say if I shall send her back. And I will borrow her again from you perhaps some day. I am so sorry about poor S. Gonzaga's troubles. I know what those Committees are. I have had to deal with them almost all my life.

My strength has failed more than usually of late. And I don't think I have much more work in me--not, at least, if it is to continue of this harassing sort. God called me to Hospital work (as I fondly thought, for life)--but since then to Army work--but with a promise that I should go back to Hospital--as I thought as a Nurse, but as I now think, as a Patient. But St. Catherine of Siena says: "Et toutesfois je permets cela luy advenir, afin qu'il soit plus soigneux de fuyr soi mesme, & de venir & recourir à moy ... et qu'il considère que par amour je luy donne le moyen de tirer hors le chef de la vraye humilité, se reputant indigne de la paix & repos de pensée, comme mes autres serviteurs--& au contraire se reputant digne des peines qu'il souffre," etc.

My sister and her family come to spend here two or three nights occasionally to see friends. But I was only able to see her for ten minutes, and my good brother-in-law, who is one of the best and kindest of men, not at all--nor his children.... I sent you back St. Francis de Sales, with many thanks. I liked him in his old dress. I like that story where the man loses his crown of martyrdom, because he will not be reconciled with his enemy. It is a sound lesson. I am going to send you back S. Francis Xavier. His is a life I always like to study as well as those of all the early Jesuit fathers. But how much they did--and how little I do.... Ever my dearest Revd. Mother's loving and grateful, F. N.

Miss Nightingale never lost sight of the end in the means. She was doing "God's work" in the "War Office." She thought it was "little" that she did, for it is often the hardest workers who thus deem themselves the most unprofitable servants. And the work was often drudgery; yet through it all she had inspiration from her memories of heroism in the Army, for whose "salvation" she was working. "I have seen to-day [from my window]," she wrote to her mother in 1863, "the first Levée, since all are dead whom I wished to please. A melancholy sight to me. Yet I like the pomp and pageant of the old veterans covered with well-earned crosses. To me who saw them earned, no vain pageant. It is like the Dead March in _Saul_--to me, who heard it on the battle-field, no vain sound, but full of deep and glorious sadness."

CHAPTER V

HELPERS, VISITORS, AND FRIENDS

(1862-1866)

To be alone is nothing; but to be without sympathy in a crowd, this is to be confined in solitude. Where there is want of sympathy, of attraction, given and returned, must it not be a feeling of starvation?--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: _Suggestions for Thought_ (1860).

Friendship should help the friends to work out better the work of life.--BENJAMIN JOWETT (1866).

The years of Miss Nightingale's life, described in this Part, were perhaps those of her hardest and most unremitting work. Throughout these years, until August 1866, she lived entirely in London or immediately near to it.[60] Her quarters were in lodgings or in hired houses, until November 1865, when her father took a house for her for a term of years in South Street (No. 35), near her married sister. This house (No. 10 when the street was renumbered) was the one that she occupied till her death. I think that there was not a single day during the period from 1862 to 1866 upon which she was not engaged in one part or another of the manifold work described in preceding chapters. And there was much other work as well, begun in these years, but brought to completion later, which will be described in a subsequent Part. She gave account of her days to Madame Mohl (Jan. 24, 1865), and recalled what "a poor woman with 13 children, who took in washing, once said to me--her idea of heaven was to have one hour a day in which she could do nothing." Yet all that Miss Nightingale did was done forcefully. "I am completely reassured as to the state of your health," wrote her old friend Mr. Reeve (Jan. 21, 1865), in reply to some communication on Indian affairs, "by the Homeric frame of mind you are in. You will live an hundred years. You will write a Sanitariad or a Lawrentiad in 24 books, and Lord Derby will translate you into all known languages. Stanley will be Lord Derby then, but this will only make the thing more appropriate." But her work, though very vigorous, was very hard. It was done, not as in the Crimean war, in the excitement of immediate action, nor, as in the years succeeding her return, with the daily aid and sympathy of her "dear Master." It was her hardest work for another reason, already mentioned: she was for a large part of this later period, almost bedridden. She would get up and dress in order to receive the more important of her men-visitors, but the effort tired her greatly.

[60] Her places of residence in 1862 and 1863 have been given above, p. 24. In 1864 she lived at 32 (now No. 4) South Street, the Verneys' house (Jan.); at 115 Park Street (Feb.-July); at 7 Oak Hill Park, Hampstead (Aug.-Oct.). She was at 27 Norfolk Street from Nov. 1864 to May 1, 1865. During May and June 1865 and again in Oct., she was at 34 (now No. 8) South Street; in July-Sept., she was at Hampstead.

The amount of work which she did under these conditions is extraordinary, and the question arises how she did it. A principal explanation is to be found in Dr. Sutherland. The reader may have noticed once or twice in letters written by Miss Nightingale such expressions as "We are doing" so and so, or "Can such and such be sent to us." The plural was not royal; it signified she had explained at an earlier time to Sidney Herbert, "the troops and me;" but it also signified, during the years with which this Part is concerned, herself and Dr. Sutherland. She wrote incessantly, but even so she could hardly have accomplished her daily tasks without some clerical assistance. She knew an immense deal about the subjects with which she dealt, and her memory was both precise and tenacious; but there were limits to her powers of acquisition, and cases often arose in which personal inspection or personal moving about in search of information were essential. In all these ways Dr. Sutherland's help was constant. He wielded a ready pen. He was one of the leading sanitary experts of the day. His professional and official connections gave him access to various sources of information. His regular work was on the Army Sanitary Commission; and for the rest, he placed himself at Miss Nightingale's beck and call. Mrs. Sutherland was her private secretary at this time for household affairs, such as searching for lodgings and engaging servants; her accounts were still kept, and much of her miscellaneous correspondence conducted by her uncle, Mr. Sam Smith;[61] but in all official business, her factotum was Dr. Sutherland. A large proportion of the notes, drafts, and memoranda, belonging to these years, among her papers, is in Dr. Sutherland's handwriting, and sometimes it is impossible to determine how much of the work is hers and how much his. Often he took down heads from her conversation, and put the matter into shape; at other times he submitted drafts for her approval or correction, and took copies of the letters ultimately dispatched.

[61] She was still so beset by begging letters, that Mr. Smith had a notice inserted in the _Times_ of April 29, 1864, to the effect that she could not answer them or return any papers enclosed to her.

How indispensable to her was Dr. Sutherland's help comes out from some correspondence of 1865. Captain Galton had sent private word that there was talk at the War Office of appointing Dr. Sutherland Commissioner to inquire into an outbreak of cholera at some of the Mediterranean Stations. Miss Nightingale was greatly perturbed. "We are full of Indian business," she wrote (Nov. 1), "which must be settled before Parliament meets. Lord Stanley has consented to take it up. And I have pledged myself to have it all ready--a thing I should never have done if I had thought Dr. Sutherland would be sent abroad. You are yourself aware that Calcutta water-supply has been sent home to us (at my request), and Dr. S. told me this morning that _he and I_ should have to write the Report." And again (Dec. 15): "For God's sake, if you can, prevent Dr. Sutherland going." She had begged that at any rate nothing should be said to Dr. Sutherland himself about it unless the mission were irrevocably decided upon: "he is so childish that if he heard of this Malta and Gibraltar business he would instantly declare there was nothing to keep him in England." The "child"--the "baby" of some earlier correspondence[62]--only liked a little change sometimes. Indispensable though he was to his task-mistress, he yet, as in former days, vexed her. She thought him lacking in method, and with her this was one of the unpardonable sins. He sometimes forgot what he had done with, or had promised to do with, a particular Paper; he was even capable of mislaying a Blue-book. He was often behind hand with tasks imposed upon him. His temperament was a little volatile, and in one impeachment he is accused of "incurable looseness of thought." If this were so (which I take leave to doubt), the defect must have been congenital, or long service under Miss Nightingale would have cured it.

[62] See Vol. I. pp. 370, 383.

Partly because Dr. Sutherland's manner sometimes teased her, partly because he was deaf, and partly owing to her own physical disabilities, Miss Nightingale developed at this time a method of communicating with him which, during later years, became familiar to all but her most privileged friends. The visitor on being admitted was ushered into a sitting-room on the ground-floor, and given pencil and paper. It were well for him that what he wrote should be lucid and concise. The message was carried upstairs into the Presence, and an answer, similarly written, was brought down. And to such interchange would the interview be confined. With Dr. Sutherland, Miss Nightingale had many personal interviews; their business was often too detailed, too intricate, too confidential, to be conducted otherwise; but there are hundreds of letters, received from other people, upon which (in blank spaces or on spare sheets) there are pencilled notes conveying answers or messages to Dr. Sutherland. "Well, you know I have already said that to Lord Stanley. I can't do more." "Yes, you _must_." "Oh, Lord bless you, _No_." "You want me to decide in order that you may do the reverse." "Can you answer a plain question?" "You have forgotten all we talked about." "I cannot flatter you on your lucidity." "I do not shake hands till the Abstract is done; and I do not leave London till it is done." "You told me positively there was nothing to be done. There is everything to be done." "Why did you tell me that tremendous _banger_? Was it to prevent my worrying you?" "Nothing has been done. I have been so anxious; but the more zeal I feel, the more indifferent you." Sometimes he strikes work, or refuses to answer, signing his name by a drawing of a dry pump with a handle marked "F.N.": "Your pump is dry. India to stand over." Sometimes he makes fun of her business-like methods, and heads his notes "Ref.000000/000." Sometimes he pleads illness. "I am very sorry, but I was too ill to know anything except that I was ill." Often he received visitors for her, or entertained them on her behalf at luncheon or dinner. "These two people have come. Will you see them for me? I have explained who you are." "Was the luncheon good? Did he eat?" "Did he walk?" "Yes." "Then he's a liar; he told me he couldn't move." In 1865-66 Dr. and Mrs. Sutherland had moved house from Finchley to Norwood. Miss Nightingale complained of this remoteness. Dr. Sutherland dated his letters from "The Gulf." He stayed there sometimes, complaining of indisposition, instead of coming up to South Street where business was pressing. Miss Nightingale did not take the reason kindly, and his letters begin, "Respected Enemy" or "Dear howling epileptic Friend." One morning (June 23, 1865) Dr. Sutherland went to the private view of the Herbert Hospital--a great occasion to Miss Nightingale. In the afternoon he called and sent up to her a short note of what he had seen. "And that is all you condescend to tell me. And I get it at 4 o'clock." Of course, they understood each other; they were old and intimate friends. But I think that the man who thus served with Miss Nightingale must have had a great and disinterested zeal for the causes in which they were engaged; and that there must have been something at once formidable and fascinating in the Lady-in-Chief.

II

The pressure of work during these years caused Miss Nightingale to close her doors resolutely. She did indeed see her father often; her mother and sister occasionally, though she did not press them to come. Other relations and many of her friends felt aggrieved that she would not accept help which they would have liked to give. But she had a rule of life to which she adhered firmly. There was so much strength available, likely enough (as she still supposed) to be ended by early death; there was so much public work to be done; there was no strength to spare for family or friends, except in so far as they helped, and did not hinder, the public work. She saw nurses and matrons from time to time: they were parts of her life-work. She saw Lady Herbert and Mrs. Bracebridge: they were parts of her work in the past. She never omitted to write to Lady Herbert on the anniversary of Lord Herbert's death, though their friendship lost something of its former intimacy when in 1865 Lady Herbert joined the Church of Rome. Other friends were seldom admitted. Letters to an old friend, who was sometimes received and sometimes turned away, explain Miss Nightingale's point of view:--

(_To Madame Mohl._) 115 PARK STREET, _July_ 30 [1864]. You will be doing me a favour if you come to me. August 2 is a terrible anniversary to me. And I shall not have my usual solace, for Mrs. Bracebridge has always come to spend that day with me, and I am sure she would have come this year, but I could not tell whether I should be able to get Sir John Lawrence's things off by that time. It does me good to be with you, as with Mrs. Clive, because it reduces individual struggles to general formulæ. It does me harm, intensely alone as I am, to be with people who do the reverse. But it is incorrect to say, as Mrs. Clive does, that "I will not let people help me," or, as others do, that "no one can help me." Any body could have helped me who knew how to read and write and what o'clock it is.

_June_ 23 [1865], SOUTH STREET. CLARKEY MOHL DARLING--How I should like to see you now. But it is quite, quite, quite impossible. I am sure no one ever gave up so much to live, who longed so much to die, as I do and give up daily. It is the only credit I claim. I will live if I can. I shall be so glad if I can't. I am overwhelmed with business. And I have an Indian functionary now in London, whose work is cut out for him every day at my house. I scarcely even have half an hour's ease. Would you tell M. Mohl this, if you are writing, about the Queen of Holland's proposed visit to me? I really feel it a great honour that she wishes to see me. She is a Queen of Queens. But it is quite, quite, quite impossible.... (_Oct_. 4 [1865]). I am so weak, no one knows how weak I am. Yesterday because I saw Dr. Sutherland for a few minutes in the afternoon, after the morning's work, and my good Mrs. Sutherland for a few minutes after him, I was with a spasm of the heart till 7 o'clock this morning and nearly unfit for work all to-day.

In the case of one distinguished visitor to London, Miss Nightingale made an exception. This was Garibaldi. She was a sworn Garibaldian, as we have heard. He wished to see her; she was famous in Italy, and she had subscribed to his funds. Friends told her that she might be able to influence the hero in the direction of her own interests, and with some trepidation she prepared herself to receive him. "I think," wrote Mr. Jowett, "that we may trust God to give us his own calmness and clearness on any great occasion such as this is. I hope you will inspire Garibaldi for the future and not pain him too much about the past. Ten years more of such a life as his might accomplish almost anything for Italy in the way of military organization and sanitary and moral improvement--if he could only see that his duty is not to break the yet immature strength of Italy against Austrian fortresses." Miss Nightingale prepared for the "great occasion" by jotting down in French what she would try to say. "Eh bien! in five years you have made Italy--the work of five centuries. You have worked a miracle. But even you, mon Général, could not make a steam-engine in five minutes. And Italy has to be consolidated into a strong machine, like those which you have been seeing at Bedford," and so forth, and so forth. She tried to keep the fact of the interview secret, but it was chronicled in the newspapers[63]:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Harriet Martineau._) 115 PARK ST., _April 28_ [1864]. You may have heard that I have seen Garibaldi. I resisted it with all my might, but I was obliged to do it. I asked no one to look at him--told no one--and he came in my brother-in-law's carriage, hoping that no one would know. But it all failed. We had a long interview by ourselves. I was more struck with the greatness of that noble heart--full of bitterness, yet not bitter--and with the smallness of the administrative capacity, than even I expected. He raves for a Government "like the English." But he knows no more what it is than his King Bomba did. (It was for this that I was to speak to him.) One year of such a life, as I have led for ten years, would tell him more of how one has to give and take with a "representative Government" than all his Utopia and his "ideal." You will smile. But he reminds me of Plato. He talks about the "ideal good" and the "ideal bad"; about his not caring for "repubblica" or for "monarchia": he only wants "the right." Alas! alas! What a pity--that utter impracticability! I pity _me_ very much. And of all my years, this last has been the hardest. But now I see that no _man_ would have put up with what I have put up with for ten years, to do even the little I have done--which is about a hundredth part of what I have tried for. Garibaldi looks flushed and very ill, worn and depressed--not excited. He looks as if he stood and went thro' all this as he stood under the bullets of Aspromonte--a duty which he was here to perform. The madness of the Italians here in urging him is inconceivable.

[63] See the _Times_, April 18, 1864. The interview took place on Sunday afternoon April 17. On the day before, Garibaldi had been at Bedford.

Miss Nightingale, we may safely infer, did not inspire Garibaldi with divine fervour for sanitary reform or any merely administrative progress. Administration in any sort was foreign to his genius. But she felt, after the interview no less than before, that it was a great occasion to her. The interview took place at 115 Park Street, a house belonging to the Grosvenor Hotel, and she presented the Hotel with a bust of Garibaldi as a memento of the occasion.

Another of her heroes was Abraham Lincoln, of whom she wrote this appreciation[64]:--

34 SOUTH STREET, _June_ 20 [1865]. DEAR SIR--I have not dared to press in with my feeble word of sympathy upon your over-taxed time and energy, when all Europe was pouring in upon you with its heartfelt sympathy. My experience has been infinitesimally small. Still, small as it is, it has been of historical events. And I can never remember the time--not even when the colossal calamity of the Crimea was first made known to us,--not even when we lost our own Albert (and our Albert was no common hero--remember that it was no Sovereign, but it was Washington, whom he held up as an example to himself and his)--I can never remember the time when so deep and strong a cry of feeling has gone up from the world, in all its length and breadth, and in all its classes, as has gone up for you and yours--in your great trial: Mr. Lincoln's death. As some one said of him, he will hold "the purest and the greatest place in history." I trust and believe that the deed which will spring up from that noble grave will be worthy of it. I will not take up your time with weak expression of a deep sympathy. Sincerely yours, FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.

[64] In a letter to Mr. Dennis R. Alward.

At home, the political event which most moved her was the death of Lord Palmerston:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Dr. Farr._) 34 SOUTH STREET, _Oct._ 19 [1865] Ld. Palmerston is a great loss. I speak for the country and myself. He was a powerful protector to me--especially since Sidney Herbert's death. I never asked him to do anything--you may be sure I did not ask him often--but he did it--for the last nine years. He did not do himself justice. If the right thing was to be done, he made a joke, but he did it. He will not leave his impress on the age--but he did the country good service. Except L. Napoleon, whose death might be the greatest good _or_ the greatest evil, I doubt whether there is any man's loss which will so affect Europe.... He was at heart the most liberal man we had left. I have lost, in him, a powerful friend. I hear spoken of as his successors--Clarendon, Russell, Granville. Ld. Clarendon it is said the Queen wishes--and she has been corresponding with him privately--perhaps by Ld. Palmerston's own desire. But I believe the real question is, under which (if any) of these, your Mr. Gladstone will consent to remain in office and be Leader of the Ho. of C. Not one of these men will manage the cabinet as Ld. Palmerston did. But I daresay you have more trustworthy information than I have. I would Ld. Palmerston had lived another Session. We should have got something done at the Poor Law Board, which we shall not now.[65] Ld. Russell is so queer-tempered. I quite dread his Premiership, if it comes.

[65] On this subject, see below, p. 133.

III

Miss Nightingale's interest in the working classes led her in 1865 to draft a scheme which, in some aspects of it, forestalled ideas of a later generation of social reformers. Mr. Gladstone had recently passed an Act enabling a depositor's accumulations in the Post Office Savings Bank to be invested in the purchase either of an Annuity or an Insurance. It would be very advisable, she suggested, to add to these methods of saving facilities for the purchase of small freeholds. There was nothing that the working men more coveted than the ownership of a house or a piece of land. An extension of small ownership would satisfy a legitimate craving, increase the motives to thrift, and raise the social position and independence of the working classes. If the adoption of the scheme would necessitate the enfranchisement of leaseholds, so much the better. Such were Miss Nightingale's ideas, and under different forms and by different methods they have occupied the attention of social reformers to this day. She submitted her scheme to Mr. Villiers, President of the Poor Law Board, who seems to have been somewhat favourable to it. Then she tackled the Chancellor of the Exchequer, artfully suggesting that her scheme was merely, on the one hand, a slight development of his "most successful Savings Bank measures," and, on the other, an indirect means of meeting his earnest desire to extend the suffrage. But Mr. Gladstone was not to be cajoled. "It would not do," he told her, "for Government to become land-jobbers"--an opinion which has not been shared, it would seem, by some of Mr. Gladstone's successors. He had further suggested that the scheme should be submitted, in its legal aspects, to his friend Mr. Roundell Palmer, and Mr. Palmer, after reading it, opined that the law already gave adequate facilities for the purchase of freeholds by working men and others. Miss Nightingale then took other legal opinions with a view to meeting objections; but she presently gave up this addition to her schemes. "It was certainly," she said, "the wildest of ideas for me to undertake it just now when I can scarcely do what I have already undertaken."

IV

Though Miss Nightingale saw little of her friends or relations at this time, she constantly corresponded with them. There are many letters which tell of her grief at the death of her cousin, Miss Hilary Bonham Carter: "the golden bowl is broken," she wrote to Madame Mohl (Sept. 8, 1865), "and it was the very purest gold I have ever known." There are letters from many correspondents--Lady Augusta Bruce, for instance, and Mrs. William Cowper--which show how deeply they had been touched by Miss Nightingale's letters of condolence. Her own griefs left room for sympathy with those of others:--

(_To Dr. Farr._) HAMPSTEAD, _August_ 5 [1864].... I am sorry to hear of your griefs. I do not find that mine close my heart to those of others--and I should be more than anxious to hear of _yours_--you who have been our faithful friend for so many years. I had heard of your father's death, but not of any other loss. Sidney Herbert has been dead three years on the 2nd. And these three years have been nothing but a slow undermining of all he has done (at the W.O.). This is the bitterest grief. The mere personal craving after a beloved presence I feel as nothing. A few years at most, and that will be over. But the other is never over. For me, I look forward to pursuing God's work soon in another of his worlds. I do not look forward with any craving to seeing again those I have lost (in the _very_ next world)--sure that that will all come in His own good time--and sure of my willingness to work in whichever of His worlds I am most wanted, with or without those dear fellow-workers, as He pleases. But this does not at all soothe the pain of seeing men wantonly deface the work _here_ of some of His best workers. But I shall bear your faith in mind--that good works never really die. Alas! good Tulloch. But I think his work was done. Pray, if you speak of him, remember--had it not been for him, where would our two Army Sanitary enquiries have been?

Miss Nightingale's large circle of correspondents kept her in touch with the literary, as well as with the political, world. She suffered greatly from sleeplessness and read much at night. She seldom read a book without finding something original or characteristic to say about it. "Lately," she wrote to M. Mohl (Jan. 24, 1865), "I have read an English translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The way it interests me is theologically. Otherwise he seems a poor weak mixture of Mahomet and a Mephistopheles. But the arguments which he despises seem to me just the real arguments, the only arguments, if only we believe in a Perfect God, for eternal existence. Do tell me a little about this, and about the Sufis and Firdausi--as regards their belief in a God, and whether the God was good or bad, if any." Omar was new to M. Mohl. Miss Nightingale lent him Fitz-Gerald's version,[66] and M. Mohl read the original. "The tidings," she wrote (April 21), "that you may perhaps print Al Khayyám's quatrains is diffusing joy among a (not large but) select circle, I having communicated it in the 'proper quarter' (see how we are all tarred with the same official stick). If you send me a copy, I shall immediately become a personage of importance." "I read some of Madame Roland's _Memoires_," she wrote to Madame Mohl (May 20, 1865): "but, do you know, I was so disappointed to find out that her patriotism was inspired by a lover. Not that I care much about virtue: I do think 'virtue' by itself a very second-rate virtue. But because I did hope that here was one woman who cared for _respublica_ as alone, or as chief, among her cares." "Do" (to Madame Mohl, Sept. 8, 1865), "read if you have not read Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_. Forgive it its being an imitation of a Greek play. That is its worst fault. As you said of Macaulay's _Lays_, They are like an old man in a pinafore; or as I should say of this, It is like a Puritan togged out as a Priest going to say mass. But read it. The Atalanta herself, though she is only a sort of Ginn and not a woman at all, has more reality, more character, more individuality (to use a bad word) than all the jeunes premières in all the men novelists I ever have read--Walter Scott, Lytton Bulwer, and all of them. But then Atalanta is not a sound incarnation of any 'social or economic principle'--is she? So men will say."

[66] The copy in question was lent by Tennyson to Jowett, and by him to Miss Nightingale.

V

On higher themes the correspondent to whom Miss Nightingale wrote most fully from her heart was from this time forth Mr. Jowett. Their acquaintance, at first confined to paper, had begun, as described in an earlier chapter, with correspondence about her _Suggestions for Thought_. The work had greatly interested him, and from time to time he continued to write to her about it. He wished her to do something with her "Suggestions," but to rewrite them in a more connected form and a gentler mood, and he sometimes gave hints for an irony less bitter than hers. Her letters to him are no longer in existence, except in the case of a few of which she preserved copies; but it is clear from the tenor of the correspondence on the other side that she was already (1862) giving to him much of her intimate confidence. She had now met a new friend who was capable of entering into her inmost and highest thoughts, not indeed always with agreement, but always with a sympathetic understanding. "As you have shown me so much confidence," he presently wrote, "I feel the strongest wish to help you in any way that I can without intruding." And again: "I cannot but wish you (as sincerely as I ever desired anything) unabated hope and trust and resolve to continue your work to the end, and many rays of light to cheer the way." A little later, drawing a bow at a venture, Mr. Jowett wondered whether she was engaged about Indian sanitary matters? He had "a reason for being interested about them which is that I lost my two brothers in India." Miss Nightingale, as we have heard, was interested in nothing else so intently at this time, and here was a fresh bond of sympathy. She asked whether, knowing what he did of her religious views, he would come and administer the Sacrament to her, as she was entirely unable to leave her room. "I shall be very glad," he wrote (Oct. 3), "to give you the Sacrament. I am sure that many other clergymen would be equally glad. Would you like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, or any of their family, to join you?" The Sacrament was often thus administered, and Miss Nightingale's most intimate friends--such as Mrs. Bracebridge--or some of her family, generally partook of the rite with her. On one of the earlier of these occasions, Mr. Jowett met her parents, and in 1862 paid the first of his visits, which afterwards became frequent, to them in the country. He often figures in their letters as "that great and good man," or "that true saint, Mr. Jowett." And from this date also began his frequent visits--usually many times a year--to Miss Nightingale herself; indeed he was seldom, if ever, in London without spending an afternoon with her. If she had friends staying in her house--such as M. and Madame Mohl--he would sometimes come in to dine with them.

"Dear Miss Nightingale," wrote Mr. Jowett (Oct. 28), "I shall always regard the circumstance of having given you the Communion as a solemn event in my life which is a call to devote myself to the service of God and men (if He will give me the power to do so). Your example will often come before me, especially if I have occasion to continue my work under bodily suffering. There is something that I want to say to you which I hardly know how to express." And then followed the first of what became a long series of spiritual admonitions. Mr. Jowett had, it is clear, a very high opinion of Miss Nightingale's genius, the most sincere admiration for her self-devotion, and a deep affection for her. But he thought that she was in some ways not using her life to the best advantage, and that her state of physical and mental suffering was in some measure the result of a too impetuous temper. In letter after letter, full of a beautiful and delicate sympathy, he whispered into her ears counsels of calm, of trust, of moderation. She seems to have kept him informed of every move in her crusades, and he was constantly afraid that she would fight too fiercely or even (in this case a quite needless fear) come out into the open. "The gift of being invisible," he wrote (April 22, 1863), "is much to be desired by any one who exercises a good influence over others. Though Deborah and Barak work together, Sisera the Captain of the Host must not suspect that he has been delivered into the hands of a woman." "I hope" (March 1865) "that you won't leave your incognito. It would seriously injure your influence if you were known to have influence. (Did you know the Baron Stockmar whom Sir Robert Peel called one of the most influential persons in Europe? Hardly any one in England excepting Kings and Queens knew of his existence. That was a model for that sort of life.) If you answer (anonymously, as I hope, if at all), may I beg you to answer with facts only and without a trace of feeling?" When he applauds some stroke, he urges her to find rest and comfort in the victory. "All this," he wrote (Feb. 26, 1865), "I firmly believe would not have been accomplished but for your clearness of sight and intensity of purpose. Is not this a thing to thank God about? I was reading in Grote an account of an attempted Spartan revolution in the times of Agesilaus. One of the great objects of the Ephori was to keep the Spartan youth from getting under the influence of a woman (name unknown) who was stirring the rebellion. Do you not think that woman may have been you in some former state of existence?" Miss Nightingale, perhaps in some justification for her eagerness in action, opened her heart fully to Mr. Jowett about her sense of loss in Sidney Herbert's death; explaining her loneliness in work, and yet her overmastering desire to complete, while strength was still granted to her, the "joint work" of her friend and herself. "I have often felt," he replied (Aug. 7, 1865), "what a wreck and ruin Lord Herbert's death must have been to you. You had done so much for him and he had grown so rapidly in himself and in public estimation that there seemed no limits to what he might have effected. He might have been one of the most popular and powerful Prime Ministers in this country--the man to carry us through the social and ecclesiastical questions that are springing up. And you would have had a great part in his work and filled him with every noble and useful ambition. Do not suppose that I don't feel and understand all this. (And you might have made me Dean of Christ Church: the only preferment that I would like to have, and I would have reformed the University and bullied the Canons.) But it has pleased God that all this should not be, and it must please us too, and we must carry on the struggle under greater difficulties, with more of hard and painful labour and less of success, still never flinching while life lasts." Never flinching, but never fretting or fuming: that was the burden of Mr. Jowett's exhortations. "I sometimes think," he had written (July 9, 1865), "that you ought seriously to consider how your work may be carried on, not with less energy, but in a calmer spirit. Think that the work of God neither hastes nor rests, and that we should go about it in the spirit of order which prevails in the world. I am not blaming the past (who would blame you who devote your life to the good of others?). But I want the peace of God to settle on the future. Perhaps you will feel that in urging this I really can form no notion of your sufferings. Alas, dear friend, I am afraid that this is true. Still I must beg you to keep your mind above them. Is that motive vain of being made perfect through suffering?" It is an idle speculation to wonder whether persons who have done great things in the world would have done as much or more or better if they had been other than they were. Calm is well; but it is not always the spring of action. If Miss Nightingale had been less eager and impetuous, she might, after her return from the Crimea, have done nothing at all. But perhaps already, in moments of weariness during the battle, and increasingly as the shadows lengthened into the pensive evening of her days, she may have felt that there was some truth in the soothing counsels of Mr. Jowett's friendship.

That Miss Nightingale reciprocated his feelings of affectionate esteem is shown very clearly by the way in which she received his admonitions. She was not usually meek under even the gentlest reproaches of her friends; but, so far as Mr. Jowett's letters tell the story, she never resented anything he said; she expressed nothing but gratitude. I do not suppose that she never retorted. He advised her, as he advised everybody, to read Boswell. I gather from one of his letters that she may have reminded him of Dr. Johnson's love of a good hater, for Mr. Jowett promises to try and satisfy her a little better in that respect in the future. And, as far as it was in him to do so, he seems to have kept his word. "Hang the Hebdomadal Council," he wrote; or, of a certain meeting of another body, "I was opposed by two fools and a knave." There are passages about "rascals" and "rogue Elephants" and "beasts," which are almost as downright as was Miss Nightingale herself in this sort. She returned to the full the sympathy which he gave to her. She was solicitous about his health. He promised to cut down his hours of reading, and never to work any more after midnight. "I cannot resist such a remonstrance as yours. I think that you would batter the gates of heaven or hell. Seriously, I shall think of your letter as long as I live, dear friend." She asked to be kept informed of every move in the academical disputes which concerned him, the judgment in the case of _Essays and Reviews_, the dispute about the Greek Professorship, and so forth. He told her even of stupidities at College meetings--"not to be beaten," he said of one, "even by your War Office." "I think you are the only person," he wrote (1865), "who encourages me about my work at Oxford. I cannot be too grateful for your words." "I am delighted," he wrote again (Oct. 27, 1866), "to have a friend who cares two straws whether I succeeded in a matter at Oxford." She, as is clear from his letters, wrote to him, not only about her struggles and interests, but also about his; and he, on his side, discussed all her problems. He wanted her to spend herself no longer "on conflicts with Government offices," but to devote her mind to some literary work in which successful effect would depend only on herself. In such work, moreover, he could perhaps help her. She, on her side, would like to help him with a sermon, the preparation of which was teasing him, and there is a long draft amongst her papers of the heads of a discourse, suggested by her, on the relation of religion to politics. "I sometimes use _your_ hints," he had written earlier. "A pupil of mine has a passion for public life, and having the means, is likely to get into Parliament. I said to him, 'You are a fanatic, that cannot be helped, but you must try to be a "rational fanatic."'" Each of the friends thought very highly of the powers and services of the other. "There is nothing you might not accomplish," he says to her. He turns off what she must have said of him with playful deprecation: "About Elijah--you must mean the Honble. Elijah Pogram. There is no other Elijah to whom I bear the least resemblance." And each valued the friendship as a means of enabling them both to serve God more truly. "The spirit of the twenty-third Psalm and the spirit of the ninetieth Psalm should be united in our lives."

Her friendship with Mr. Jowett was, I cannot doubt, Miss Nightingale's greatest consolation in these strenuous years. She was immersed in official drudgery, never forgetful, it is true, of the end in the means, but sorely vexed and harassed by the difficulties and disappointments of circumstance. Her friend's letters and conversation raised her above the conflict into a purer and calmer atmosphere. Not indeed that Mr. Jowett was a quietist; she would little have respected him had he been so; but though in the world, he was not of it; he was unsoiled by the dust of the great road. She had, it is true, other and yet more unworldly friends--nuns in convents and matrons or nurses in hospitals. With them, too, she exchanged intimate confidences in spiritual matters; but their standpoint was not hers, and the exchange could only be with mental reservations on her part. To Mr. Jowett she was able to open unreservedly her truest thoughts. And then, too, the dearest of her other friends paid her an almost adoring worship, whilst some who were estranged offered only unsympathetic criticism. It was from Mr. Jowett alone that she heard the language of affectionate and understanding remonstrance. She heard it gladly, because she knew that it was sympathetic, and because she felt that her friend's character was attuned to her own highest ideals.

Thirty years after the date at which we have now arrived (1866), Miss Nightingale read through the hundreds of letters she had received and kept from Mr. Jowett. She made copious extracts from them in pencil, and sent several to his biographers. Many of his letters to her were included in his _Life_, though the name of the recipient was not disclosed. She was jealous in her life-time of the privacy of her life. She rebuked Mr. Jowett once for accepting a copy of her cousin's statuette of her. He explained that he had placed it where it would not be observed. "I consider you," he had already written, "a sort of Royal personage, not to be gossiped about with any one." The letters to her, hitherto published, were selected to throw light upon his views. In this Memoir, in which it has been decided to give (if it may be) a truthful picture of her life and character, I select rather those letters which show the influence of his character upon hers. The following was noted by Miss Nightingale as "one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, of the whole collection":--

ASKRIGG, _July_ [1864]. I am afraid that hard-working persons are very bad correspondents, at least I know that I am, or I should have written to you long ago, which I have always a pleasure in doing. But Plato, who is either my greatest friend or my greatest enemy, and has finally swelled into three large volumes (you will observe that I am proud of the size of my baby), is to blame for preventing me. This place, at which I shall be staying for about five weeks longer, is at the head of Wensleydale, high among mountains in a most beautiful country, and what, I think, adds greatly to the charm of the country, very pleasing for the simplicity and intelligence of the people. Among the enjoyments which I have here, which notwithstanding Plato are really very great, I cannot help remembering you at 115 Park Street. I wish you would venture to see something more of the sights and sounds of nature. You will never persuade me that your way of life is altogether the best for health any more than I could persuade you into Mr. Gladstone's doctrine of the salubrity of living over a churchyard.

As to the rest, I have no doubt that you could not be better than you are. I don't wish to exaggerate (for you are the last person to whom I should think of offering compliments), but I certainly believe that it has been a great national good that you have taken up the whole question of the sanitary condition of the soldier and not confined yourself to hospitals. The difficulties and stupidities would have been as great in the case of the hospitals, and the object really far inferior in importance. Besides you could never have gained the influence over medical men with their professional jealousies that you have had over the War Office and the Indian Government. Also, if your life is spared a few years longer, a great deal more may be done. There are many resources that are not yet exhausted. Therefore never listen to the voice that tells you in a moment of weariness or pain that you ought to have adhered to your old vocation.

I suppose there have been persons who have had so strong _a sense of the identity of their own action with the will of God as to exclude every other feeling, who have never wished to live nor wished to die except as they fulfil his will_? Can we acquire this? I don't know. But _such a sense of things would no doubt give infinite rest and almost infinite power_. Perhaps quietists have been most successful in gaining this sort of feeling, but the quietists are not the people who have passed all their lives rubbing and fighting against the world. But _I don't see why active life might not become a sort of passive life too, passive in the hands of God and in the fulfilment of the laws of nature. I sometimes fancy that there are possibilities of human character much greater than have been realized_, mysteries, as they may be called, of character and manner and style which remain to be called forth and explained. One great field for thought on this subject is the manner in which character may grow and change quite late in life.... [The rest of the letter is about the politics of the day.]

The passages which I have printed in italics are those which Miss Nightingale had specially marked. "Can we help one another," he wrote in the following year (March 5, 1865), "to make life a higher and nobler sort of thing--more of a calm and peaceful and never-ending service of God? Perhaps--a little." The marked passages show in what way Miss Nightingale found in Mr. Jowett's friendship a source of comfort, and a fresh inspiration towards her own spiritual ideals. In her meditations of later years, a greater "passivity in action" was the state of perfection which she constantly sought to attain.

* * * * *

Mr. Jowett, as will have been noted, sought to reassure her about her concentration for the most part upon work for the Army and for India. And indeed she was herself intensely devoted to it, nor was it ever deposed from a principal place in her thoughts and interests. Yet there were times, as shown in a letter already quoted (p. 82), when she felt that this work, insistently though it appealed to her, though it was bound up with some of her fondest memories, was all the while, if not a kind of desertion, yet at best only a temporary call. Her first "call from God" had been to service in another sort, and she was anxious to make peace with "those first affections." In January 1864 she sent these instructions to Mrs. Bracebridge, who directed that if Miss Nightingale should survive her they were to be handed on to Mrs. Sutherland:--

You know that I always believed it to be God's will for me that I should live and die in Hospitals. When this call He has made upon me for other work stops, and I am no longer able to work, I should wish to be taken to St. Thomas's Hospital and to be placed _in a general ward_ (which is what I should have desired had I come to my end as a Hospital matron). And I beg you to be so very good as to see that this my wish is accomplished, whenever the time comes, if you will take the trouble as a true friend, which you always have been, are, and will be. And this will make me die in peace because I believe it to be God's will.

It was not so to be. But we shall find, on opening the next Part in the story of Miss Nightingale's long life, that she was presently to have time for helping forward the movement, which she had promoted as a Reformer of Hospitals and as the Founder of Modern Nursing, into a new and a wider field.

CHAPTER VI

NEW MASTERS

(1866)

Among new men, strange faces, other minds. TENNYSON.

The year 1866 was one of stirring events both at home and abroad. It saw the downfall of the Whig Administration which, with a brief interval (1858-59), had held office under different chiefs since December 1852. In March Mr. Gladstone, now leader of the House of Commons, introduced a Reform Bill, of which the fortunes were uncertain owing to the dissent of the Adullamites under Mr. Lowe. On April 27 the second reading was carried by a majority of five only. On June 18 the Government was defeated in Committee on Lord Dunkellin's amendment, and resigned. On the day before Lord Russell's Government was defeated war was declared between Austria and her allies on the one side, and Prussia and Italy on the other. Prussia, armed with her new breech-loading gun, quickly defeated Austria. The foundation of the future German Empire under the hegemony of Prussia was laid, and Italy, as part of the price of a victory not hers, received from Austria the province of Venetia. Of these great events, some brought consequences with them to causes in which Miss Nightingale was deeply interested, whilst others made direct demands on her exertions.

The earlier months of the year were thus a period of continuous and almost feverish activity on her part. Two of her letters--the former written when the fate of the Government was still trembling in the balance, the latter written when the new Government had been installed and when the war was raging on the continent--will serve to introduce the subjects of this chapter:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Harriet Martineau._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _May_ 2 [1866].... We have been rather in a fever lately because Ministers were hovering between in and out. Mr. Villiers promised us a Bill quite early in the year for a London uniform Poor Rate for the _sick_ and consolidated hospitals under a central management. (This was before we got our Earls and Archbishops and M.P.'s together to storm him in his den.) We shall not get our Bill this session, for Mr. Villiers is afraid of losing the Government one vote. But we shall certainly get it in time. "In 1860 the consolations of the future never failed me for a moment. And I find them now an equally secure resource." Can you guess who wrote those words? They are in a note from Mr. Gladstone written the morning of his speech on the Franchise Bill. Could you have believed he was so much in earnest? I could not. And yet I knew him once very well. His speech (he was ill) impressed the House very much. "And e'en the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer." ...

(_Miss Nightingale to Julius Mohl._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _July_ 12 [1866]. I have been in the thick of all these changes of Government. I should like, if you had been in England, to have shown you the notes I have had from those going out, and those coming in--especially from my own peculiar masters, Lord de Grey and Lord Stanley. They are so much more serious and anxious than the world gives them credit for. I used to think public opinion was higher than private opinion. I now think just the reverse. As for the _Times_ and about all these German affairs--I believe the _Times_ to be a faithful reflection of the public opinion of our upper classes: see what it is. Last week Prussia and Bismarck were the greatest criminals in Europe. This week the needle-gun (I mean Prussia and Bismarck--no, I mean the needle-gun) is a constitutional Protestant--or a Protestant constitution, I am not sure which.... But I was going to tell you: Lord Stanley has taken the Foreign Office (how he or anybody could take willingly the Foreign Office, England having now so little weight in European councils, in preference to the India Office which Lord Stanley created[67] and where we _create_ the future of 150 millions of men, one can't understand). Lord Stanley accepted the Foreign Office solely because he could not help it--Lord Clarendon (which I saw under his own hand) having "unhesitatingly declined" it, although Lord Derby made the most vehement love to him, even to offering to him the nomination of half the places in the Cabinet. This I heard from Lord Clarendon himself.... Like you, I can't sleep or eat for thinking of this War. I can't distract my thoughts from it--because, you know, it is my business. I am consulted on both sides as to their Hospital and sanitary arrangements.... And then those stupid Italians publish parts of my letter--just the froth at the end, you know, while I had given them a solid pudding of advice at their own request--publish it cruelly, without my leave, with my address--since which my doors have been besieged by all exiles of all nations asking to be sent to Italy, and women threatening to "_accoucher_" (_sic_) in my passage. I sometimes think I must give up business, _i.e._ work, or life. It would take two strong policemen to keep my beggars in check. No one could believe the stories I should have to tell--people who beg of me whom I might just as well beg of ... [a sheet missing]. Of course now I have to begin again at the very beginning with Mr. Gathorne Hardy at the Poor Law Board, to get our Metropolitan Workhouse Infirmary Bill. It was a cruel disappointment to me to see the Bill go just as I had it in my grasp. Also: a Public Health Service organization for Sir John Lawrence in India which I lost by 24 hours!! owing to Lord de Grey's going out. However, I am well nigh done for. Life is too hard for me. I have suffered so very much all the winter and spring, for which nothing did me any good but a curious new-fangled little operation of putting opium in under the skin, which relieves one for 24 hours, but does not improve the vivacity or serenity of one's intellect. When Ministers went out, I had hopes for a time from a Committee of the House of Commons (on which serves John Stuart Mill) "on the special local government of the Metropolis." At their request I wrote them a long letter. Then because it is July and they are rather hot, they give it up for this year. The change of Ministers, which brings hard work to us drudges, releases the House of Commons men. Alas! (There is a pathetic story of Balzac's, in which a poor woman who had followed the Russian campaign, was never able to articulate any word except _Adieu, Adieu, Adieu!_ I am afraid of going mad like her and not being able to articulate any word but _Alas! alas! alas!_)--F. N.

[67] Lord Stanley had been President of the Board of Control in 1858, in which capacity he conducted the India Bill through the House of Commons, and on its passage he became the first Secretary of State for India.

II

Of the events over which Miss Nightingale cried alas! in this letter, the one which came first was the loss of Mr. Villiers's Poor Law Bill. The loss, however, as she rightly surmised in writing to Miss Martineau, was only temporary. The whole subject is connected with a distinct branch of Miss Nightingale's work, of which a description must be reserved for the next chapter. She was in large measure, as we shall hear, the founder of Sick Nursing among the Indigent Poor, and a pioneer in Poor Law Reform.

The next event is connected with a subject with which we have already made acquaintance. Miss Nightingale "lost by 24 hours the opportunity of organizing a Public Health Service in India for Sir John Lawrence." The story of this lost opportunity and its retrieval illustrate the truth of something said already;[68] namely, the difference it made that there was in London, in the person of Miss Nightingale, a resolute enthusiast, to whom the question of Indian sanitation was not "one of a thousand questions," but the one question of absorbing interest. That the opportunity of which she spoke was lost, was not, as by this time the reader will hardly need to be told, in any way whatever the fault of Miss Nightingale. It is a curious story, and is the subject of a great mass of correspondence amongst her Papers--a mass eloquent of the eager interest and infinite trouble which she devoted to the matter; but the story itself admits of being told succinctly. A few words, however, are first necessary on the essential issues; it was not a case of much ado about nothing. The whole future of sanitary progress in India was, or might reasonably be thought to be, at stake. Under the energetic rule of Sir John Lawrence, a good start had been made. The Governor-General continued to report progress to Miss Nightingale, and suggestions which she sent were communicated by him to his officers. But the larger questions of organization had still to be settled. Sir John's eagerness as a sanitary reformer was in some measure held in check by shortage of money. "Sanitary works," as Lord Salisbury remarked at a later stage of the affair, "are uniformly costly works." Miss Nightingale's view was that whether advance was to be slower or quicker, the organization should be on lines which would ensure the importance of advance being constantly kept in mind. She insisted that the Public Health Service in India should be a separate service, responsible to the Governor-General in Council, not a subordinate branch tucked away under some other department. This is the burden of many letters and memoranda from her hand.

[68] Above, p. 58.

Early in 1866 a double opportunity seemed to offer itself to Miss Nightingale for advancing her cause. At the beginning of February Sir Charles Wood resigned office, and her friend, Lord de Grey, became Secretary of State for India in his place. At the same time she had received an important letter from the Governor-General (dated Calcutta, Jan. 19). Her friend, Mr. Ellis, who had been in conclave (as we have heard) with her and her circle, had shortly before submitted proposals to him. Sir John Lawrence wrote to her: "As regards the reconstruction of our sanitary organizations, we are sending home to the Secretary of State a copy of Mr. Ellis's note which he sent me, and are proposing a further change somewhat in accordance with his plan. I have no doubt that you will see the dispatch, and therefore I had better not send it to you." He then went on to give a summary of its contents. The summary was brief, and allowed of different opinions as to the ultimate bearing of the Governor-General's proposals. He had assumed as a matter of course that she would be shown his dispatch, and she applied to her official friends for a sight of it. They would be delighted if they had it, but they had received no such dispatch; perhaps it would come by the next mail. But it did not, nor by the next, nor the next, for a very simple reason, as will presently appear. Miss Nightingale put on her friend Mr. Ellis, who as the head of a Presidency Health Commission had a direct _locus standi_, to inquire and even to search at the India Office. "They swear by their gods," he reported, "that they have no such dispatch." Miss Nightingale was becoming desperate. She was perfectly certain that Sir John Lawrence must have sent it. Meanwhile the Home Government was tottering to its fall; the new Secretary of State might be one who knew not Miss Nightingale. She entreated that a further search should be made. On May 5 she was told that "at last the Sanitary Minute had been found, and a copy of it was sent for her consideration. It had been attached to some papers connected with the Financial Department and thus had escaped attention. Lord de Grey begged Miss Nightingale to let him have the benefit of her opinion upon it as soon as possible." She afterwards learnt that it was the Secretary of State himself who, with his own hands, had searched for and found the Governor-General's Minute. It had "escaped attention" for nearly four months. The incident did not raise Miss Nightingale's opinion of government offices, or lessen her sense of responsibility in the duty of keeping the sanitary question to the fore. She was ill when the Minister's message arrived; but she at once set to work, and on May 7 she sent in a memorandum giving a summary of her views, and pointing out wherein the Governor-General's proposals seemed to require revision if the recommendations of the Royal Commission were to be carried out effectually. The Minister was busy with many things. His own fate and that of his colleagues were in peril every day. A month intervened before the next move was taken. On June 11 Miss Nightingale was asked by Lord de Grey, through Captain Galton, to develop her views further and to draw up, in consultation with Dr. Sutherland, "a draft letter which he could submit to the Indian Council as his reply to Sir John Lawrence." The letter was to take the form either of "a practical scheme to propose to Sir John Lawrence for the sanitary administration of India" or of "such a description of the requirements as would draw from Sir J. L. a practical scheme." It was suggested that perhaps it would be best if the letter (1) shadowed out the requirements and (2) sketched a scheme of administration for carrying them out. This was a large order and took time. On June 19 Miss Nightingale sent in her draft. She was "24 hours" too late, for on June 18 the Government had been defeated. There was, however, a short period of grace owing to the absence of the Queen at Balmoral and to her unwillingness to accept Lord Russell's resignation.[69] Lord de Grey had no time to pass the letter through the Secretary of State's Council, but he did what he could. He left on record at the India Office, he told Miss Nightingale, a Minute[70] closely following the lines of her Memorandum. If his successor let the matter go to sleep again, Lord de Grey would be ready to call attention to it in Parliament. He assured Miss Nightingale that his interest in such questions would remain as warm as ever, and as she was now more likely than he to know what was going on, he begged her to keep him informed.

[69] In one of Mr. Jowett's letters to Miss Nightingale (June 1866) there is this story of Lord Russell. "On the evening of the crisis he was not to be found. He had gone down to Richmond to hear the Nightingales (your cousins)! 'And the provoking thing,' as he wrote to a friend, 'was that they did not sing that night.'"

[70] The substance of it may be found at p. 11 of the _Memorandum_ (as cited above, p. 34 _n._).

III

So, then, she had been too late. "I am furious to that degree," she wrote to Captain Galton (June 23), "at having lost Lord de Grey's five months at the India Office that I am fit to blow you all to pieces with an infernal machine of my own invention." She threw some of the blame upon Dr. Sutherland, whose mission to the Mediterranean she had not been able to cancel, and who, for weeks at a time during this year, was absent at Malta and Gibraltar or in Algiers. Algiers, indeed, she wrote tauntingly, "why not Astley's?" That would be quite as good a change for him. Sometimes she varied the figure, and Dr. Sutherland and his party figured in her letters as Wombwell's Menagerie. "The Menagerie, I hear," she wrote (Jan. 26), "including three ladies, H.M. Commissioners, and two ladies' maids, has gone after a column in the interior." Had he stayed at home, he might have been able to find the missing dispatch; and in any case they could have written at leisure, from the hints in Sir John Lawrence's letter to her, the Memorandum which they ultimately had to write in haste. The truant seems to have foreseen what a rod in pickle was awaiting him on his return. "I have been thinking," he wrote to her from Algiers (Jan. 28), "Will she be glad to hear from me? or Will she swear? I don't know, but nevertheless I will tell her a bit of my mind about our visit to Astley's." And he goes on to write an admirable account of his experiences, in which he ingeniously emphasizes the vast importance of his inquiries in connection with their Indian work. Nor was this only an excuse; Dr. Sutherland's Report on Algeria, and the French sanitary service there, was a most valuable piece of work. It is impossible to read his writings--whether in published reports or in his manuscripts among Miss Nightingale's papers--without perceiving how well based was the reliance which she placed upon his collaboration. His wife stayed at home and saw much of Miss Nightingale. Mrs. Sutherland must have reported the state of things in South Street; for a month later Dr. Sutherland wrote thus to Miss Nightingale (Feb. 20): "The mail which ought to have arrived yesterday came in to-day, and I am trying to save the out mail, which leaves the harbour at 12, without much prospect of success. I have had a letter to-day from home about you, and if it had come yesterday, Ellis and I would certainly have been embarking to-day for England. After the account of your suffering, and of the pressure of business under which you are sinking, I feel wild to get away from this. To-night we leave Algeria, and by the time you get this we will be on our way home. God bless you and keep you to us. Amen." Well, I can only hope that Dr. Sutherland enjoyed his trip while it lasted; for I fear that he may have had a bad quarter-of-an-hour when he reported himself at South Street on his return. She had complained of his absence to another of her close allies, Dr. Farr. "I have all Dr. Sutherland's business to do," she wrote (Jan. 19), "besides my own. If it could be done, I should not mind. I had just as soon wear out in two months as in two years, so the work be done. But it can't. It is just like two men going into business with a million each. The one suddenly withdraws. The other may wear himself to the bone, but he can't meet the engagements with one million which he made with two. Add to this, I have been so ill since the beginning of the year as to be often unable to have my position moved from pain for 48 hours at a time. But to business...."

One good stroke of business, however, Miss Nightingale had been able to do during Dr. Sutherland's absence. She reported it to Dr. Farr: "The compensation to my disturbed state of mind has been a convert to the sanitary cause I have made for Madras--no less a person than Lord Napier. I managed to scramble up to see him before he sailed." The "conversion" means not necessarily that Lord Napier needed to find salvation, but refers rather to the fact that his predecessor in the governorship of Madras had been unsympathetic. Lord Napier, on receiving the appointment, had expressed a desire to learn Miss Nightingale's views. He had been secretary to the British Embassy at Constantinople during the Crimean War, and had there formed a high opinion of her ability and devotion. She now wrote to him about Indian sanitary reform, and he at once replied:--

(_Lord Napier to Miss Nightingale._) 24 PRINCES GATE, _Feb._ 16 [1866]. I beg you to believe that I am far from being impatient of your communication or indifferent to your wishes. I have read your letter with great interest, and I regret that you had not time and strength to make it longer. You will confer a great favour on me by sending me the 8vo volume of which you speak, and I would not stumble at the two folio blue books.... The Sanitary question like the railway question or the irrigation question will probably remain subordinated in some degree to financial requirements, to the necessity of shewing a surplus at the end of the year; but within the limits of my available resources I promise you a zealous intervention on behalf of the cause you have so much at heart. You say that you do not know me well; but you cannot deprive me of the happiness and honor of having seen you at the greatest moment of your life in the little parlour of the hospital at Scutari. I was a spectator, and I would have been a fellow-labourer if any one would have employed my services. I remain at your orders for any day and hour.--Very sincerely yours, NAPIER.

Their interview took place three days later. Lord Napier, during his governorship of Madras, which lasted six years, tried hard to fulfil his promise. To other matters he attended also; but it was to questions connected with the public health that he devoted his most particular attention, and throughout his residence in India he kept up a correspondence with Miss Nightingale about them.

IV

Meanwhile on the immediate question of the moment she had been too late, and her political friends were out. She was a Whig and a keen Reformer; but she was a sanitarian before she was a politician, and as soon as the Whigs fell she was on the alert to make friends for her causes with the mammon of unrighteousness. She was eager to hear the earliest political news:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Captain Galton._) _June_ 27.... Now do write to a wretched female, F. N., about _who_ is to come in _where_. Does Gen. Peel come to the War Office? If so, will he annihilate our Civil Sanitary element? Is Sutherland to go all the same to Malta and Gibraltar this autumn? Will Gen. Peel imperil the Army Sanitary Commission? I _must_ know: ye Infernal Powers! Is Mr. Lowe to come in to the India Office? It is all unmitigated disaster to me. For, as Lord Stanley is to be Foreign Office (the only place where he can be of _no_ use to us), I shall not have a friend in the world. If I were to say more, I should fall to swearing, I am so indignant.--Ever yours furiously, F. N.

Captain Galton replied that he had it from Mr. Lowe himself that he would not join the Tories; that of the actual appointments he had not as yet heard; but that as the Secretary of State's was an impersonal office, Dr. Sutherland's commission to visit the Mediterranean would still hold good--or bad. "You say the S. of S. is an impersonal creature," replied Miss Nightingale (July 3); "I wish he wuz!" When the names of the new Ministers were announced, Captain Galton threw out a suggestion tentatively that Lord Cranborne[71] (India Office) might be approachable through Lady Cranborne. "I have a much better recommendation to him than that," wrote Miss Nightingale in some triumph (July 7), "and have already been put into 'direct communication' with him, _not_ at my own request." The letters tell the story of her introduction to new masters at the India Office and the Poor Law Board:--

(_Lord Stanley to Miss Nightingale._) ST. JAMES'S SQUARE, _July_ 6. I shall see Lord Cranborne to-day (we go down to be sworn in) and will tell him the whole sanitary story, and also say that I have advised you to write to him as you have always done to me to my great advantage. You will find him shrewd, industrious, and a good man of business.

[71] Better known as the Marquis of Salisbury, to which title he succeeded in 1868.

(_Miss Nightingale to Lord Cranborne._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _July_ 17. Lord Stanley had the kindness to advise me to write to you, and to tell _me_ that he would tell _you_ that he had "advised" me "to write to" you as I "have done to" him. This is my only excuse for what would otherwise be a very great impertinence and what I fear may seem to you such even now, viz. my present application to you on the India Public Health question. I know I ought to begin, "Miss Nightingale presents her compliments to Lord Cranborne." But the "third person" always becomes confused. Lord Stanley has probably scarcely had the time to tell you my long story. I fear, therefore, I must introduce myself, by saying that my apology for what you may (justly) consider an unwarrantable interference must be--the part I have taken in the Public Health of the Army in India for the last 8 years, having been in communication with Lord Stanley, Sir C. Wood, and Lord de Grey about it, and being now in constant communication with Sir John Lawrence and others in India on the same subject. When Lord de Grey left office, Lord Stanley, of his own accord, kindly asked whether he should "put" me "in direct communication" with you.

This is my general apology. My particular one is: that by last mail I received some very pressing letters from India on the subject of the introduction of an efficient Public Health administration into India, which is after this wise:--the spirit of the very general recommendations made by the R. Commission which reported in 1863 (presided over by Lord Stanley) had never been completely acted up to--there have been difficulties and clashings in consequence. A Minute (of January 9, 1866) was sent home by Sir John Lawrence proposing to connect the Public Health Service with the Inspectorship of Prisons. The proposal appears to have been made without due consideration of the importance and greatness of the duties; if it were carried out, it would put an end, we believe, to any prospect of efficient progress. (I think I am correct in saying that Lord Stanley concurs in this view.) Lord de Grey was deeply impressed with this defect in the scheme; he drew up a Minute (just before he left office) in order to leave his views on record for you, setting forth generally the duties, and asking for a reconsideration of the subject in India, before the organisation was finally decided on--of the Public Health Service. I would now venture to ask your favourable consideration for this proposal, because, on the organisation of a service adequate for the object, depends the entire future of the Public Health in India. We commit ourselves into your hands.

(_Lord Cranborne to Miss Nightingale._) INDIA OFFICE, _July 17_. I am much obliged to you for your letter; and especially for your kindness in relieving me from the literary effort of composing a letter or series of letters in the third person. Lord Stanley spoke to me about the sanitary question some days ago, and told me I should probably hear from you. I have made enquiries as to the Despatch you mention, and find that it is in the office still awaiting decision. No confirmation of it shall take place until I have communicated further with you upon the subject. I shall not be able to go into the sanitary question until I have disposed of the claims of the Indian officers, which, according to all the best authorities, are very urgently in need of immediate settlement. But as soon as that is done with, I hope that the sanitary question may be taken up without delay.

(_Mr. Gathorne Hardy to Miss Nightingale._) POOR LAW BOARD, _July_ 25. You owe me no apology for calling my attention to material points connected with the subject in the consideration of which you are so much engaged. I should say this to any one who wrote in the same spirit as yourself, but I am really indebted to you who have earned no common title to advise and suggest upon anything which affects the treatment of the sick. Your note arrived at the very instant when a gentleman was urging me to lay before you questions relating to Workhouse Infirmaries, and I should not have hesitated to do so if needful even without the cordial invitation which you give me to ask your assistance. At present I have not advanced very far from want of time, as while Parliament is sitting I am necessarily very much occupied with other business, and I am anxious to remedy, if possible, present and urgent grievances before I enter thoroughly upon legislation for the future. I shall bear in mind the offer which you have made and in all probability avail myself of it to the full.

So, then, perhaps Miss Nightingale would not be left wholly friendless after all. She was to have new masters. Would they, or would they not, accept her service? We shall hear in due course.

V

Meanwhile Miss Nightingale had been very busily engaged with the correspondence and other tasks thrown upon her by the outbreak of war in Europe. "Saw Florence for half an hour this morning," reported her father (June); "over-fatigued certainly, but speaking with a voice only too loud and strong. Princess [Alice of] Hesse writes to her to ask for instructions for the hospitals there, and Sutherland's joke is 'There's nothing left for _you_, all is gone to Garibaldi.'" She had been applied to by representatives of all three combatants. Prussia, as usual, was the better prepared, and the Crown Princess had written to Miss Nightingale in March (three months before hostilities actually began) asking for her assistance and advice about hospital and nursing arrangements. A Prussian manufacturer communicated with her about the best form of hospital tents for field-service. The two sisters of the British Royal House were on opposite sides in this war, for Hesse-Darmstadt had thrown in its lot with Austria; but it was not till after the outbreak of hostilities that the Princess Alice wrote to Miss Nightingale through Lady Ely[72] for advice about war hospitals. Miss Nightingale at once sent it. Her Memorandum, she was told (July 3), had been forwarded to Prince Louis for use at Headquarters, and the Princess begged her to send further information for use by the hospital authorities in Darmstadt. The Italians had been earlier in "going to Miss Nightingale." The Secretary of the "Florence Committee for helping the Sick and Wounded" had written to her for advice in May. Her reply caused great delight, as an English correspondent at Florence recorded. "I have read the letter," he wrote, "which will be translated and inserted in the _Nazione_. Miss Nightingale gives, with her accustomed clearness and precision, excellent advice to the Committee, which some of them very much need. At the same time she expresses her cordial sympathy with the Italian cause. She recalls the admirable condition in which the Sardinian army was landed in the Crimea, and the praise which its appearance extorted from Lord Clyde. And she concludes her letter by saying that if the sacrifice of her poor life would hasten their cause by one half-hour, she would gladly give it them. But she is a miserable invalid."[73] The Committee had asked whether she would not come to Italy "were it but for one day" in order to inspire them by her presence. Her piece of "froth" (as she called it) was widely printed in the Italian press. She had deplored the outbreak of the war, but when it resulted in an extension of the boundaries of free Italy she felt that there were compensations. Miss Nightingale also joined the Committee of the "Ladies' Association" formed in this country "for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded of all nations engaged." She advised the Committee on the form of aid most requisite, and at the end of the war, in thanking the Crown Princess of Prussia for a letter, she gave Her Royal Highness an account of what had been done by the English Committee. The correspondence with the Princess was long, and it formed a new tie between Miss Nightingale and Mr. Jowett, who was a great favourite with the Crown Princess and who entertained a very high opinion of her abilities. The answering letter from the Princess covers eighteen pages, containing (as Dr. Sutherland said of it) "just the kind of practical information which a person who has had experience in these matters desires to obtain." A characteristic extract or two from the correspondence on each side must here suffice:--

(_Miss Nightingale to the Crown Princess of Prussia._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _Sept._ 22 [1866].... I think your Royal Highness may be pleased to hear even the humble opinion of an old campaigner like myself about how well the Army Hospital Service was managed in the late terrible war. Information reached me through my old friends and trainers of Kaiserswerth. The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem took charge of all the Deaconesses and all the offers of houses and rooms made to them. The system seems to me to have been admirably managed--especially the sending away the wounded in hundreds to towns where rooms and houses and nursing were offered. The overcrowding and massing together of large numbers of wounded is always more disastrous than battle itself. From many different quarters I have heard of the great devotion, skill and generous kindness of the Prussian surgeons--to all sides alike.... On this, the day of Manin's death nine years ago, the exiled Dictator of Venice and one of the purest and most far-seeing of statesmen, who fought so good a battle for the freedom of Venice, but who did not live to see its accomplishment, I cannot but congratulate your Royal Highness, at the risk of impertinence, at seeing the fulfilment of that liberation brought about by Prussian arms.

[72] Lady Ely as lady-in-waiting on Queen Victoria had made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance at Balmoral in 1856.

[73] _Daily Telegraph_ (foreign intelligence), June 12, 1866.

(_The Crown Princess of Prussia to Miss Nightingale._) NEW PALACE, POTSDAM, _Sept._ 29. I was delighted to receive your long and interesting letter yesterday, and hasten to express my warmest thanks for it. Every appreciation of Prussia in England can but give me the greatest pleasure.... As you are such an advocate for fresh air, I cannot refrain from telling you what I have myself _seen_ in confirmation of your opinion on the subject, and what I am sure would interest dear Sir James Clark, who is your great ally on this point. In a small well-kept Hospital, where wounded soldiers had been taken care of for some time, the wounds in several cases did not seem to improve, the general state of health of the patients did not show any progress. They were feverish, and the appearance of the wounds was that of the beginning of mortification. In the garden of the Hospital there was a shed or summer-house of rough boards, with a wooden roof; the little building was quite open in front and on the other sides closed up with boards but with an aperture of two feet all the way under the roof--so that it was like being out of doors. Six patients were moved down into this shed (sorely against their will, they were afraid of catching cold). The very next day they got better; the fever left them, the condition of the wounds became healthy; they enjoyed their summer-house--in spite of two violent storms which knocked down the tables; and all quickly recovered! I had seen them every day upstairs and saw them every day in the garden; the difference was incredible.... The Crown Prince wishes me to say what pleasure it gives him to hear you speak in praise of our Prussian army surgeons.... I remain ever, dear Miss Nightingale, yours sincerely, PRINCESS ROYAL.

Among other details, a particular kind of field-ambulance was mentioned by the Crown Princess as having proved very useful. Miss Nightingale at once put Dr. Longmore, of our own hospital service, in possession of the facts.

It will have been seen that Miss Nightingale's experience was much requisitioned in the War of 1866; but the organization of war-nursing under the Red Cross had not then attained full development owing to the fact that the Austrian Government had not ratified the Geneva Convention of 1864. In 1867 a gold medal was awarded to Miss Nightingale by the Conference of Red Cross Societies at Paris. In 1870 (March 31) the Austrian Patriotic Society for the Relief of Wounded Soldiers elected her an Honorary Member.

VI

The year 1866 was, then, one of great activity with Miss Nightingale; but by the middle of August her work was not at such high pressure as in the preceding months. Parliament was up, and the new Ministers, with whom she had established friendly relations, were turning round. At this time a home call came to Miss Nightingale. Her mother was reported to be ailing. She was disinclined to make the usual move with her husband from Hampshire to Derbyshire; so, while the father went to Lea Hurst, Miss Nightingale decided to stay with her mother at Embley. It was an event in the family circle, for Florence had not been to either of the homes for ten years. There was much correspondence and many preparations. Father and mother were equally delighted, and the journey in an invalid carriage did the daughter no serious harm. She stayed at Embley from the middle of August till the end of November. It was the first holiday she had taken, for ten years also; but it was not much of a holiday either. She set to work on the health of Romsey, the nearest town, and of Winchester, the county town. She wrote up to her friend Dr. Farr at the Registrar-General's Office for the mortality tables, found the figures for those towns above the average, and bade the citizens look to their drains. Then she commanded Dr. Sutherland to Embley for the transaction of business in view of next year's session. She found her mother happy and cheerful. "I don't think my dear mother was ever more touching or interesting to me," she wrote to Madame Mohl (Aug. 21), "than she is now in her state of dilapidation. She is so much gentler, calmer, more thoughtful." She was a little critical, however, of her mother still, and thought her habits self-indulgent. Poor lady! she was 78; she had been shaken and bruised in a carriage accident, and was threatened with the loss of her eye-sight. Certainly, Florence was not always able to make due allowances for other people. But if she was critical of others, she was yet more severe with herself. During this holiday at Embley, she resumed those written self-examinations and meditations for which, frequent in her earlier years, she seems to have found little time during the strenuous decade 1856-66. "I never failed in energy," she said once in later years; "but to do everything from the best motive--that is quite another thing." In reviewing her past life on October 21, 1866, the anniversary of her departure for the Crimea, and on subsequent days, she seems to have had a like thought. Her meditations were not so much of what she had done as of what she had done amiss; her resolutions were of greater purity of motive, and greater peace, through a more entire trust in God: "Called to be the 'handmaid of the Lord,' and I have complained of my suffering life! What return does God expect from me--with what _purity of heart_ and _intention_ should I make an offering of myself to Him! The word of the Lord unto thee: He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.... But, when we are ill, how can we be like God? I look up and see the drops of dew, blue, golden, green, and red, glittering in the sun on the top of the deciduous cypress--_that_ is like God. We see Him for a moment--we perceive His beauty. It lights us, even when we lie here prostrate.... Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God--in all temptation, trials, and aridities, in the agony and bloody sweat, in the Cross and Passion: this is not the prerogative of the future life, but of the present."

PART VI

MANY THREADS

(1867-1872)

I beg of you and pray you to look back upon the past with thankfulness and upon the future with hope--when there has been so much done and there is so much to do ... many beginnings and ravelled threads to be woven in and completed.--BENJAMIN JOWETT (_Letter to Miss Nightingale_, 1867).

CHAPTER I

WORKHOUSE REFORM

(1864-1867)

From the first I had a sort of fixed faith that Florence Nightingale could do anything, and that faith is still fresh in me; and so it came to pass that the instant that name entered the lists I felt the fight was virtually won, and I feel this still.-- H. B. FARNELL, Poor Law Inspector (Dec. 1866).

Fifty years ago the state of things which Miss Nightingale had seen, and cured, in the military hospitals during the Crimean War was almost equalled, and was in some respects surpassed in scandal, by the condition of the peace hospitals for the sick poor at home. Those hospitals were the sick wards or infirmaries of workhouses, for the hospitals usually so-called skim only the surface of sickness in any great town. The state of the Metropolitan workhouses, as reported upon by the Poor Law Board in 1866, showed that the sick wards were for the most part insanitary and overcrowded; that the beds were insufficient and admirably contrived to induce sores; that the eating and drinking vessels were unclean; that there was a deficiency of basins, towels, brushes and combs; that the food for the patients was cooked by paupers and frequently served cold; that although the medical officers did their duty to the best of their ability, the attendance given and the salaries paid were inadequate to the needs of the sick. As for the nursing, it was done by paupers, many of whom could neither read nor write, whose love of drink often drove them to rob the sick of stimulants, and whose treatment of the poor was characterized neither by judgment nor by gentleness. This is the restrained euphemism of an official report.[74] Sometimes a patient would miss the ministration of a nurse for days because the pauper charged to give it was herself bed-ridden. The rule of one nurse was to give medicine three times a day to the very ill and once to the rather ill. It was administered in a gallipot; the nurse "poured out the medicine and judged according." Cases were reported in which a patient's bed was not made for five days and nights; in which patients had no food from 4 o'clock in the afternoon of one day to 8 o'clock in the morning of the next; in which patients died, or, to speak more correctly, were killed, by the most wanton neglect.

[74] Mr. Farnall's Report, 1866, summarized in the Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1909, p. 239. The statements which follow above are from _An Account of the Condition of the Infirmaries of London Workhouses, Printed for the Association for the Improvement of Infirmaries_, 1866.

The dawn of a better day came with the passing of the Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867, an Act which figures in histories of the Poor Law in this country as "the starting-point of the modern development of Poor Law medical relief." Many persons contributed to this reform. In the case of London, a "Commission," instituted by the _Lancet_, under Mr. Ernest Hart, which afterwards developed into the "Association for the Improvement of the Infirmaries of London Workhouses," should especially be mentioned. But the person who inspired the proper nursing of the sick poor, and who, behind the scenes, was a prime mover in the legislation of 1867, was Florence Nightingale.

II

The reform began in Liverpool, and the initiative was due to a philanthropist of that city, Mr. William Rathbone. He used to speak of Miss Nightingale as his "beloved Chief"; and she, when he died, sent a wreath inscribed "In remembrance and humblest love of one of God's best and greatest sons." His voluminous correspondence with her began in 1861 when he was desirous of introducing a system of District Nursing among the poor of Liverpool. There were no trained nurses anywhere to be had, and he consulted Miss Nightingale. She suggested to him that Liverpool had better train nurses for itself in its own principal hospital, the Royal Infirmary. Mr. Rathbone took up the idea, and built a Training School and Home for Nurses. This institution provided nurses both for the Royal Infirmary and for poor patients in their own homes. Miss Nightingale gave to all Mr. Rathbone's plans as close and constant consideration "as if she were going to be herself the matron."[75] The scheme was started in 1862, and it proved so great a success that Mr. Rathbone was encouraged to attempt an extension of his benevolent enterprise. The Workhouse Infirmary at Liverpool was believed to be better than most places of its kind; but there, as elsewhere, the nursing--if so it could be called--was done by able-bodied pauper women. Able-bodied women who enter workhouses are never among the mentally and morally efficient; and in a seaport like Liverpool they were of an especially low and vicious kind. The work of the nurses, selected from this unpromising material, "was superintended by a very small number of paid but untrained parish officers, who were in the habit, it was said, of wearing kid gloves in the wards to protect their hands. All night a policeman patrolled some of the wards to keep order, while others, in which the inmates were too sick or infirm to make disturbance, were locked up and left unvisited all night."[76] On Jan. 31, 1864, Mr. Rathbone wrote to Miss Nightingale, propounding a plan for introducing a staff of trained nurses and promising to guarantee the cost for a term of years if she would help with counsel and by finding a suitable Lady Superintendent. He asked for two letters--"one for influence," to be shown to the Vestry, the other for his private advice.[77] She and Dr. Sutherland drew up the required documents; she arranged that twelve "Nightingale Nurses" should be sent from St. Thomas's Hospital; and she selected a Lady Superintendent--a choice on which, as both she and Mr. Rathbone felt, everything would depend. The Vestry agreed in May to accept Mr. Rathbone's scheme, but many months passed before it was actually launched. "There has been as much diplomacy," wrote Miss Nightingale to the Mother of the Bermondsey Convent (Sept. 3, 1864), "and as many treaties, and as much of people working against each other, as if we had been going to occupy a kingdom instead of a Workhouse." The correspondence forms one of the bulkiest bundles among Miss Nightingale's Papers.

[75] Rathbone's _Organization of Nursing in a Large Town_, p. 30.

[76] _William Rathbone: a Memoir_, p. 166.

[77] The public letter (Feb. 5, 1864) is printed in Mr. Rathbone's _Workhouse Nursing: The Story of a Successful Experiment_ (Macmillan, 1867).

The Lady Superintendent--the pioneer of workhouse nursing--was Miss Agnes Jones, an Irish girl, daughter of Colonel Jones, of Fahan, Londonderry, and niece of Sir John Lawrence. She was attractive and rich, young and witty, but intensely religious and devoted to her work.[78] "Ideal in her beauty," Miss Nightingale said of her;[79] "like a Louis XIV. shepherdess." She was one of the many girls who had been thrilled by Miss Nightingale's volunteering for the Crimea. "Perhaps it is well," she wrote, when entering St. Thomas's Hospital, "that I shall bear the name of a 'Nightingale Probationer,' for that honoured name is associated with my first thought of hospital life. In the winter of 1854, when I had those first longings for work and had for months so little to satisfy them, how I wished I were competent to join the Nightingale band when they started for the Crimea! I listened to the animadversions of many, but I almost worshipped her who braved them all." In 1860 Miss Jones followed in her heroine's steps to Kaiserswerth. In 1862 she introduced herself to Miss Nightingale, who advised her to complete her apprenticeship by a year's training at St. Thomas's. "Hitherto," the Matron reported to Miss Nightingale (Feb. 25, 1863), "I have had no lady probationer equal on all points to Miss Jones." After completing her year's training at St. Thomas's she took service as a nurse in the Great Northern Hospital, and she was there when the invitation came to Liverpool. Miss Jones was at first diffident, but after an interview with Miss Nightingale "the conviction was borne in upon her," as she wrote, that it was God's call and therefore must be obeyed in trust and with good hope.

[78] See "Una and the Lion," in _Good Words_, June 1868 (Bibliography A, No. 51).

[79] Letter to Madame Mohl, June 13, 1868.

In the history of modern nursing in this country the Sixteenth of May 1865 is a date only less memorable than the Twenty-fourth of June 1860. On the earlier day the Nightingale Training School was opened at St. Thomas's; on the latter twelve trained Nightingale nurses began work in the Liverpool Infirmary, and the reform of workhouse nursing was therein inaugurated. Miss Jones herself had arrived a few weeks earlier. Mr. Rathbone felt the importance of the occasion, and marked it by a pretty attention to Miss Nightingale. "I beg," he wrote (May 12, Miss Nightingale's birthday), "to be allowed to constitute myself your gardener to the extent of doing what I have long wished--providing a flower-stand for your room and keeping it supplied with plants. I hope you will not be offended with my presumption or refuse me the great pleasure of thinking that in your daily work you may have with you a reminder of my affectionate gratitude for all you have done for our town and for me. If the plants will only flourish, as the good seed you have planted here is doing, they will be bright enough; and as for my personal obligations, you can never know how great they are to you for guiding me to and in this work." Mr. Rathbone and other kindly Liverpool men (among whom Mr. J. W. Cropper should be remembered) were equally thoughtful of Miss Jones. At their own expense they furnished rooms for her in the workhouse, and made them bright with flowers and pictures. But it was a formidable task to which she was called, and the pleasantness of her rooms made the workhouse wards look yet more terrible, she said, by contrast. A young woman, well-bred, sensitive, and refined, accustomed as yet only to well-appointed hospitals, was thrown into the rough-and-tumble of great pauper wards, where the officials, though well-intentioned, had necessarily caught something of the surrounding atmosphere. "Your kind letter," she had written to Miss Nightingale, after a preliminary visit (Aug. 1864), "came in answer to earnest prayer, and gave me courage so that even now while waiting for the committee I do not feel nervous. The governor has promised me every co-operation and told me 'not to be down-hearted if the undertaking seemed formidable at first, as he would pull me through everything.' You will laugh when I tell you how at first his want of refinement prejudiced me, but his earnest hearty initiative in the whole work has quite won me." Their relations afterwards were only indifferently good. Miss Jones's standard was too strict, he thought, for rough workhouse ways.

The greatest shock to Miss Jones, however, was the nature of the human beings whom she was sent to nurse. Sin and wickedness, she said, had hitherto been only names to her. Now she was plunged into a sink of human corruption. The foul language, the drunkenness, the vicious habits, the bodily and mental degradation on all sides appalled her. The wards, she said in her first letter from the workhouse, are "like Dante's _Inferno_." "Una and the Lion"[80] was the title given by Miss Nightingale to her account of Agnes Jones and her paupers, "far more untamable than lions." She had, it is true, the help of twelve trained nurses, devoted alike to her and to their work; but there were 1200 inmates, and of the other "nurses" some were probationers of an indifferent class, and the rest "pauper nurses," of whom Miss Jones had to dismiss 35 in the first few months for drunkenness. Then, the standard of workhouse cleanliness was sadly low. She found that the men wore the same shirts for seven weeks. Bed-clothes were sometimes not washed for months. The diet was hopelessly meagre compared to a hospital standard. It is "Scutari over again," wrote Miss Nightingale, and Miss Jones was strengthened by the thought that the disciple was experiencing some of the difficulties which had beset the Mistress. By way of smoothing things over, Miss Nightingale had written to the governor of the workhouse saying, in effect, that the eyes of the world were upon him as the leader in a great reform; and he "seemed so gratified and flattered by your letter," reported Miss Jones. Miss Nightingale was constant in advice and encouragement to her disciple. "No one ever helps and encourages me as you do." "I could never pull through without you." "God bless you for all your kindness." Such expressions show how welcome and how unfailing was Miss Nightingale's help. And in every detail she was consulted. There was all the friction which usually accompanies a new experiment. There were disputes of every kind, and all were referred to Miss Nightingale--sometimes by Mr. Rathbone, sometimes by Miss Jones, sometimes by both. When things seemed critical, Mr. Rathbone would come up to see Miss Nightingale in person; on less serious occasions he would write. Miss Nightingale and Dr. Sutherland would then sit as a kind of Conciliation Board, and see how matters could be adjusted. In one of Dr. Sutherland's draft judgments submitted for Miss Nightingale's concurrence there is a blank left for her to fill, as the note explains, with "soft sawder." His breezy manner may sometimes have been of comfort to his friend. On one occasion, when everything at Liverpool seemed to be at sixes and sevens, his note to Miss Nightingale was: "I don't despair by any means. The entire proceeding has in it the elements of an Irish row, for they are all more or less Hibernian there, and they will cool down." And so they did. Miss Jones, who was at first a little too stiff-necked, soon found out a more excellent way, and there is "the Nightingale touch" in many of her later reports. "To-day they were a little cross, but I got my way all the same." She is "much amused at the manner in which she now gets all she asks for." She suggests things. She is laughed at. She persists. A decent interval is allowed to elapse; and then the things are suggested to her by the officials; she says the suggestions are excellent, and the things are done. It is obvious to Miss Nightingale and Dr. Sutherland that sooner or later the powers of the Lady Superintendent must be better defined; obvious, too, that the worthless probationers and drunken pauper "nurses" must be cleared out; but that is just one of the things that the experiment is meant to prove, and meanwhile it is enough to drive in the thin end of the wedge. So well does Miss Jones do her work that opinion, in the workhouse and outside, begins even to be impatient for the thicker end. The experiment has so far been limited to the male wards. The doctors go to Miss Jones and ask eagerly when she and more Nightingale nurses are to be given charge of the female wards also. Old women who go in to see their husbands or brothers report wonderful changes in the House since "the London nurses" came. Visiting ladies report to the same effect. The experiment is becoming popular; and the Liverpool Vestry begins to wonder whether the cost hitherto borne by Mr. Rathbone's private purse should not be thrown upon the rates. Miss Nightingale has good cause to be pleased. She has been throwing herself into the work, not only in order to make the particular experiment a success, but also because she wants to use it as a lever for promoting larger reforms.

[80] See Book I. chap. iii. stanzas 4 _seq._ of _The Faerie Queene_:--

"Her angel's face As the great eye of heaven shyned bright, And made a sunshine in the shady place, etc."

III

Liverpool had shown the way, and Miss Nightingale resolved in her own mind that the way should be followed in London. The struggle was long and arduous; the fortune of political war went at a critical moment against her; the victory of 1867 was only partial, and indeed there are other parts of her designs which even to this day await fruition. But the insight with which from the very first, as her Papers show, she seized the essential positions was masterly. I can understand how it was that Mr. Charles Villiers, not usually given to such outbursts of admiration, exclaimed to a friend: "I delight to read the Nightingale's song about it all. If any of them had the tenth part of her vigour of mind we might expect something."

The opening move in her campaign was made in December 1864. There had been an inquest on the death of one Timothy Daly, which had figured in the newspapers as "Horrible Treatment of a Pauper." The facts, as ultimately sifted, were not in this particular case as bad as they were painted in the press, but the circumstances were distressing and public opinion was excited. The situation was in that favourable condition for moving Ministers when there is a feeling in the air that "something must be done." Miss Nightingale seized the opportunity to open communications with the President of the Poor Law Board, Mr. Villiers. She did not in this first letter disclose her whole scheme, though she said just enough to show that she had considered the subject in its larger bearings. She knew the art of beginning on a moderate, and even a humble, note. She presumed to write because the case involved a question of nursing, in which matter she had had some practical experience; she had, moreover, been "put in trust by her fellow-countrymen with the means of training nurses." She described what was to be done in the Liverpool Infirmary by a Matron who had been trained under the "Nightingale Fund," and she invited the Minister's attention to the possibility of preventing the scandals, with which the newspapers were ringing, by starting some scheme of a like kind in London. This letter, in the composition of which Dr. Sutherland had a hand, went straight to its mark. Mr. Villiers at once replied (Dec. 31, 1864) that he would like to communicate with Miss Nightingale personally on the subject. In January the interview took place, and this was the beginning of a long series of personal and written communications between them during the next few years. On one occasion early in 1865 Mr. Villiers, being prevented by official business from keeping an appointment with Miss Nightingale, begged her to receive in his place his right-hand man, Mr. H. B. Farnall, Poor Law Inspector for the Metropolitan district. Mr. Farnall called, and he and Miss Nightingale became as thick as conspirators in no time. For Poor Law purposes he soon became the Chief of her Staff. Mr. Farnall was a man after her own heart. He not only knew the facts with which he had to deal, but he felt them, with something of her "divine impatience." "It's intolerable to me," he said, "to know that there are some 12,000 gasping and miserable sick poor whom we might solace and perhaps in some 5000 cases save, and yet that we have to let them wait while the world gets ready to get out of bed and think about it all." He was a keen and broad-minded reformer, and Miss Nightingale's ideas were upon lines which he too had considered. He was an old official hand, but he hated official obstruction: "all this is treason to King Red Tape, but I know that the old King is always happy _after_ a change, though he gets very red while the change progresses." Miss Nightingale instantly set her new ally to work. Here, as in all that she undertook, she knew that the first thing needful was to collect the facts. She drew up a schedule of inquiries, to be filled up with regard to all the sick-wards and infirmaries in London. "I will immediately issue your Forms," wrote Mr. Farnall (Feb. 16, 1865). He required them to be filled up in duplicate, and Miss Nightingale's set of them is preserved amongst her Papers. Throughout the year she and Mr. Farnall were engaged in the work of inspiring and incensing Mr. Villiers in the direction of radical reform. He was throughout very willing, but he was becoming an old man, he had many other things to think about, and he was apt to see lions in the path. Moreover, not all the officials at the Poor Law Board were reformers; there were those, more highly placed than Mr. Farnall, who were of a very different opinion; and some of the medical officers were inclined to dispute the necessity of any radical changes. However, on the subject of workhouse nursing, Mr. Villiers promptly authorized Mr. Farnall to press upon the Guardians the importance of employing competent nurses, and he told the House of Commons (May 5) that "in consequence of communications lately received at the Poor Law Board from Miss Nightingale, who was now taking much interest in the matter," he was hopeful that great reforms in nursing might come about. She, however, knew perfectly well that the only way to such reform was by reform also in administration and finance. In the following month Mr. Farnall persuaded his Chief to insinuate into an innocent little "Poor Law Board Continuation Bill," a clause which would enable the Board to _compel_ Guardians to improve their workhouses; but the clause was struck out, Mr. Farnall was disappointed, and Miss Nightingale wrote to reassure him. They must work all the harder to secure, not by a side-wind, but by a direct move in the next session of Parliament, a full and far-reaching measure of reform. "Your kind note," said Mr. Farnall (July 3), "has done me a world of good; there is not a single expression or hope in it which I cannot make my own. So we hope together for next year's ripened fruit. I hope, too, that we may really taste it. I pledge myself to you to relax in nothing till the task is done. It is something to live for, and something to have heard you say that such a victory will some day be claimed by me. It is a pleasant thing to think of, and I shall think of it as a soldier thinks of his Flag."

So, then, Miss Nightingale set to work, with the help of Mr. Farnall and Dr. Sutherland, in elaborating a scheme for 1866. There are several drafts in her handwriting for the Memorandum finally submitted to Mr. Villiers, and many notes and emendations by Dr. Sutherland. The scheme was sent also (at a later date) to Mr. Chadwick (one of the few survivors of the famous Poor Law Commission of 1834) in order that he might submit it to John Stuart Mill, whom Miss Nightingale sought to enlist in the cause.[81] The essential points and considerations were these:--

A. To insist on the great principle of separating the Sick, Insane, "Incurable," and, above all, the Children, from the usual population of the Metropolis.

B. To advocate a single Central Administration.

C. To place the Sick, Insane, etc., under a distinct administration, supported by a "General Hospital Rate" to be levied for this purpose over the whole Metropolitan area.

These are the ABC of the reform required.

(A) So long as a sick man, woman, or child is considered _administratively_ to be a pauper to be repressed, and not a fellow-creature to be nursed into health, so long will these most shameful disclosures have to be made. The care and government of the _sick_ poor is a thing totally different from the government of paupers. Why do we have Hospitals in order to cure, and Workhouse Infirmaries in order _not_ to cure? Taken solely from the point of view of preventing pauperism, what a stupidity and anomaly this is!... The past system of mixing up all kinds of poor in workhouses will never be submitted to in future. The very first thing wanted is classification and separation.

(B) Uniformity of system is absolutely necessary, both for efficiency and for economy.

(C) For the purpose of providing suitable establishments for the care and treatment of the Sick, Insane, etc., consolidation and a General Rate are essential. To provide suitable treatment in each Workhouse would involve an expenditure which even London could not bear. The entire Medical Relief of London should be under one central management which would know where vacant beds were to be found, and be able so to distribute the Sick, etc., as to use all the establishments in the most economical way.

[81] Mill was at the time a member of a Select Committee on the Local Government and Local Taxation of the Metropolis; see above, p. 106. The Committee did not, however, touch Poor Law Administration.

Miss Nightingale elaborated her views in detail, going into the questions of Hospitals, Nursing, Workhouse Schools, etc. The cardinal point was what Mr. Farnall spoke of to her as "your Hospital and Asylum Rate." The Minister was favourable to the idea. "I have conferred with Mr. Villiers," wrote Mr. Farnall (Dec. 12), "and he has decided on adopting your scheme. He thinks it will be popular and just, and I think so also, but I think too that it will be the means of my carrying out a further reform some of these days. That is my hope and belief. If your plans are carried my struggle is half over. Under these circumstances I shall to-morrow commence a list of facts for you on which those who are to support your plan in print will be able to hang a considerable amount of flesh, for I shall furnish a very nice skeleton." Miss Nightingale had already, through an intermediary, interested the editor of the _Times_ in the matter, and he had been to see Mr. Villiers. Further public support came from the Association above mentioned (p. 124), which sent a deputation to the Poor Law Board. Mr. Villiers in reply (April 14, 1866) foreshadowed legislation on Miss Nightingale's lines, and he appointed Mr. Farnall and another of her friends, Dr. Angus Smith, to inspect all the Infirmaries. Their Report has already been cited. Public opinion was ripe for radical reform; but the Whig Ministry was tottering, no fresh contentious legislation was deemed advisable, and in June 1866 Mr. Villiers was out. The opportunity had passed, and Miss Nightingale was left crying, "Alas! Alas! Alas!"

IV

She was not one, however, to waste much time in empty lamentations. She had to begin over again, that was all; and she wrote at once, as we have heard,[82] to the new Minister. She also procured an introduction for Mr. Farnall to Lord Derby, and the Prime Minister seemed sympathetic. Mr. Hardy had answered politely, but did not follow up his letter, and his first move seemed sinister. He dismissed Mr. Farnall from Whitehall and sent him to the Yorkshire Poor Law District. The anti-reform party was believed to have gained the ascendant. But now a fortunate thing happened. Mr. Hardy made a speech in which he implied that the existing laws were adequate, if properly enforced, to meet the case. Technically there was a measure of truth in this statement, but in practice it was fallacious;[83] and in any case Mr. Hardy's remark was a reflection on his predecessor's administration. This nettled Mr. Villiers greatly; he was "not going to sit down under it," he said; he became red-hot for reform; very much on the alert, too, to trip his successor up. Miss Nightingale did not fail to add fuel to the flame. Mr. Villiers corresponded with her at great length; saw her repeatedly; reported all he was able to learn of how things were going at Whitehall, and begged her to do the like for him. "The public are led to infer," he said to her, "that nothing was needed but a touch from Mr. Hardy's wand to set all things straight." The public, thought Miss Nightingale also, would soon discover his mistake. Mr. Hardy would find that he had either to do nothing, or to legislate; unless indeed the Tory Ministry were overthrown first.

[82] Above, p. 115.

[83] Previous legislation had _empowered_ Guardians to separate the sick, etc., but had set up no administrative or financial machinery.

Now, Miss Nightingale was a Whig, and she, too, would have been glad enough to see the Tories out and Mr. Villiers in again at the Poor Law Board. But there was something that she cared about a great deal more, namely, that the neglect of the sick poor should be remedied at the earliest possible moment; and as the Tories might after all weather the storm, she must see what she could do to get a Poor Law Bill out of them. In the autumn Mr. Hardy appointed a Committee, mainly composed of doctors, to report "upon the requisite amount of space, and other matters, in relation to workhouses and workhouse infirmaries." One of the "other matters" was nursing, and the Committee, instead of expressing an opinion on the subject themselves, asked Miss Nightingale to send them a Paper. In this Memorandum, dated Jan. 19, 1867, she made full use of her opportunity; for she pointed out that the question of nursing could not, either in logic or in effective practice, be separated from that of administration. "In the recent inquiries," she wrote, "the point which strikes an experienced hospital manager is not the individual cases which have been made so much of (though these are striking enough), but the view which the best Matrons, the best Masters, and other officials of the workhouses give from their own lips (in evidence) of what they considered their duties. These bore as little reference to what are usually considered (not by me alone, but by all Christendom) the duties of hospital superintendents as they bear to the duties of railway superintendents. Your Committee is probably well acquainted with the administration of the _Assistance Publique_ at Paris. No great stretch of imagination is required to conceive what they think of the system or no system reigning here.[84] I allude to the heaping up aged, infirm, sick, able-bodied, lunatics, and sometimes children in the same building instead of having, as in every other Christian country, your asylum for aged, your hospital for sick, your lunatic asylum, your union school, &c., &c., &c., each under its proper administration, and your able-bodied quite apart from any of these categories. This point is of such vital importance to the introduction and successful working of an efficient nursing system that I shall illustrate it...." And she went on to outline her general scheme. In accordance with her usual custom, Miss Nightingale had copies of her Paper struck off separately, and circulated them among influential people. The Committee had given her a platform, but its own Report was only of subsidiary value. She put her point of view with a touch of exaggeration characteristic of her familiar letters to Captain Galton, one of the members of the Committee. "I look upon the cubic space as the least of the evils--indeed as rather a good, for it is a very good thing to suffocate the pauper sick out of their misery." Meanwhile she thought it wholesome that the "ins" should know that the "outs" did not mean to let the subject of Poor Law Reform be shelved. "I have had a great deal of clandestine correspondence," she wrote to a friend who might pass the information on (Oct. 28, 1866), "with my old loves at the Poor Law Board these last two months. The belief among the old loves is that the new master is bent on--doing nothing. There is only one thing of which I am quite sure. And that is that Mr. Villiers will lead Mr. Gathorne Hardy no easy life next February."

[84] M. Husson, Director of the _Assistance Publique_, had been in London in 1865. Miss Nightingale had procured him various introductions and facilities, and he had reported his impressions to her.

V

Mr. Hardy kept his own counsel and made no sign. As the session drew near, Miss Nightingale became anxious and she poured in letters and memoranda upon him. In one of these she made what turned out to be an unfortunate mistake. She was too frank. She was pressing upon Mr. Hardy's attention the importance of the Liverpool experiment, and in the course of her exposition she said incidentally that there had been difficulties. Mr. Hardy misinterpreted the remark and made use of it to explain in the House of Commons why he did not propose to take any direct action in the matter of nursing reform. Indirectly, however, his proposals did a great deal. On February 8, 1867, Mr. Hardy introduced his Bill. So, legislation had, after all, been found necessary to meet the demand that something must be done. To that extent, then, Mr. Villiers had no need to make Mr. Hardy's life a burden to him. The question was, How much did the Bill do? and was what it did, good or bad? Those who had been working for reform were anxious to know what Miss Nightingale thought. "I should amazingly like to hear," wrote Mr. Villiers to her, "what you say to this seven months' child born in the workhouse at Whitehall." Mr. Ernest Hart's Association, whose attitude was summed up by Mr. Villiers as "silenced but not satisfied," applied for her opinion. Her journalistic friends wanted hints. Dr. Sutherland was told, in a note requiring his instant attention, that "X. wants to know in what tone he is to write his article in the _Daily News_," and that "Y. will write an article in the _Pall Mall_ in any sense we wish." Now, whenever a Bill is introduced touching a question which demands, or admits of, large reforms, there are two points of view from which it may be regarded. One man compares what is proposed with the existing state of things, and asks himself, Is there any decided improvement? Another, comparing the proposals with what might exist in the future, asks, Does the Bill approximate to the ideal? The former is the view which "practical politicians" take; the latter, the view which is apt to be taken by administrative enthusiasts. Miss Nightingale's administrative mind saw chiefly, and at first saw only, the points at which, and the measure in which, Mr. Hardy's Bill fell short of logical perfection. It was a tentative measure; it was largely permissive; it did something to separate the sick and the children from the ordinary paupers, but it did not do all. Moreover, so far as direct and express enactment went, it did nothing to improve workhouse nursing. Miss Nightingale pronounced the Bill, therefore, "a humbug." Its principles were "none"; its details, "beastly." She tried hard to get the Bill amended and extended. Sir Harry Verney, who might perhaps be described as "Member of Parliament for Miss Nightingale," gave every assistance that was possible; and Mr. Mill, inspired largely by his old friend Mr. Chadwick (with whom Miss Nightingale also was in constant correspondence), took a prominent part in the debates to the same end. But he seldom pressed his points to a division, and there was little life in the opposition. Mr. Villiers was as critical as he could reasonably be, but the real fact was that the Bill made a great and a surprising step in the direction which Miss Nightingale had pressed upon him. These were days in which Disraeli was educating his party in the political art of dishing the Whigs, and the difficulty was, as Mr. Jowett wrote to Miss Nightingale, to discover any clear difference between a Tory and a Radical. Mr. Mill, with the candour that became a philosopher, "had no doubt that the Bill would effect a vast improvement"; Mr. Villiers, with the determination of the politician to score a point, admitted that "the Bill would set the ball rolling," and reflected that anything might presently come from a party which had been converted "from pure Conservatism to Household Suffrage in 48 hours"; and Mr. Hardy, in his conduct of the measure, was careful to conciliate the other side. He agreed to all the objections "in principle," pleaded the difficulty of doing everything in a moment, and claimed for his Bill that it was "only a beginning." And so, in fact, it turned out; while, even at the time, the reforms made by the Bill, which became an Act on March 29, 1867, were sufficiently beneficent. The whole of the unions and parishes in London were formed, by an Order under the Act, into one district, "The Metropolitan Asylum District," for the treatment of insane, fever, and small-pox cases, which had hitherto been dealt with in the workhouses. Separate infirmaries were formed for the non-infectious sick, with a greatly enlarged cubic space per inmate. Dispensaries were established throughout the metropolis. Above all, the "Metropolitan Common Poor Fund" (the "Hospital and Asylum Rate" of Miss Nightingale's Memorandum) was established, and to it were charged the maintenance of the "asylums," medicines, etc., and the maintenance of pauper children in separate schools. When the battle was lost--or won--Miss Nightingale counted up the gains, and said, "This is a beginning; we shall get more in time."[85] And such has been the case. The Act of 1867 was the foundation on which many improvements in medical relief under the Poor Law have been laid,[86] and the principles implied in the Act--the separation of the sick from the paupers, and in the case of London the making medical relief a common charge--are likely to receive yet further recognition. They are the principles for which Miss Nightingale contended. Her influence in forming the public opinion which made the legislation of 1867 possible was referred to in both Houses of Parliament.[87]

[85] Letter to the Rev. Mother of Bermondsey, March 1867.

[86] The history of the matter is succinctly told in the Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1909, pp. 235 _seq._

[87] By Mr. Villiers in the House of Commons, February 21; and in the House of Lords on March 19 by the Earl of Devon, who, in moving the second reading of Mr. Hardy's Bill, said: "It would be improper on such an occasion to omit reference to the improved feeling on the subject which had resulted from the admiration the country must feel for the exertions of that excellent and gifted woman, Miss Nightingale, whose name would always be received with that respect which was due to her Christian activity and self-devotion."

VI

Soon after the Act of 1867 came into operation, to the improvement of London workhouses, the pioneer of improved workhouse nursing died in Liverpool. The work of Miss Agnes Jones, whose early difficulties have been described above, had gone ahead with ever-increasing success. The difficulties indeed continued, and throughout 1867 Miss Nightingale was still busy in giving encouragement and advice; but the results of the work were so satisfactory that in March 1867 the Liverpool Vestry decided to extend the trained nursing to the female wards and to throw the whole cost upon the rates. When the strain of the increased work was at its severest point, Miss Jones was attacked by fever, and she died on February 19, 1868. To _Good Words_ in the following June Miss Nightingale contributed a touching paper in memory of her friend and disciple:--

She died as she had lived, at her post in one of the largest workhouse infirmaries in the Kingdom. She lived the life, and died the death, of the saints and martyrs; though the greatest sinner would not have been more surprised than she to have heard this said of herself. In less than three years she had reduced one of the most disorderly hospital populations in the world to something like Christian discipline, such as the police themselves wondered at. She had converted a vestry to the conviction of the economy as well as humanity of nursing pauper sick by trained nurses. She had converted the Poor-Law Board--a body, perhaps, not usually given to much enthusiasm. She had disarmed all opposition, all sectarian zealotism; so that Roman Catholic and Unitarian, High Church and Low Church, all literally rose up and called her "blessed." All, of all shades of religious creed, seemed to have merged their differences in her, seeing in her the one true essential thing, compared with which they acknowledged their differences to be as nothing. And aged paupers made verses in her honour after her death.

In less than three years--the time generally given to the ministry on earth of that Saviour whom she so earnestly strove closely to follow--she did all this. She had the gracefulness, the wit, the unfailing cheerfulness--qualities so remarkable but so much overlooked in our Saviour's life. She had the absence of all asceticism, or "mortification," for mortification's sake, which characterized His work, and any real work in the present day as in His day. And how did she do all this? She was not, when a girl, of any conspicuous ability, except that she had cultivated in herself to the utmost a power of getting through business in a short time, without slurring it over and without fid-fadding at it;--real business--her Father's business. She was always filled with the thought that she must be about her "Father's business." How can any undervalue business-habits? as if anything could be done without them. She could do, and she did do, more of her Father's business in six hours than ordinary women do in six months, or than most of even the best women do in six days.... What she went through during her workhouse life is scarcely known but to God and to one or two. Yet she said that she had "never been so happy in all her life." All the last winter she had under her charge above 50 nurses and probationers, above 150 pauper scourers, from 1290 to 1350 patients, being from two to three hundred more than the number of beds. All this she had to provide for and arrange for, often receiving an influx of patients without a moment's warning. She had to manage and persuade the patients to sleep three and four in two beds; sometimes six, or even eight children had to be put in one bed; and being asked on one occasion whether they did not "kick one another," they answered, "Oh, no, ma'am, we're so comfor'ble." Poor little things, they scarcely remembered ever to have slept in a bed before. But this is not the usual run of workhouse life. And, if any one would know what are the lowest depths of human vice and misery, would see the festering mass of decay of living human bodies and human souls, and then would try what one loving soul, filled with the spirit of her God, can do to let in the light of God into this hideous well (worse than the well of Cawnpore), to bind up the wounds, to heal the broken-hearted, to bring release to the captives--let her study the ways, and follow in the steps of this one young, frail woman, who has died to show us the way--blessed in her death as in her life.

The death of Miss Jones involved Miss Nightingale in much anxiety and additional responsibility. "The whole work of finding her successor has fallen upon me," she wrote to Madame Mohl (March 20); "and in addition they expect me to manage the Workhouse at Liverpool from my bedroom." And again (April 30): "I have seven or eight hours a day additional writing for the last two months about this Liverpool workhouse." The bundle of correspondence on the subject makes this statement quite credible. "I believe I have found a successor[88] at last. I don't think anything in the course of my long life ever struck me so much as the deadlock we have been placed in by the death of one pupil--combined, you know, with the enormous _jaw_, the infinite female ink which England pours forth on 'Woman's Work.' It used to be said that people gave their _blood_ to their country. Now they give their _ink_." Miss Nightingale's first concern was to put heart and strength into the nurses who were now deprived of their Chief. Writing as their "affectionate friend and fellow-sufferer," she called upon them to fight the good fight without flinching. "Many battles which seemed desperate while the General lived have been fought and won by the soldiers who, when they saw their General fall, were determined to save his name and win the ground he had died for. And shall we fight a heavenly battle, a battle to cure the bodies and souls of God's poor, less well than men fight an earthly battle to kill and wound?" "The nurses have been splendid," she was able to report presently. Miss Nightingale concluded her paper in _Good Words_ with a stirring appeal to others--Poor Law officials, on their part, and devoted women, on theirs--to go and do likewise. "The Son of God goes forth to war, who follows in his train? Oh, daughters of God, are there so few to answer?" The appeal awoke a response in at least one heart. One of the most valued of Miss Nightingale's disciples ascribed her call to this article in _Good Words_. "Some of us," she says, "who were children in the days of the Crimean War when Miss Nightingale's most famous work was done, were responsible girls at home, nursing as occasion arose in our families, by the light of her _Notes_, to the music of Longfellow's verse, when once again she came before us, flashing out of her retirement with the trumpet-call of 'Una.'" Many are now called to such work, but few, I suppose, are chosen--in the sense of being found worthy to do the work in the spirit of Agnes Jones. The Liverpool experiment, rendered successful by her devotion, rapidly made its mark. In ten years' time the system of employing pauper inmates as nurses had been entirely superseded, in all sick asylums and separate infirmaries, by paid nurses. In 1897 the employment of pauper nurses in any workhouse was forbidden, and the training of the paid nurses has been continuously improved.[89] To Miss Nightingale, here as in all her undertakings, each point gained was only a step on the road to perfectibility. Among some communings with herself, written in 1867, there is this entry: "Easter Sunday. Never think that you have done anything effectual in nursing in London till you nurse, not only the sick poor in workhouses, but those at home."

[88] Miss L. Freeman.

[89] For details on this subject, see Majority Report, 1909, pp. 240-242.

CHAPTER II

ALLIANCE WITH SIR BARTLE FRERE

(1867-1868)

Truly these poor people will have cause to bless you long after English Viceroys and dynasties are of the past.--SIR BARTLE FRERE (_Letter to Miss Nightingale_, May 6, 1869).

When Sidney Herbert died, his work as an army reformer was in part arrested because he had never put in what Miss Nightingale called "the main-spring." He had failed to reform the War Office. There had thus been no such effective organization set up as would ensure even the permanent possession of ground already gained and much less a continuous advance. There was now some danger of a like state of things in connection with Public Health in India, and Miss Nightingale turned her thoughts to avert it.

There had been many improvements; but there was as yet no consistent scheme of organization, and in some respects there had already been backsliding. The Sanitary Commissions had been reduced on the ground of expense to two officers (a President and a Secretary) in each case, and a further retrenchment was now in contemplation. Under each Local Government there was to be one sanitary officer, and it was proposed that this officer should be the Inspector-General of Prisons. A "Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India" would remain, who would not combine that duty with an inspectorship of prisons; but such a scheme would assuredly not supply any "mainspring" for sanitary improvement. Meanwhile Sir John Lawrence's term of office was coming to an end; and Miss Nightingale, regarding him as the indispensable man, looked upon the end of his viceroyalty as an event almost comparable to the death of Sidney Herbert. The same error must not be made a second time. Before Sir John Lawrence retired, the mainspring of the machinery for sanitary progress in India must be inserted. Miss Nightingale had a clear policy in her mind, and she secured most of her points with a celerity and a completeness which entitle this episode to rank among her most brilliant campaigns. It will make the moves more easily intelligible if the main points are indicated at once. What Miss Nightingale sought to attain was an efficient machine which would turn out sanitary improvement in accordance with the best knowledge of the day and of which the working would be subject to the propelling force of public opinion. She, therefore, set herself to secure, if by any means she could, (1) an executive sanitary authority in India, (2) an expert controlling (and, incidentally, an inspiring) authority in London, and (3) the publication of an annual report on the work done, so as to make both parts of the machinery amenable to public inspection.

On the first of these points, Miss Nightingale was doomed to some disappointment. Neither at the time with which we are here concerned, nor in her later years, nor yet to the present day, has any supreme and executive sanitary machinery been established in India. "It was true," said the Secretary of State during a debate in the House of Lords on Indian sanitation in 1913 (June 9), "that the present system fell very far short of a great independent Sanitary Department supreme over the Provincial Governments and forming one of the main departments of the Government of India." That was Miss Nightingale's ideal at this time, though in later years, as we shall learn,[90] she recognized that sanitary progress in India could not be turned out by clockwork; but at the opposite pole stood the scheme by which she was threatened in 1867 for consigning sanitary administration in the Local Governments to a sub-head of the prison department. She had the satisfaction before Sir John Lawrence left India of seeing another scheme adopted, which was at any rate as far removed from the Prison as from her Ideal. On the other two points, stated above, she was at the time completely successful. She had in all this a valuable ally; and it was her way to see something like special providence in fortunate circumstances. The most logical mind sometimes admits exceptions; yet there was in fact no exception. Providence, according to her belief, is Law; and it had become a law that men interested in her interests should go to her. Hence it was that she made at this time a friendship with one whose disinterested devotion to the cause of sanitary reform in India equalled her own, and whose co-operation was to prove of the greatest value. The new friend was Sir Bartle Frere.

[90] See below, p. 405.

II

For a year and more the question of the Public Health Service in India had slumbered, so far as organization was concerned. Sir John Lawrence's dispatch had been lost at the India Office for some months (p. 109). Then, when it had been found and Miss Nightingale had drafted the reply, Lord de Grey had gone out of office before the reply could be sent (p. 110). She had opened communications with his successor, Lord Cranborne (p. 114); but his stay at the India Office was brief, for when Disraeli's Franchise Bill was introduced, he resigned. He was succeeded by Sir Stafford Northcote, with whom as yet Miss Nightingale had no acquaintance. She had been diligent in writing to Sir John Lawrence, who continued to ask her advice and send her papers; but she had held her hand on this side. The reason was that all her friends told her that "the Tories would be out in a week." Dr. Sutherland, greatly daring, went further and talked treason against Sir John Lawrence: "He is our worst enemy," and "we had better wait." Miss Nightingale ascribed this ribaldry to a desire of Dr. Sutherland to be off cholera-hunting in the Mediterranean, and reproached him in some impromptu rhymes.[91] Sir John Lawrence was her hero. If he did amiss sometimes (as she had to admit), she put it down, I suppose, to his Council, with whom he was notoriously not on good terms; whatever was done aright was his doing. And meanwhile the weeks passed and the Tories did not go out; they looked, on the contrary, very much like staying in. Miss Nightingale determined to wait no longer. She announced her determination in a letter to Captain Galton (May 28, 1867). He was in touch with Indian sanitary business as a member of the War Office Sanitary Committee, to which such business was often referred, and she attached considerable weight to his judgment. "Our Indian affairs," she wrote, "are getting as drunk as they can be"; she was resolved to have them put straight. She had been "strongly advised to communicate direct with Sir Stafford Northcote"; advised, I imagine, by Mr. Jowett (for was not Sir Stafford a Balliol man, and therefore specially amenable to reason?) What did Captain Galton advise? He agreed that things were not going well, and was glad that she meant to move. He would give her an introduction, if she liked, to Sir Stafford, and he advised her to see Sir Bartle Frere, "as I fancy you could make him useful." He had just returned from the governorship of Bombay, and had been given a seat on the India Council in London. A fortnight later (June 14) he and Miss Nightingale met:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Captain Galton._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _June_ 16 [1867]. I have seen Sir Bartle Frere. He came on Friday by his own appointment. And we had a great talk. He impressed me wonderfully--more than any Indian I have ever seen except Sir John Lawrence; and I seemed to learn more in an hour from him upon Indian administration and the way it is going than I did from Ellis in six months, or from Strachey in two days, or from Indian Councils (Secretaries of State and Royal Commissions and all) in six years. I hope Sir B. Frere will be of use to us. I have not yet applied to you to put me into communication with Sir S. Northcote. Because why? Your Committee won't sit. It won't sit on Monday because Monday is Whit Monday. And Tuesday is Whit Tuesday. And Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. And Thursday is Ascension Day. And Friday is Good Friday. And Saturday is the Drawing Room. And Sunday is Sunday. And that's the way that British business is done. Now you are come back, you must send for the police and make the Committee do something. As for Sutherland, I never see him. Malta is the world. And Gibraltar is the "next world." And India is that little island in the Pacific like Honolulu.

[91] Free as air. I don't care. Go away To Malta-y. I don't care. Let Sir John Hall Be Director-Genera_ll_.

I don't care. As for India-y Let her have her way. I don't care. Free as air. I don't care.

Miss Nightingale must have impressed Sir Bartle Frere as greatly as he had impressed her. He now became one of her constant visitors, and a busy correspondence began between them. He and his family became friends too of Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale, whom they visited at Embley. "There are amongst his papers for 1867 and the five following years considerably more than a hundred letters, short or long, from Miss Nightingale to him, mostly upon sanitary questions affecting India."[92] The letters from him to her are not less numerous. "I will make 35 South Street the India Office," he said, "while this affair is pending." Miss Nightingale took note of his conversations, principally for communication to Dr. Sutherland, but also for her own guidance. But if she had much to learn from him, he also must have found something to learn, and some inspiration to derive, from her. The work which she had done for the Royal Commission had given her a great knowledge of sanitary, or rather insanitary, details in India; and on the principles of sanitation she was an acknowledged expert. Her acquaintance with the official history of the Indian Public Health question was unique, for no other person had so continuously been in intimate touch with it. The clearness of her mind and her breadth of view impressed every one who saw her. And then something must be allowed, in considering her successive "conquests" (as Mr. Jowett used playfully to call them), to the personal factor. The administrators and ministers who sought or were invited to audience of her would have been more (or less) than men if they had not felt a certain pleased curiosity in meeting this famous woman, who rose from an invalid's bed to receive them. Each of them speedily discovered that her enthusiastic devotion to humanitarian causes was equalled by her soundness of judgment, and that remarkable powers of brain were accompanied by all of a woman's graciousness "She is a noble-minded woman," said Mr. Lowe of her, "and so charming."

[92] _Life of Sir Bartle Frere_, vol. ii. pp. 38, 39.

Encouraged by Sir Bartle Frere's sympathy, Miss Nightingale set to work in earnest. The first thing was to obtain a colourable starting-point. This she found in some Indian papers, sent to her by friends on the War Office Sanitary Committee, on the question of "Doors _versus_ Windows." She determined to attack simultaneously the Governor-General and the Secretary of State on this question. To the Governor-General she wrote immediately; but with regard to the India Office there was a preliminary difficulty. "Dr. Sutherland is so very etiquettish," she wrote to Captain Galton (June 24, 1867), "that he says, But how are you to have seen these papers? I don't know. It seems to me that the cat has been out of the bag so long that it is no use tying the strings now. I will say, if you like, that Broadhead of Sheffield gave me £15 to steal them and to blow you up.[93] I am going ahead anyhow." Captain Galton put aside Dr. Sutherland's etiquette. It had been an established practice for years, he said, as every official person knew, to send Indian sanitary papers to Miss Nightingale; and in the very improbable event of anybody objecting in this case, he, Captain Galton, would assume full responsibility. Miss Nightingale then proceeded to draw up an indictment, and to suggest reform, basing her case upon the "Doors _versus_ Windows" papers. Upon the merits of the controversy I am happily not called upon to offer an opinion. To Miss Nightingale and the War Office Sanitary Committee the ventilation of barracks or hospitals by open doors was a pestilential heresy; to the Government of India it was the ark of the covenant for salvation in hot weather. Sir John Lawrence in reply to Miss Nightingale's remonstrance told her bluntly that nothing but an imperative order from home would make him close the doors, and even then that he would first send the most energetic protest. But, though she attached some importance to the matter on its merits, her real object was something different. She objected to the manner in which the case had been handled. The sanitary experts at home had said that new barracks and hospitals should be ventilated by open windows, and their report to that effect had been sent to India. Then the matter had been referred in succession to the Government of India, the local governments, sanitary commissions, medical authorities, military authorities, district authorities, and then to the Government of India again. Next it had come back to London, where the experts were still of their original opinion. There seemed no reason why the travels of the "Doors and Windows" papers should ever come to an end. If every sanitary question were to be treated in the same way, no sanitary progress could be made; and the idea of "sanitary administration by universal suffrage" was impossible. Sir John Lawrence hardly made proper allowance for her way of putting things when he assured her in reply that she was mistaken in thinking that such matters were referred to a vote in India. The case showed conclusively, it seemed to her, that the time had come for organizing the health service on a business-like footing. She suggested schemes on the basis of the Three Points already defined--a Sanitary Department in India to do the work; a Sanitary Department at the India Office to control the work; and annual publication of what work had been done. With regard to the second point, she regarded the War-Office-cum-India-Office Sanitary Committee as only a makeshift, as we have seen.[94] She knew whom she wanted at the head of a separate India Office Sanitary Department. "If only," she had written to Captain Galton (July 24), "we could get a Public Health Department in the India Office to ourselves with Sir B. Frere at the head of it, our fortunes would be made."

[93] For William Broadhead and the rattening outrages at Sheffield, see M^cCarthy's _History of our own Times_, vol. iv. p. 156.

[94] Above, p. 33.

III

Such was the substance of successive letters which Miss Nightingale now sent to the Secretary of State. The first of them is an admirable document; closely reasoned; with a pleasant pungency of phrasing here and there, such as might occur in a despatch by Lord Salisbury; with a touch of emotion kept well in reserve. She begged the minister to go back to the point at which the matter had been left when Lord de Grey went out, and "to put the Indian Health Service once for all on a satisfactory footing. This would indeed be a noble service for a Secretary of State to render to India." She submitted her letter to Sir Bartle Frere, who pronounced it excellent. He carried it off, and delivered it to the minister in person. This was on July 27. On July 30 Sir Stafford Northcote answered, promising early attention to the subject, and adding, "I attach great weight to any suggestions from one who is so well qualified to speak with authority as yourself." Without going into the question, he made the general remark that "due regard should be had to local information." This criticism was just what she wanted; it afforded an opening for unfolding her schemes in greater detail. Sir Stafford Northcote must have been impressed by the letters; for he gave the matter immediate study, and then, on August 19, wrote to know if he might call for "a little conversation." Miss Nightingale told Mr. Jowett of this new opening. "I am delighted to hear," he wrote (Aug. 20), "that you are casting your toils about Sir Stafford Northcote. Do you know that he was elected a scholar of Balliol with A. H. Clough? I think that you may do him as well as the cause immense service. May I talk to you as I would to one of our undergraduates? Take care not to exaggerate to him (I mention this because it is really difficult to avoid when you are deeply interested). You will make him feel, I have no doubt, that you can really help him. Of course he will have heard things said against you by the officials; and you will have to produce just the opposite impression to these reports. But I don't really suppose that the art of influencing others can be reduced to rules. I commend you and your work to God, and am quite sure that 'it will be given you what to say,' because (I am afraid this is very rationalistic) you know what you mean to say." The interview (Aug. 20), somewhat dreaded on Miss Nightingale's side, had already taken place when Mr. Jowett's letter came. "Much more satisfactory to my hopes," she wrote to Sir Bartle Frere (Aug. 21) "than I expected. I think you have imbued him with your views on Indian administration more than you know. We went as fully into the whole subject as was possible in an hour, seeing that India is rather a big place." Her notes of the conversation show that she had found the minister very keen and sympathetic. "I don't know," she told Dr. Sutherland, "that he saw how afraid I was of him. For he kept his eyes tight shut all the time. And I kept mine wide open." Afraid or not, she had done a great stroke of business:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Captain Galton._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _August_ 22 [1867]. I saw Sir S. Northcote on Tuesday. He came of his own accord--which I think I partly owe to you. The result is (that is, if he does as he says) that there will be a Controlling Committee at the India Office for sanitary things with Sir B. Frere at the head and Sir H. Anderson at the tail, and your War Office Commission as the consulting body. As to the Public Health Service, I told him that we want the Executive Machinery in India to do it, and the Controlling Machinery at the I.O. to know that it is being done. The work of the Controlling Committee will really be introducing the elements of civilization into India. Sir S. N. said something about having Gen. Baker and Sir E. Perry on as members and an assistant-secretary to Sir H. Anderson. (I wish I could choose the members as I did in Sidney Herbert's time.) But I have the greatest faith in Sir B. Frere, and he asked me to let him bring Sir H. Anderson here; so we shall have the Chairman and the Secretary on our side. I liked Sir S. Northcote; but he appears to me to have much the same calibre of mind as Lord de Grey. He has none of the rapid, unerring perception of Sidney Herbert; none of the power of Sir J. Lawrence; none of the power and keenness of Sir B. Frere. He talks about "talking it all over with Lord Clinton." Do you know Lord Clinton, and does he know anything about it? But my principal reason for writing to you now is this: I went as fully as I could with Sir S. N. into this, that no time should be lost in sending R. Engineers intended for service in India to examine and make themselves acquainted with improvements in sewerage, drainage, water-supply of towns, and in application of sewage to agriculture, and with improvements in Barrack and Hospital construction, etc., as carried out here. Now, there is no one but you who can properly advise Sir S. N. in this way. Pray do so.

Sir Stafford Northcote did all, and more than all, that at this interview he had promised. She was impressed by his sincerity at the time. "I believe," she told Dr. Sutherland, "he will carry out exactly what he consents to do." But other friends advised her to leave nothing to good intentions, to strike while the iron was hot, and to continue jogging the minister's elbow until the things were actually done. Presently an occasion offered itself. The Governor-General had written her a long private letter about the ravages of cholera among the troops in the N.W. Provinces. She sent the substance of this letter to Sir Stafford Northcote, and invited him to concur in her opinion that such things ought not to be. But could they ever be prevented until the Public Health Service was placed on a proper footing? The minister, in acknowledging her letter (Oct. 18), said that, the pressure of other business being relaxed, he was now able to give full attention to sanitary questions, and that he would like to have another conversation. The interview was on October 23. On this occasion the minister came full-handed. He told her, first, as appears from her notes and letters, that he had definitely decided to appoint a Sanitary Committee at the India Office. He read out the list of names; with Sir Bartle Frere, according to promise, as chairman, and Sir H. Anderson as secretary. He then asked her advice with regard to the relations between this Committee and the War Office Sanitary Committee, for there was, as he explained (and as she knew only too well), great jealousy between the two offices. She advised that the India Office Committee should be the controlling and responsible body, and the War Office Committee consultative only; "but I shall be much surprised," she wrote in explaining things to Captain Galton, "if Sir Bartle Frere does not refer many more matters to you than has previously been the case." She had thus won the second of her Three Points.

The minister next handed to Miss Nightingale a dispatch dated August 16, which he had received from the Government of India, and to which an immediate answer was requested. This was not news to her (though she was doubtless too discreet to say so), for the Governor-General had also written to her on August 16 to like effect. In this dispatch the appointment of medical officers in each Local Government for the exclusive duty of Principal Health Officers, paid by the Central Government, was suggested. The Secretary of State left the dispatch with Miss Nightingale, and requested her to favour him in writing with her views on the whole subject, suggesting, if she cared to do so, what answer should be sent to the Government of India. The new proposal of Sir John Lawrence's Government was not all or exactly what she wanted. The local Officers of Health would be advisory only; and the Commissioner with the Government of India would remain in a like position. What she had wanted was a distinct Executive Department, both central and local, for Public Health. Still, the appointment of State Officers of Health was a step in the right direction, and a great advance on the Prisons scheme. She must see to it that the better opinion was made to prevail, while Sir John Lawrence was still at the helm in India and the Secretary of State in London was friendly to her. The new policy would win some part of her First Point. It remained to secure Annual Health Reports; and the Secretary of State had given her an opening by inviting her to make suggestions at large.

She had now a spell of very hard work. At the end of it she had sent to Sir Stafford Northcote (1) a draft for immediate reply to the Indian Government, approving the appointment of the Health Officers. This was sent to India on November 29. (2) Secondly, a digest of the Indian Sanitary Question from 1859 to 1867. This was printed in a Blue-book issued by the Secretary of State in 1868. (3) Thirdly, a memorandum on the whole subject full of suggestions and advice. This was sent out to the Indian Government, and printed in the same Blue-book. It was printed anonymously, though there are tell-tale phrases (such as "The result will be the civilization of India"); the manuscript of the "review," in Miss Nightingale's hand, is amongst her papers. (4) Fourthly, and principally, the heads of a dispatch on the whole subject which, she suggested, might be sent to the Government of India. "Of course I cannot say," she wrote, "how far these heads may meet with your concurrence." The heads, in her hand, are also amongst her papers, and a comparison of this manuscript with Sir Stafford Northcote's dispatch of April 23, 1868, shows that they all met with his concurrence; they were adopted for the most part in her own words. The suggestions of this dispatch constitute one of Miss Nightingale's best services to the cause of Public Health in India. It begins with calling for a Report on Sanitary Progress. It then reverts to the famous "Suggestions in regard to Sanitary Works" of 1864, which Miss Nightingale had so large a hand in writing (above, p. 48). "I consider these Suggestions," wrote the Secretary of State, "to be of very great practical value and to constitute a good foundation for sanitary inquiry and work in India." The dispatch invites particular attention to some of the Suggestions seriatim, and calls for a report on any progress that has been made in carrying them out. It also includes Miss Nightingale's later suggestion (above, p. 152) that Engineer Officers should be sent to England to study sanitary questions. The whole dispatch, whilst leaving full executive authority to the Government of India, was directed to stimulating its zeal in the cause of Public Health.

The adoption by Sir Stafford Northcote of Miss Nightingale's "heads" for this dispatch secured the last of her Three Points. The reports for which the minister called were duly forwarded. They were printed in the Blue-book above mentioned, together with the other Papers, and with the dispatch itself. This Blue-book[95] was the first of an Annual Series of Indian Sanitary Reports. So, then, Miss Nightingale's intercourse with Sir Stafford Northcote had, with the limitations already explained, secured all her points.

[95] For its title, etc., see Bibliography A, No. 52.

"I hope, in this recourse to Sir Stafford Northcote," she had written three months before,[96] "as a last hope. Hope was green, and the donkey ate it (that's me)." "I am inclined to think," Mr. Jowett had written to her at the same time (July 18), "that you have really made a considerable step. I talked about Sir Stafford Northcote to some people who know him. They say, besides what I told you, that he works really hard at Indian affairs. Now, you must get hold of him and fuse him and Sir Bartle Frere and Sir John Lawrence into one by some alchemy or wicked wit of woman, and then something will be accomplished." And this was what had now been made possible; though perhaps the only secret on the woman's part was the combination of singleness of purpose, fulness of knowledge, clearness of insight, and a resolute will.

[96] To Captain Galton (July 16).

IV

Sir Stafford Northcote's dispatch, and the accompanying memorandum, did not immediately have the effect which Miss Nightingale hoped so far as the Supreme Government was concerned. The Government of India somewhat resented the process of hustling by the India Office at home. Miss Nightingale had kept her faith in Sir John Lawrence, but it was put to some severe trials. For some time she had been more ready to praise and pray than he to do her bidding:--

(_Sir John Lawrence to Miss Nightingale._) CALCUTTA, _Feb._ 7 [1867]. Many thanks for your very kind note of the 26th of December. I am quite sure that I in no wise deserve your blessings; nevertheless I am grateful to you for them, perhaps the more so when I bear in mind my own demerits. It is not a very pleasant duty talking to the "Kings of the East," for though they receive all which one in my position may say with gravity and politeness, it makes but a wretched impression on them. You will be glad to hear that the death-rate among the English troops in India for 1866 was only 20.11, while it was 24.24 in 1865. This seems to me a very satisfactory result.... I have had an envoy down in Calcutta for some time, from the King of Bokhara, asking for aid against Russia. How strange it will be if Russia and England meet in Central Asia! I hope, if it is to be so, that it will be in amity. There is ample verge and room enough for both powers; and if both would only see this we might be a help instead of an injury to each other.

(_Sir John Lawrence to Miss Nightingale._) SIMLEH, _July_ 9 [1867].... [A passage dwelling on the many difficulties he had to encounter.] I do what I can to further the objects to which you have devoted your life--no doubt with slow and faltering steps, but still as fast as circumstances will permit.

Then on August 16 the Governor-General sent her a letter which must have very seriously shaken her faith. He had asked her (p. 55) to formulate a scheme for female nursing. With her habitual good sense, she had contemplated an experiment in a single hospital and had drawn up a scheme on that basis. Instead of accepting her basis, the Governor-General referred the matter to his medical advisers, who elaborated a scheme for introducing female nursing into seven hospitals. The cost of this larger scheme was prohibitive; and the Government of India, instead of falling back upon Miss Nightingale's proposals, vetoed the whole thing. Sir John McNeill, who had assisted her with her proposals, was very angry, and sent her a hot indictment of the Indian officials. "You must wait for a new Governor-General. Sir John Lawrence has greatly disappointed me." Then, afraid, I suppose, lest she might adopt some of his scathing phrases in replying to Sir John Lawrence, he wrote again, suggesting that dignified silence would be the better course. "It would be mere waste of time and hardly consistent with your name and position to argue with men who flounder about in such a hopeless slough of unreason. I would not even point out their inconsistencies. Both the Governor-General and you are high powers, and your correspondence ought, I think, to be conducted with the reserve that is proper to such persons when your opinions do not coincide. I would merely say, etc. etc." What Sir John McNeill suggested she adopted with some slight modifications. In her reply to the Governor-General (Sept. 26, 1867) she thanked him for his letter and for the documents he enclosed; explained that she had submitted a scheme only because he had asked her to do so; remarked that the scheme which the Government of India had vetoed was not hers, nor anything like it; and added that if at any future time the question should be revived, she would again be willing, if desired, to give any advice or assistance in her power.

V

This incident did not interfere with the continuance of frequent and friendly correspondence between the two "high powers," and Miss Nightingale's persistence may not have been without some effect. She frequently sent sanitary papers and suggestions to the Governor-General, and these he always referred to some appropriate official for report, whose remarks (sometimes in manuscript, sometimes printed for official use) were in turn forwarded to her. There is one long printed paper of the kind, headed "Dr. Farquhar's Notes on Miss Nightingale's Questions relative to Sanitation in Algeria and India, April 20, 1867."[97] Miss Nightingale forwarded the "Notes" to Sir Bartle Frere, who wrote a long memorandum in rejoinder. He agreed with Miss Nightingale that there was no reason why India should not be brought up to the Algerian standard. The "Notes" were a compendium, he thought, of the errors that impede sanitary reform in India. But though Sir John Lawrence's officials were critical, and her suggestions were not at the moment effectual, they may have had their influence in the end. Sir Bartle Frere was once asked by a member of Miss Nightingale's family to what her influence in India was due, and what had set the sanitary crusade in motion? Not the big Blue-book, he replied, which nobody reads, but "a certain little red book of hers on India which made some of us very savage at the time, but did us all immense good."[98] Sir Bartle Frere had by no means lost faith in Sir John Lawrence, and urged Miss Nightingale to write to him, telling him in advance of the Memorandum which would shortly come to him from the India Office. "I have often known," he said, "a scrap of paper on which you had written a few words--or even your words printed--work miraculously." The scrap of paper was sent, urging Sir John Lawrence once more to appoint an Executive Sanitary Department in the Government of India, but it did not prevail:--

(_Sir John Lawrence to Miss Nightingale._) _October_ 25 [1868]. It may seem to you, with your great earnestness and singleness of mind, that we are doing very little, and yet in truth I already see great improvement, more particularly in our military cantonments, and doubtless we shall from year to year do better. But the extension of sanitation throughout the country and among the people must be a matter of time, especially if we wish to carry them with us ... (_November_ 23). I think that we have done all we can do at present in furtherance of sanitary improvement, and that the best plan is to leave the Local Governments to themselves to work out their own arrangements. If we take this course we shall keep them in good humour. If we try more we shall have trouble. I don't think we require a commission. Mr. John Strachey, a member of Council, has special charge of the Home Department under the Government of India, and all sanitary matters have been transferred to that department, so that when I am gone there will still be a friend at court to whom you can refer.

[97] She had made use, after all, it will be observed, of Dr. Sutherland's visit to "Astley's" (above, p. 110).

[98] The "little red book" was the reprint of Miss Nightingale's _Observations_; see above, p. 36.

Miss Nightingale found cold comfort in this promised friend at court, for Sir John Lawrence forwarded at the same time a letter to himself from Mr. Strachey, in which the latter expressed himself in indignant terms about the India Office's memorandum. It was full, he complained, of things which they were said to have left undone, and gave them no credit for what they had done; and it advocated a forward policy in sanitation which might be attended by grave dangers in forcing sanitary reform upon unwilling people. "Well," said Miss Nightingale to Dr. Sutherland, "this is the nastiest pill we have had, but we have swallowed a good many and we're not poisoned yet." They replied to Mr. Strachey's criticisms in a final letter to the Governor-General. An "admirable" letter, Sir Bartle Frere thought it; "my letter to Sir J. L.," wrote Miss Nightingale in her diary, "to bless and to curse" (Dec. 4, 1868). I hope, and I expect, that the blessing was the larger half. For, in truth, she had obtained during Sir John Lawrence's term of office at least as much for her cause as could reasonably be expected.

When Sir John Lawrence returned to London, one of the first things he did was to call at South Street, and leave, with a little note, "a small shawl of the fine hair of the Thibet goat." He did not presume, he said, to ask to see her without an appointment, but would call another day if she cared to give him one. Three days later (April 3, 1869), he came, and all Miss Nightingale's admiration returned on the instant. She made a long note of his conversation, which ranged over the whole field of Indian government. On the subject of Public Health she recorded with pleasure his saying to her: "You initiated the reform which initiated Public Opinion which made things possible, and now there is not a station in India where there is not something doing." But "in the first place," she wrote, "when I see him again, I see that there is nobody like him. He is Rameses II. of Egypt. All the Ministers are rats and weasels by his side." And to a friend she afterwards said:[99] "Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battle ever knew. He has left his mark on India. Wherever superstition or ignorance or starvation or dirt or fever or famine, or the wild bold lawlessness of brave races, or the cringing slavishness of clever feeble races was to be found, there he has left his mark. He has set India on a new track which--may his successors follow!--

Knight of a better era Without reproach or fear, Said I not well that Bayards And Sidneys still are here!"

[99] Letter to Madame Mohl, March 26, 1869.

CHAPTER III

PUBLIC HEALTH MISSIONARY FOR INDIA

(1868-1872)

There is a vast work going on in India, and the fruits will be reaped in time. Not all at once. We must go on working in faith and in hope.--DR. JOHN SUTHERLAND (_Letter to Miss Nightingale_, August 16, 1871).

"By dint of remaining here for 13 months to dog the Minister I have got a little (not tart, but) Department all to myself, called 'Of Public Health, Civil and Military, for India,' with Sir B. Frere at the head of it. And I had the immense satisfaction 3 or 4 months ago of seeing 'Printed Despatch No. 1' of said Department. (I never, in all my life before, saw any Despatch, Paper or Minute under at least No. 77,981). Still you know this is not the meat, but only the smell of the meat. What we want is an Executive out there to do it, and a Department here to see that it is being done. The latter we now have; the former must still rest with the Viceroy and Council out there." Thus did Miss Nightingale, in a letter to M. Mohl (Feb. 16, 1868), sum up the results of the campaign described in the last chapter. Her life, for some years to come, was now largely occupied with the affairs of the "little Department all to herself." The Department may have been little, but she interpreted her duties, as we shall see, in a large sense. Her work in connection with the War Office, though it did not entirely cease, was no longer absorbing. She had ceased to have direct communications with the Secretaries for War. In 1868 there was one of the periodical reorganizations of the War Office, followed in the succeeding year by the retirement of Captain Galton.[100] She had thus no longer a confidential intimate in the Department. She could have made one, perhaps, if she had so desired; for her Scutari friend, Sir Henry Storks, had now been appointed to the newly organized post of Controller-in-Chief, and presently became Surveyor-General of Ordnance. But her Indian preoccupations, coupled with the never-ceasing strain of work as Adviser-in-General on Hospitals and Nursing, used all her strength. In the present chapter we shall follow the course of her life during the years 1868-72, with special reference to Indian work; in the next, we shall follow the development of her work in connection with hospitals and nursing.

[100] He retired at the end of 1869, and was appointed to a post in the Office of Works. Miss Nightingale intervened (through representations to Lord de Grey and Mr. Cardwell) to secure his continuance as a member of the Army Sanitary Committee.

* * * * *

The long strain, mentioned in the letter to M. Mohl, had told severely upon Miss Nightingale's strength, and at the end of December 1867 she went, leaving no address behind (except with Dr. Sutherland), for a month's rest-cure under Dr. Walter Johnson at Malvern. Upon her return to London she was busily engaged in the preparation of the Indian "Memorandum" described in the last chapter. The death of Miss Agnes Jones and the anxieties which it entailed (chap. i.) told greatly upon her health and spirits. Mr. Jowett, after seeing her early in July, was seriously alarmed at her state of physical weakness and mental despondency. She had half promised him that she would go for rest and change to Lea Hurst; but only if the rest were accompanied by a duty of affection. If her mother were at Lea Hurst, she would go; if not, she would not. So Mr. Jowett wrote privately to Mrs. Nightingale, who arranged her plans accordingly, and begged her daughter to come and be with her. They were together at the old home for three months (July 7-Oct. 3), and for a week of the time Mr. Jowett was with them. The mother and the daughter had seldom been on such affectionate and understanding terms as now. "Mama," wrote Miss Nightingale to Madame Mohl (July 20), "is more cheerful, more gentle than I ever remember her." The daughter's note of conversations shows that they talked of misunderstandings in the past, and that the mother was ready to blame herself: "You would have done nothing in life, if you had not resisted me." For many years to come, Miss Nightingale repeated such visits to the country homes of her parents. They were now old; her father was 74 in 1868, her mother 80. The daughter desired to be with them so far as her work allowed. Perhaps something was due also to the persistent counsels of Mr. Jowett. Continuous drudgery in London was not good, he pleaded, either for her body or for her soul. They were supposed to have entered into a compact not to overwork. He avowed that he was faithfully keeping his side of the bargain, and put her upon her honour to do her part in return. It was an unhealthy life, he pleaded, to be shut up all the year in a London room. There was still much for her to do, and she would do it all the better for some relaxation of daily effort. Perhaps he persuaded her. At any rate, from 1868 for some years onwards there was more of the country in Miss Nightingale's life--less of incessant drudgery, more leisure for reading, more marge for meditation. In 1869 she was at Embley for three months in the summer; in 1870, at Embley for one month, and at Lea Hurst for three; in 1871, there was a similar division of time; in 1872 she was at Embley for eight months.

II

Mr. Jowett was often a visitor on these occasions for a few days at a time. He continued in frequent letters to urge her to attempt some sustained writing. She had a talent for it, he insisted, and she was possessed of great influence. He suggested as a subject suitable to her a Treatise on the Reform of the Poor Law, and he sent her a memorandum of his own ideas on the subject. There are one or two of Mr. Jowett's ideas, and occasionally a phrase of his, in what she ultimately wrote. She endeavoured to take his advice, and a resolve is recorded in her diary for 1868 to devote an hour a day to writing. The projected work went to no further length than that of a magazine article entitled "A Note on Pauperism." Nothing that she ever wrote--with one exception[101]--cost her so much worry and trouble. She did what is always trying to an author's equanimity and often prejudicial to the effect of his work: she admitted collaboration. Dr. Sutherland had a hand in it--that goes without saying, and his assistance was always useful: he knew exactly within what limits he could really help his friend. But her brother-in-law was an authority on the subject and Lady Verney claimed (and not without justice) to be an authority on the style appropriate to magazine articles. She took much well-meant trouble, and transcribed her sister's first draft in her own hand, with corrections of her own also. The authoress was in despair, and sent again for Dr. Sutherland: "I have adopted _all_ your corrections, and _all_ Parthe's, and _all_ Sir Harry's; and they have taken out all my _bons mots_ and left unfinished sentences on every page; and this _kind_ of work really takes a year's strength out of me; and now you _must_ help me." So, Dr. Sutherland patched up the broken sentences and harmonized the corrections, and the article was ready. Miss Nightingale was as timid and perplexed as any literary beginner about placing her paper. After much consultation she decided to submit it to Mr. Froude, with whom as yet she had no acquaintance. She was as pleased as any literary beginner when the editor replied immediately that he would be delighted to print the paper in his next number. In _Fraser_ for March 1869 it appeared accordingly--the first of several contributions which she made to that magazine. The "Note" is somewhat disconnected in style and slight in treatment, but is full of far-reaching suggestions. She begins by insisting on a reform of which we have heard much in a previous chapter: the separation of the sick and incapable from the workhouse. Then she goes on to argue that the thing to do is "not to punish the hungry for being hungry, but to teach the hungry to feed themselves." She attacks the _laisser faire_ school of economists, "which being interpreted means Let bad alone." Political economy speaks of labour as mobile, and she quotes a leading article in the _Times_ which had talked about "the convenience in the possession of a vast industrial army, ready for any work, and chargeable on the public when its work is no longer wanted." She stigmatizes such talk as false, in the first case, and wicked, in the second. The State should endeavour to facilitate the organization of labour. "Where work is in one place, and labour in another, it should bring them together." Education should be more manual, and less literary. Pauper children should be boarded out and sent to industrial schools. The condition of the dwellings of the poor is at the root of much pauperism, and the State should remedy it. There should be State-aided colonization, so as to bring the landless man to the manless lands. Some of all this was not so familiar in 1869 as it is to-day, and Miss Nightingale's "Note" attracted much attention. Among those who read it with hearty approval was Carlyle. "Last night," wrote Mr. Rawlinson (March 11), "I spent several hours with Mr. Carlyle, and amongst talk about Lancashire Public Works, modern modes of government, modern Political Economy and Social Morality, he brought to my notice your 'Note on Pauperism' as in his opinion the best, because the most practical, paper he had read of late on the question. I wish you could have been present to have listened to the great man alternately pouring forth a living stream of information, and then bursting into a rhapsody of passionate denunciation of some thick-headed blundering statesmanship or indignant tirade against commercial rascality." Dr. Sutherland called to express his pleasure that the article had gone off so well. "Well!" she said; "it's not well at all. The whole of London is calling here to tell me they have got a depauperizing experiment, including that horrid woman." A large bundle of correspondence testifies to the interest which her paper aroused. Some of it was not disinterested. All the emigration societies read the paper with the gratitude which looks to subscriptions. The article was very expensive to her; for she gave away the editor's fee many times over in such contributions. For some years following, she took great interest in schemes for emigration, and nothing angered her more in the politics of the day than the absence of any Colonial Policy in the schemes and speeches of Liberal Ministers.

[101] See below, p. 196.

Miss Nightingale had sent some of her correspondence on colonization to an old friend at the Colonial Office--Sir Frederick Rogers (Lord Blachford). "See what a thing," he replied (July 26, 1869), "is a bad conscience! You, conscious of a life spent in bullying harmless Government offices, think that I must read your (beautiful) handwriting with horror. Whereas I, conscious of rectitude, have sincere pleasure in receiving your assaults." This was a preface to an essay in which the Under-Secretary demonstrated, in the manner habitual to the Colonial Office in those days, the utter undesirability, impropriety, and impossibility of doing anything at all. Lord Houghton raised a conversation on the subject in the House of Lords, but confessed to Miss Nightingale that he was half-hearted, and nothing came of it. She formed a large heap of newspaper cuttings, collected facts from foreign countries, made many notes, and intended to follow up the suggestions, thrown out in her paper, into greater detail, and then perhaps to publish a book. She gave much time during 1869 to the subject, and in December Mr. Goschen, the President of the Poor Law Board, came to see her. They had a long discussion, and her note of it begins with an _aperçu_ of the Minister--a little severe, perhaps, but not undiscriminating. "He is a man of considerable mind, great power of getting up statistical information and political economy, but with no practical insight or strength of character. It is an awkward mind--like a pudding in lumps. He is like a man who has been senior wrangler and never anything afterwards." He seemed to Miss Nightingale to see so many objections to any course as to make him likely to do nothing; and his economic doctrines paid too little regard, she thought, to the actual facts. "You must sometimes trample on the toes of Political Economists," she said,[102] "just to make them feel whether they are standing on firm ground." That she was deeply interested in the whole subject is shown by a testamentary document, dated September 19, 1869, in which she earnestly begged Dr. Sutherland to edit and publish her further "Notes on Pauperism."[103] She lived in full possession of her faculties for at least a quarter of a century after this date, but she never put the Notes into printable shape. As I have said before, she lacked inclination to sustained literary composition. Besides, her hands were full of other things.

[102] In a letter to Madame Mohl, March 26, 1869.

[103] In the same document Dr. Sutherland is begged to do the like for her (1) _Notes on Lying-in Hospitals_ (published in 1871; see below, p. 196), and (2) "Paper on selling lands with houses in towns" (see above, p. 92). At a later time she sent the second batch of Pauperism Notes to Dr. Sutherland; but he was of opinion that they required complete rewriting.

III

Miss Nightingale's main work during these years may be described as that of a Health Missionary for India. She carried on her mission in three ways. She endeavoured by personal interviews and correspondence to incense with a desire for sanitary improvement all Indian officials, from Governors-General to local officers of health, whom she could contrive to influence. She made acquaintance with natives of India and strove to spread her gospel among them in their own country. And through her "own little Department" in co-operation with Sir Bartle Frere she did a large amount of official work in the same direction.

On her return to London at the beginning of October 1868, she found work awaiting her under the first of the foregoing heads. Sir John Lawrence's term of office of Governor-General was coming to an end, and Disraeli had appointed Lord Mayo to succeed him. On October 22 he wrote asking to be allowed to see Miss Nightingale before he sailed for India:--

(_Sir Bartle Frere to Miss Nightingale._) INDIA OFFICE, _Oct._ 23 [1868]. I think you will hear from Lord Mayo, who I know is anxious to see you, if you can grant him an interview next week. Could you in the meantime note down for him, as you did (when describing what the folk in India should now do) in a note to me a few weeks ago, the points to which he should give attention? I think you will like him very much. In appearance he is a refined likeness of what I remember of O'Connell when I went as a boy (with a proper horror of his principles) to hear him before he got into Parliament. Lord Mayo is very pleasing in manner, with no assumption of "knowing all about it," and evidently better informed on many subjects connected with sanitary reform than many men of greater pretension. He has a great sense of humour, too, which is a great help. I wish, when you see him, you would ask to see Lady Mayo.

The interview with Lord Mayo was on the 28th, and a few days later Miss Nightingale saw Lady Mayo also. On the morning of the 28th Dr. Sutherland was summoned to South Street. He was in a hurry and hoped there was "nothing much on to-day." "There is a 'something,'" ran the message sent down to him, "which most people would think a very big thing indeed. And that is seeing the Viceroy or Sacred Animal of India. I made him go to Shoeburyness yesterday and come to me this afternoon, because I could not see him unless you give me some kind of general idea what to state." Dr. Sutherland, thus prettily flattered, stayed, and they discussed what should be said to the Sacred Animal. Next day she reported the conversation to Dr. Sutherland:--

What he said was not unsensible but essentially Irish. He said that he should see Sir J. Lawrence for two days before he (Sir J. L.) left. And he said he should ask Sir J. L. to call upon me the moment he returned, and to ask _me_ to write out to _him_ (Lord Mayo) anything that Sir J. L. thought "a new broom" could do. That was clever of him. But he asked me (over and over again) that I should now at once before he goes write down for him something (he said) "that would guide me upon the sanitary administration as soon as I arrive." And "especially (he said) about that Executive." He asked most sagacious questions about all the men.

Miss Nightingale took counsel with Sir Bartle Frere and Dr. Sutherland and then wrote a Memorandum for the new Viceroy. She covered the whole ground of sanitary improvement, dwelling much on questions of irrigation and agricultural development as aids thereto. "A noble and a most complete Paper," said Sir Bartle Frere (Nov. 1), "and it will be invaluable to India." Perhaps it impressed the new Viceroy also. At any rate Lord Mayo's administration was marked by some improvement in sanitary conditions, and by extension of irrigation works.[104] He also initiated two of the indispensable preliminaries to sanitary progress: the Census, and a statistical survey of the country. In an autobiographical note detailing her relations with successive Viceroys, Miss Nightingale says that Lord Mayo's policy in sanitary and agricultural matters was in accord with lines which Sir Bartle Frere and she desired. "I say nothing," she adds, "of his splendid services in foreign policy, in his Feudatory States and Native Chiefs policy, in which doubtless Sir B. Frere helped him. I saw him more than once before he started, and he corresponded with me all the time of his too brief Viceroyalty. I think he was the most open man, except Sidney Herbert, I ever knew. I think it was Lord Stanley who said of him, 'He did things not from calculation, but from the nature of his mind.' Lord Mayo said himself that his Irish experience with 'a subject race' was so useful to him in India. He said that he was certainly the only Viceroy who had sold his own cattle in the market." "Florence the First, Empress of Scavengers, Queen of Nurses, Reverend Mother Superior of the British Army, Governess of the Governor of India" was Mr. Jowett's address when he heard of the interviews with Lord Mayo. "Empress of Scavengers" was M. Mohl's title for her at this time. "Rather," she said, "Maid of all (dirty) work; or, The Nuisances Removal Act: that's me."

[104] For the former point, see the Annual Sanitary Reports; for a summary of the latter works, see Sir William Hunter's _Earl of Mayo_, pp. 177-8.

Miss Nightingale's greatest ally in India at this time was, however, Lord Napier, Governor of Madras. "I remember Scutari," he wrote (June 24, 1868), "and I am one of the few original faithful left, and I think I am attached to you irrespective of sanitation." He was firm in her cause even where Sir John Lawrence had seemed unfaithful. The Governor-General had abandoned a scheme for female nursing (p. 157); Lord Napier carried one through in Madras, and corresponded at some length with Miss Nightingale on the subject. Sir John Lawrence had refused her advice to send some Engineer Officers home to study sanitary works; he had "none to spare." Lord Napier adopted the advice, and sent Captain H. Tulloch, whose visit to England and association with Mr. Rawlinson resulted in reports on urban drainage and the utilization of sewage. Lady Napier gave letters of introduction to Miss Nightingale to other officials from Madras, and Lord Napier reported progress to her constantly:--

(_Lord Napier to Miss Nightingale._) KODAIKANAL, _Sept._ 22 [1867]. I write to you from one of the Arsenals of Health in Southern India, from the Palni Hills, the most romantic and least visited of these salubrious and beautiful places.... I have deferred writing to you till I could announce that some sanitary good had really been secured worthy of your attention. I cannot say that such is yet the case, but something has been proposed and designed. We are building central jails to empty the district jails, and we are remodelling the district jails and rebuilding two or three. We are aerating and enlarging the lock-ups. I have stirred up the doctors in the general hospital at Madras. I have proposed to take the soldiers out of it and build them a new separate military Hospital (not yet sanctioned). I have endeavoured to raise the little native dispensaries and hospitals out of their sordid baseness and poverty. I am trying to get a new female hospital sanctioned for women, both European and native, with respectable diseases, and the others taken out and settled apart. I don't think my action has gone beyond a kind of impulse and movement. But we may effect something more important in the coming year. My wife has taken an active interest in the Magdalen Hospital, the Lying-in Hospital, and the orphanages of various kinds. We want money, zeal, belief; and knowledge in many quarters.

(_Lord Napier to Miss Nightingale._) MADRAS, _Sept._ 3 [1868]. I am truly happy to find that I can do something to please you and that you will count me as a humble but devoted member of the Sanitary band, of _your_ band I might more properly say! Do you know that I was sent by Lord Stratford to salute and welcome you on your first arrival at Scutari and that I found you stretched on the sofa where I believe you never lay down again? I thought _then_ that it would be a great happiness to serve you, and if the Elchi would have given me to you I would have done so with all my heart and learned many things that would have been useful to me now. But the Elchi would never employ any one on serious work who was at all near himself, so I spent the best years of my life at a momentous crisis doing nothing when there was enough for all! But if I can do something now it will be a late compensation ... [report on various sanitary measures then in hand]. I have read the beautiful account of "Una" last evening driving along the melancholy shore. I send it to Lady Napier, who is in the Hills. I will write again soon, as you permit and even desire it, and I am ever your faithful, grateful and devoted Servant, NAPIER.

(_Lord Napier to Miss Nightingale._) MADRAS, _June_ 3 [1869]. ... Now I have a good piece of news for you. We are framing a Bill for a general scheme of local taxation in this Presidency, both in municipalities and in villages, and the open country, to provide for three purposes--local roads, primary education, and Sanitation--such as improvement of wells, regulation of pilgrimages and fairs, drainage, &c. It will be very unpopular I fear in the first instance, for the people wish neither to be taught nor cured, but I think it is better on the whole to force their hands. We are driven to it, for I see clearly that we must wait a long time for help from the Supreme Government.... I was pleased and flattered to be mentioned by you in the same sentence with Lord Herbert. Indeed I am not worthy to tie the latchet of his shoe, but there are weaknesses and illusions which endure to the last, and I suppose I never shall be indifferent to see myself praised by a woman and placed in connection, however remote, with a person of so much virtue and distinction. You shall have the little labour that is left in me.[105]

[105] The other day in a bookseller's catalogue of "Association Books" I found this item: "Florence Nightingale's _Notes on Lying-in Institutions_. Presentation copy, with autograph inscription, 'To His Excellency the Lord Napier, Madras, this little book, though on a most unsavoury subject, yet one which, entering into His Excellency's plans for the good of those under his enlightened rule, is not foreign to his thoughts--is offered by Florence Nightingale, London, Oct. 10, '71.'"

A subject on which Miss Nightingale wrote both to Lord Napier and to Lord Mayo was the inquiry into cholera in India ordered by the Secretary of State in April 1869. She had made the proposition many months before. Indian medical officers were absorbed in propounding theories; Miss Nightingale wanted first an exhaustive inquiry into the facts. Even if such an inquiry did not establish any of the rival theories, it must lead, she thought, to much sanitary improvement. Sir Bartle Frere strongly supported the idea, and it was arranged that the War Office Sanitary Committee should make the suggestion and elaborate the scheme of procedure to be followed in India. The Committee meant for such a purpose Dr. Sutherland, and Dr. Sutherland meant in part Miss Nightingale. Sir Bartle Frere constantly wrote to her to know when the India Office might expect the Instructions, and Miss Nightingale as constantly applied the spur to Dr. Sutherland. On April 3 she delivered an ultimatum: "Unless the Cholera Instructions are sent to me to-day, I renounce work and go away." At last they arrived, and her friend received a withering note: "_April_ 13, 1869. I beg leave to remark that I found a letter of yours this morning dated early in Dec., which I mean to show you, in which, with the strongest objurgations of me, you told me that you could not come because you intended to get the Cholera Instructions through by _December_ 12, 1868. My dear soul, really Sir B. Frere could not have known the exhausting labour he has put you all to; to produce that in four months must prove fatal to all your constitutions! He is an ogre." Dr. Sutherland's Instructions are admirably exhaustive, and may well have taken some time to prepare. The remaining stages of the affair were quick, and the Secretary of State's dispatch went out to the Government of India on April 23, followed by private letters from Miss Nightingale. The Sanitary Blue-books of successive years contain copious reports and discussions upon this "Special Cholera Inquiry." It furnished much material for scientific discussion, by which Miss Nightingale sometimes feared that what she regarded as the essence of the matter was in danger of being overlaid. She and the Army Sanitary Committee took occasion more than once to point out that "whatever may be the origin of cholera, or whatever may ultimately be found to be its laws of movement, there is nothing in any of the papers except what strengthens the evidence for the intimate relation which all previous experience has shown to exist between the intensity and fatality of cholera in any locality and the sanitary condition of the population inhabiting it."[106] The origin of cholera is now said to be a micro-organism identified by Koch, but the laws of its movement and activity remain inscrutable. Meanwhile, all subsequent experience has confirmed the doctrine which Miss Nightingale continually preached, that the one protection against cholera consists in a standing condition of good sanitation.

[106] Blue-book, 1870-71, p. 5; and see Bibliography A, No. 127.

IV

At the very time when Dr. Sutherland was hard at work upon the Cholera Instructions, Miss Nightingale heard a report (on good authority) which filled her with anger and consternation. Mr. Gladstone was engaged in cutting down the Army Estimates; the Army Medical Service was believed to be marked for retrenchment, and the War Office Sanitary Commission for destruction. When she told this to Dr. Sutherland, he took the matter with nonchalance and said (as men are sometimes apt to say in such cases, especially if there is a woman to rely upon) that he did not see that anything could be done. Very different was the view taken by Miss Nightingale, when she contemplated, not merely the interruption of Dr. Sutherland's useful work,[107] but the possibility of all Sidney Herbert's work being undermined. Nothing to be done indeed! There was everything to be done! She could write to the Prime Minister himself. She could write to Lord de Grey (Lord President). She could get this friend to approach one Minister, and that friend to approach another. She could even claim a slight acquaintance, and write to Mr. Cardwell (Secretary for War). She could write to all her friends among the Opposition and give them timely notice of the wicked things intended by their adversaries. She ultimately wrote to Lord de Grey, enclosing a letter which he was to hand or not, at his discretion, to Mr. Cardwell. The intervention was successful, and Lord de Grey asked her for Memoranda to "post him up" in the work of the Army Sanitary Commission and in the Sanitary Progress in India. Lord de Grey interceded with Mr. Cardwell also on behalf of the Army Medical School and it was spared. The Army Sanitary Committee was not touched, and for nearly twenty years more (till 1888) Dr. Sutherland continued his work upon it. Miss Nightingale's reports submitted to Lord de Grey are summarized in a letter to M. Mohl (Nov. 21, 1869):--"I am all in the arithmetical line now. Lately I have been making up our Returns in a popular form for one of the Cabinet Ministers (we are obliged to be very 'popular' for them--but hush! my abject respect for Cabinet Ministers prevails). I find that every year, taken upon the last four years for which we have returns (1864-7), there are, in the Home Army, 729 men alive every year who would have been dead but for Sidney Herbert's measures, and 5184 men always on active duty who would have been 'constantly sick' in bed. In India the difference is still more striking. Taken on the last two years, the death-rate of Bombay (civil, military and native) is lower than that of London, the healthiest city of Europe. And the death-rate of Calcutta is lower than that of Liverpool or Manchester![108] But this is not the greatest victory. The Municipal Commissioner of Bombay writes[109] that the 'huddled native masses clamorously invoke the aid of the Health Department' if but one death from cholera or small-pox occurs; whereas formerly half of them might be swept away and the other half think it all right. Now they attribute these deaths to dirty foul water and the like, and openly declare them preventable. No hope for future civilization among the 'masses' like this!"

[107] Captain Galton took occasion in 1876 to render a tribute to Dr. Sutherland's services. "Possessed of high general culture, of remarkably acute perception, of a very wide experience, and of a perfectly balanced judgment, he has been the moving mind in the proceedings of the Army Sanitary Commission since its formation." (_Journal of the Society of Arts_, vol. xxiv. p. 520).

[108] According to the Sanitary Blue-book for 1869-70, the death-rates per 1000 were: Bombay 19.2, London 23.3, Calcutta 31.9, Liverpool 36.4. In 1910 the order was very different: London 12.7, Liverpool 17.7, Calcutta 23.0, Bombay 35.7. In four years (1864-8) the death-rate in Bombay had fallen from 31.3 to 19.2; the rise in modern times is due to the industrialization of the town.

[109] To Miss Nightingale; in the Blue-book (p. 186) it is similarly stated that "in three years the masses have begun to learn that such scourges as cholera, fever and the like can be prevented by the ordinary processes of sanitation."

V

In December 1869 Miss Nightingale made a new friend. Lord Napier of Magdala[110] was passing through London, and wrote to Sir Bartle Frere saying that it "would make him very happy if he could have the privilege of paying his respects to Miss Nightingale before he left." Sir Bartle begged Miss Nightingale to grant the favour, as Lord Napier was devoted to their cause and was likely to be employed in India again--as quickly came to pass, for in the following month he was appointed Commander-in-Chief.[111] Lord Napier called on December 14, in order (as he wrote to her in making the appointment) "to have an opportunity of saying how much I have felt indebted to you for the assistance that your precepts and example gave to all who have been concerned with the care of soldiers and their families." He spent some hours with her, and she was charmed with him. "I felt sure," wrote Sir Bartle Frere (Dec. 23), "that you would like Lord Napier of Magdala. He always seemed to me one of the few men fit for the Round Table." A long note which she recorded of the conversation shows how congenial it must have been to her, for Lord Napier talked with strong feeling of the importance and the practicability of improving the moral health of the British soldier. The administrators and the men of action always appealed to her more than the politicians, and Lord Napier of Magdala was now added to her list of heroes. "When I look at these three men (tho' strangely different[112])--Lord Lawrence, Lord Napier of Magdala and Sir Bartle Frere--for practical ability, for statesmanlike perception of where the truth lies and what is to be done and who is to do it, for high aim, for noble disinterestedness, I feel that there is not a Minister we have in England fit to tie their shoes--since Sidney Herbert. There is a simplicity, a largeness of view and character about these three men, as about Sidney Herbert, that does not exist in the present Ministers. They are party men; these three are statesmen. S. Herbert made enemies by not being a party man; it gave him such an advantage over them." Lord Napier of Magdala came to see Miss Nightingale again in the following year (March 18, 1870), spending in conversation with her his last hours before leaving London to take up his appointment in India. She and Sir Bartle Frere attached high importance to this interview. Lord Napier was a convinced sanitarian. He was bent upon introducing many reforms in the treatment of the soldiers. He believed in the possibility of improving both their moral and physical condition, by means of rational recreation and suitable employment. Sir Bartle Frere suggested to Miss Nightingale that after seeing the Commander-in-Chief she should write to the Viceroy so as to prepare his mind for what Lord Napier would propose. Lord Napier himself begged her to do so. "Everything in India," he said to her, "depends on what is thought in England, and it was you who raised public opinion in England on these subjects." Preparation of the Viceroy's mind was held to be the more necessary because a letter, lately received by Miss Nightingale from him, seemed to show that his sanitary education was by no means complete. So Mr. Jowett's "Governess of the Governors of India" took her pupil again by the hand, and, with Dr. Sutherland's assistance, drew up a further Memorandum on the Indian sanitary question at large. Referring him to the Royal Commission's Report, she pointed out that the causes of ill-health among the troops were many, and that there was no single panacea; that if other causes were not concurrently removed, the erection of new barracks could not suffice; that fever may lurk beneath and around "costly palaces" (for so Lord Mayo had called some of the new barracks) even as around hovels; that expense incurred in all-round sanitary improvement can never be costly in the sense of extravagant, because it is essentially saving and reproductive expenditure; and so forth, and so forth.[113] Miss Nightingale, before sending her letter, submitted it to Sir Bartle Frere (March 25). "I have nothing to suggest," he said, "in the way of alteration, and only wish that its words of wisdom were in print, and that thousands besides Lord Mayo could profit by them. They are in fact exactly what we want to have said to every one connected with the question from the Viceroy down to the Village Elder." Sir Bartle begged her to consider whether she could not write something to the same effect which would reach the latter class. Mr. Jowett had suggested something of the sort a few years before. "Did it ever occur to you," he had written (March 1867), "that you might write a short pamphlet or tract for the natives in India and get it translated? That would be a curious and interesting thing to do. When I saw the other day the account of Miss Carpenter in India, I felt half sorry that it was not you. They would have worshipped you like a divinity. A pretty reason! you will say. But then you might have gently rebuked the adoring natives as St. Paul did on a similar occasion, and assured them that you were only a Washerwoman and not a Divine at all; that would have had an excellent effect." Presently she found an opportunity of doing something in the kind that Mr. Jowett and Sir Bartle Frere had suggested.

[110] Robert Cornelius Napier (1810-90), created Baron Napier of Magdala, 1868. Miss Nightingale's other friend, the Governor of Madras, Baron Napier (in the Scottish peerage), was created Baron Ettrick in the United Kingdom peerage, 1872. In first signing himself "Napier and Ettrick" in a letter to Miss Nightingale, he begged "the high priestess of irrigation" to observe that his new title was "watery."

[111] In succession to Sir William Mansfield (Lord Sandhurst). On his return from India Lord Sandhurst came to see Miss Nightingale (July 8, 1870), and they corresponded afterwards.

[112] Of Lord Lawrence and Sir Bartle Frere, Miss Nightingale wrote to Madame Mohl (March 26, 1869): "You can ask Sir Bartle Frere about Sir John Lawrence if you like. But they are so unlike, yet each so roundly perfect in his own way, that they can never understand each other--never touch at any point, not thro' eternity. I love and admire them both with all my mind and with all my heart, but have long since given up the slightest attempt to make either understand the other. But each is too much of a man, too noble, too chivalrous, to denigrate the other."

[113] The substance of much of her Memorandum to Lord Mayo was embodied in the "Observations" which she contributed to the Indian Sanitary Blue-book, 1869-70; see especially p. 43.

Meanwhile, Lord Mayo had introduced Dr. J. W. Cunningham to Miss Nightingale, and they became great allies. When he returned to resume his duties as "Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India," he corresponded with Miss Nightingale regularly, telling her where things were backward and where a word in season from her would be helpful. In every question she took the keenest interest, sparing no pains to forward, so far as she could, every good scheme that was laid before her. In 1872 Mr. W. Clark, engineer to the municipality of Calcutta, came to see her about great schemes of water-supply and drainage. She obtained an introduction to Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, in order to commend to his notice Mr. Clark's plans. For many years she was thus engaged in correspondence with sanitary reformers and officials in various parts of India, sending them words of encouragement when they seemed to desire and deserve it, words of advice when, as was frequently the case, they invited it. When such officials came home on furlough, most of them came also to Miss Nightingale. Dr. Sutherland, in his official capacity on the War Office Sanitary Committee, would often see them first; he would then pass them on to her, dividing them into two classes: those "whom you must simply lecture" and those "whose education you had better conduct by innocently putting searching questions to them." Miss Nightingale was never backward in filling the part of governess to those who in sanitary matters governed India.

VI

Sanitary improvement depended, however, on the governed as well as on the governors; and Miss Nightingale had for some time been extending her influence in India by making the personal acquaintance of Indian gentlemen. "I have been quite beset by Parsees," she wrote to M. Mohl (Feb. 16, 1868); "and after all I saw your Manochjee Cursetjee, that is, the 'Byron of the East.' Sir B. Frere says that few men have done so much for the education of their own race. He talked a good deal of Philosophy to me, while my head was entirely in Midwifery! He is (by his own proposal), if I can send out the Midwives, to take them in at the house of his daughters, of whom one married a Cama, and the other is the first Parsee lady who ever lived as an English single lady might do." Many other Indian ladies and gentlemen were introduced to Miss Nightingale personally or in correspondence by Miss Carpenter. In 1870 Miss Nightingale was elected an Honorary Member of the Bengal Social Science Association, the Council of which body was mainly composed of Indian gentlemen. She wrote a cordial letter of thanks (May 25). "For eleven years," she said, "what little I could do for India, for the conditions on which the Eternal has made to depend the lives and healths and social happiness of men, as well Native as European, has been the constant object of my thoughts by day and my thoughts by night." She eulogized the work that had been done by many private gentlemen of India; she put before them a vision of vast schemes of drainage and irrigation; she sent a subscription to the funds of the Association, and promised a contribution to its Proceedings. In this contribution,[114] sent in June 1870, Miss Nightingale did what Sir Bartle Frere desired: she addressed the Village Elder. "I think," said Dr. Sutherland, who had submitted a draft for Miss Nightingale to rewrite in her own language, "that this is the most important contribution you have made to the question." In simple and terse language, she described the sanitary reforms which might be carried out by the people themselves--pointing out in detail the nature of the evils, and the appropriate remedies for them, and then appealing to simple motives for sanitary improvement. "As we find in all history and true fable that the meanest causes universally multiplied produce the greatest effects, let us not think it other than a fitting sacrifice to the Eternal and Perfect One to look into the lowest habits of great peoples, in order, if we may, to awaken them to a sense of the injury they are doing themselves and the good they might do themselves. Much of the willingness for education is due to the fact, appreciated by them, that education makes money. But would not the same appreciation, if enlightened, show them that loss of health, loss of strength, loss of life, is loss of money, the greatest loss of money we know? And we may truly say that every sanitary improvement which saves health and life is worth its weight in gold." This address to the Peoples of India was the most widely distributed of all Miss Nightingale's missionary efforts. The Association translated it into Bengali. Sir Bartle Frere had it translated into other Indian languages.

[114] Bibliography A, No. 56.

VII

Miss Nightingale's third sphere of missionary work was in the Sanitary Department at the India Office, to which, through her alliance with Sir Bartle Frere, she was a confidential adviser. Her action, in making suggestions and in seeking to influence officials in India, has been illustrated already. Her constant work was in helping to edit and in contributing to the Annual Blue-book containing reports of "measures adopted for sanitary improvements in India." The importance which Miss Nightingale attached to the publication of such an annual has been explained in general terms already (p. 145). She saw in it two useful purposes. First, the fact that reports from India were required and published each year acted as a spur to the authorities in that country; and, secondly, the introductory memorandum, and the inclusion of reports on Indian matters by the War Office Sanitary Committee, gave opportunity, year by year, for making suggestions and criticisms. The Annual was issued by the Sanitary Department at the India Office and edited by Mr. C. C. Plowden, a zealous clerk in that office with whom Miss Nightingale made friends; Sir Bartle Frere, as head of the Department, instructed him to submit all the reports to Miss Nightingale who in fact was assistant-editor, or perhaps rather (for her will seems to have been law) editor-in-chief. It was she who had prepared for the Royal Commission the analysis of sanitary defects in the several Indian Stations; who had written the "Observations" on them; who had taken a principal part in drafting the "Suggestions" for their reform. It was natural that she should be asked to report on the measures actually taken to that end. She was a very critical reporter. "Sir Bartle Frere hesitates a little," she was told on one occasion (1869), "as to the omission of all terms of praise, and says that the Indian Jupiter is a god of sunshine as well as thunder and should dispense both; he, however, sanctions the omission in the present case." Miss Nightingale's papers show that during the years 1869-74 she devoted great labour to the Annual. She read and criticised the abstracts of the local reports prepared by Mr. Plowden; she discussed all the points that they suggested with Dr. Sutherland; she wrote, or suggested, the introductory memorandum. She did this work with the greater zeal because it kept her informed of every detail; and the knowledge thus acquired gave the greater force to her private correspondence with Viceroys, Governors, Commanders-in-Chief, and Sanitary Commissioners. Her share in the first number of the Annual has been already described (p. 155). In the following year Mr. Plowden wrote (May 22, 1869): "I forward a sketch of the Introductory Memorandum to the Sanitary volume. You will see that the greater part of it is copied verbatim from a memorandum of your own that Sir Bartle Frere handed over to me for this purpose." "I can never thank you sufficiently," wrote Sir Bartle himself (July 5), "for all the kind help you have given to Mr. Plowden's Annual, at the cost of an amount of trouble to yourself which I hardly like to think of. But I feel sure it will leave its mark on India." She took good care that it should at any rate have a chance of doing so. She had discovered that the 1868 Report, though sent to India in October of that year, had not been distributed in the several Presidencies till June 1869. She now saw to it that copies of the 1869 Report were sent separately to the various stations by book-post. She continued to contribute in one way or another to successive volumes[115]; and that for 1874 included a long and important paper by her.

[115] See Bibliography A, Nos. 57, 62.

VIII

Ten years before Miss Nightingale had popularized the Report of her Royal Commission in a paper entitled "How People may Live and Not Die in India." The Paper was read to the Social Science Congress in 1863. In 1873 she was again requested to contribute a Paper to the Congress. She chose for her title "How some People have Lived, and Not Died in India." It was a summary in popular form of ten years' progress, and this was the Paper which the India Office reprinted in its Blue-book of 1874. Miss Nightingale glanced in rapid detail at the improvements in various parts of India; took occasion to give credit to particularly zealous officials; and noticed incidentally some of the common objections. One objection was that caste prejudice must ever be an insuperable obstacle to sanitary improvement. She gave "a curious and cheerful" instance to the contrary. Calcutta had "found the fabled virtues of the Ganges in the pure water-tap." When the water-supply was first introduced, the high-caste Hindoos still desired their water-carriers to bring them the _sacred_ water from the _river_; but these functionaries, finding it much easier to take the water from the new taps, just rubbed in a little (vulgar, not sacred) mud and presented it as Ganges water. When at last the healthy fraud was discovered, public opinion, founded on experience, had already gone too far to return to dirty water. And the new water-supply was, at public meetings, adjudged to be "theologically as well as physically safe." Then there was the objection of expense, but she analysed the result of sanitary improvements in statistics of the army. The death-rate had been brought down from 69 per 1000 to 18. Only 18 men died where 69 died before. A sum of £285,000 was the money saving on recruits in a single year.

The course of sanitary improvement, and the results of it, among the civil population cannot be brought to any such definite test; no Indian census was taken till 1872, registration of births and deaths was only beginning and was very imperfect; and India is a country as large as the whole of Europe (without Russia). It was the opinion of a competent authority that the sanitary progress which had been made in India during the years covered by Miss Nightingale's review "had no parallel in the history of the world";[116] but the progress was relative of course to the almost incredibly insanitary condition of the country when she began her crusade. The progress had been made along many different lines. First, in connection with the health of military stations, the Government of India established committees of military, civil, medical and engineering officers, of local magistrates and village authorities to regulate the sanitary arrangements of the neighbourhood. Sanitary oases for British troops were thus established in the midst of insanitary deserts. Then, sanitary regulations were issued for fairs and pilgrimages--each of these a focus of Indian disease. Institutions in India--hospitals, jails, asylums--had been greatly improved; and the municipalities of the great cities had made some sanitary progress. Ten years before, Miss Nightingale had reported to the Royal Commission that no one of the seats of Presidencies in India had as yet arrived at the degree of sanitary civilization shown in the worst parts of the worst English towns. Now, Calcutta had a pure-water supply and the main drainage of most of the town was complete. Bombay had done less by municipal action, but thanks to a specially vigorous Health Officer, Dr. Hewlett, sanitation had been improved. Madras had improved its water-supply and was successfully applying a part of its sewage to agriculture. The condition of the vast regions of rural India showed that the teaching of the Sanitary Commissioners was beginning to take some effect. Hollows and excavations near villages were being filled up; brushwood and jungle, removed; wells, cleaned. Surface refuse was being removed; and tanks were being provided for sewage, to prevent it going into the drinking-tanks. From reports of particular places, Miss Nightingale drew her favourite moral. There was a village in South India which had suffered very badly from cholera and fever. It was in a foul and wretched state, and had polluted water. Then wells were dug and properly protected; the surface drainage was improved; cleanliness was enforced; trees were planted. The village escaped the next visitation of the scourge. Miss Nightingale had many hours of depression, and many occasions of disappointment, as Health Missionary for India; but in her Paper of 1874 she bore "emphatic witness how great are the sanitary deeds already achieved, or in the course of being achieved, by the gallant Anglo-Indians, as formerly she bore emphatic witness against the then existing neglects." Only the fringe of the evil had been touched; but at any rate enough had been done to show that the old bogey, "the hopeless Indian climate," might in course of time be laid by wise precautions. "There is a vast work going on in India," said Dr. Sutherland; and in this work Miss Nightingale had throughout played a principal, and the inspiring, part. It was the opinion of an unprejudiced expert who, though he admired her devotion, did not always agree with her views or methods, that "of the sanitary improvements in India three-fourths are due to Miss Nightingale."[117]

[116] Captain Galton, "On Sanitary Progress in India," 1876 (_Journal of the Society of Arts_, vol. xxiv. pp. 519-534.) This is the best _short_ account of the matter that I have come across. It is more detailed than Miss Nightingale's Paper of 1874. For further particulars, a reader should, of course, refer to the Annual Sanitary Blue-books.

[117] So Sir Bartle Frere reported to Miss Nightingale that Sir John Strachey had said to him; and Sir John wrote in much the same sense to Miss Nightingale herself.

But here, as in all things, her gaze was fixed upon the path to perfection. In her own mind she counted less the past advance than the future way. There was an Appendix to her Paper in which she preached the supreme importance of Irrigation--of irrigation, that is, combined with scientific drainage. Only by that means, she held, could yet more people "live and not die in India," and could the country be raised to its full productive power. A letter which Sir Stafford Northcote sent her (April 29, 1874), in acknowledgment of her Paper on "Life or Death in India," exactly expressed her own feelings. "How much," he said, "you have done! and how little you think you have done! After all, the measure of our work depends upon whether we take it by looking backwards or by looking forwards, by looking on what has been accomplished or on what has revealed itself as still to be accomplished. When we have got to the top of the mountain, are we much nearer the stars or not?"

CHAPTER IV

ADVISER-GENERAL ON HOSPITALS AND NURSING

(1868-1872)

We are your Soldiers, and we look for the approval of our Chief.--MISS AGNES JONES (_Letter to Miss Nightingale_).

From a correspondent in the North of England: "I have got a colliery proprietor here to co-operate with the workmen to build a Hospital for Accidents. Will you kindly give your opinion on the best kind of building?" From a correspondent in London: "We are proposing to form a British Nursing Association. May we ask for your advice and suggestions?" These letters are samples of hundreds which Miss Nightingale received, and to all such applications she readily replied. She constituted herself, or rather she was constituted by her fellow-countrymen, a Central Department for matters pertaining to hospitals and nurses.

From all parts of the country, from British colonies and from some foreign countries, plans of proposed General Hospitals, Cottage Hospitals, Convalescent Homes were submitted to her. She criticised them carefully. When she was consulted at an earlier stage, she often submitted plans of her own. In all such cases, there were experts among her large circle of friends--architects, sanitary engineers, military engineers, hospital superintendents and matrons--to advise and assist her. And here a curiously interesting thing may be noticed. Miss Nightingale had begun her work as a Reformer with the military hospitals. So high was now their standard that she often went to them for models. Many plans for ideal hospitals were drawn for her at this time by Lieutenant W. F. Ommamney, R.E., at the War Office. The improvement of buildings and of nursing went on concurrently, and Miss Nightingale used her influence in each department to improve the other. If she were consulted only about buildings, she would answer: "These plans are all very well, as far as they go; but your Hospital will never be efficient without adequate provision for a supply of properly trained nurses." If she were asked to furnish a supply of nurses, she would say: "By all means; but you must satisfy me first that your buildings are sanitary." Thus, when she was asked to send nurses to the Sydney Infirmary, she stipulated that plans of the buildings should be submitted; and when the War Office was negotiating for a supply of nurses for Netley, there was a voluminous correspondence about the improvement of the wards and of the nurses' quarters.

There was a great extension during these years of societies for the training of nurses, and of the introduction of trained nurses into infirmaries and other institutions. All this involved a large addition to Miss Nightingale's correspondence. As the nursing system extended, many questions arose with regard to the relation between the medical and the nursing staffs, and she was constantly referred to for suggestions and advice. She printed a code of "Suggestions" in 1868 dealing with such matters,[118] and three years later she and Dr. Sutherland drew up a Code for Infirmary Nursing which was approved by Mr. Stansfeld, the President of the newly-formed Local Government Board. Her correspondence was as extensive with individuals as with institutions. Hundreds of girls who thought of becoming nurses applied to her, and she generally answered their letters; but the supply of nurses barely kept pace with the demand. Miss Nightingale was impressed in particular by the lack of suitable applicants for the higher posts. There were many women anxious to take up nursing as a profession. There were few who possessed the social standing, the high character, trained intelligence, and personal devotion which were necessary to make them successful Lady Superintendents; and much of Miss Nightingale's correspondence during these years was to friends in various parts of the country who were begged to enlist promising recruits.

[118] Bibliography A, No. 49 (note).

II

Among the women who sought out Miss Nightingale for advice were Queens and Princesses. She guarded very jealously, however, the seclusion which was necessary to enable her to do her chosen work, and she did not allow it to be invaded at will even by the most exalted personages. Her position as a chronic invalid gave her the advantage. She could pick and choose by feeling a little stronger or a little weaker. She made two rules which she communicated to her influential friends. She would not be well enough to see any Queen or Princess who did not take a personal and practical interest in hospitals or nursing; and she would never be well enough to receive any who did not come unattended by ladies or lords in waiting. Any interview must be entirely devoid of ceremonial; it must be simply between one woman interested in nursing and another. In 1867 the Queen of Prussia was paying a visit to the English court, and Queen Victoria asked Miss Nightingale through Sir James Clark to see Queen Augusta. Miss Nightingale was assured that the Queen had given much personal attention to hospitals. Miss Nightingale saw her (July 6) and found that the assurances were well founded:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Julius Mohl._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _July_ 28 [1867]. I am a little unhappy because the Queen of Prussia's Secretary told Mad. Mohl that I had seen the Queen. I liked her. I don't think the mixture of pietism and absolutism is much more attractive at the Court of Prussia than at the Court of Rome. Still, I am always struck, especially with our own Royal family, how superior they are in earnestness and education to other women. I know no two girls of any class, of any country, who take so much interest in things that are interesting, as the Crown Princess of Prussia and Princess Alice of Darmstadt--especially in theological matters and administration.

The Queen of Holland, it will be remembered, had not been received; but at a later time Miss Nightingale saw her, in November 1868 and again in March 1870. "I think of you," wrote Queen Sophie (March 29, 1870), "as one of the highest and best I have met in this world." The Princess Alice asked for an interview in 1867 through Lady Herbert, who was able to inform Miss Nightingale that "the Princess has been to see most of the hospitals in London with a view to learn all about them so as to improve those in Darmstadt." Miss Nightingale saw the Princess in June, and in subsequent years there was much correspondence between them. But the royal lady who made the greatest impression on Miss Nightingale was the Crown Princess Victoria. It had been explained to Miss Nightingale by one of the Princess's ladies that "H.R.H. has always thought a life devoted to the comfort of fellow-beings and the alleviation of their sufferings the one most to be envied," and that "she knows your Notes on Hospitals and Notes on Nursing almost by heart." The Princess was in England at the end of 1868, and was full at the time of schemes for a new hospital at Berlin, for lying-in hospitals, for a training-school for nurses. She showed her practical purpose by sending to Miss Nightingale in advance her architect's plans. They had two long interviews in December, and Miss Nightingale had a very busy fortnight with Dr. Sutherland in collecting statistics about various lying-in hospitals and in preparing plans, with the assistance of the Army Medical Department and War Office Sanitary Committee, on the best model. Miss Nightingale was delighted with her visitor. "She took every point," she told Dr. Sutherland, "as quick as lightning." "I have a fresh neophyte," she wrote to Sir John McNeill (Dec. 25, 1868), "in the person of the Crown Princess of Prussia. She has a quick intelligence, and is cultivating herself in knowledge of sanitary (and female) administration for her future great career. She comes alone like a girl, pulls off her hat and jacket like a five-year-old, drags about a great portfolio of plans, and kneels by my bedside correcting them. She gives a great deal of trouble. But I believe it will bear fruit." That the inquiries of the Princess were searching, and her commissions exacting, appears from the correspondence:--

(_Miss Nightingale to the Crown Princess of Prussia._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _Dec._ 21 [1868]. MADAM--In grateful obedience to Your Royal Highness's command, directing me to forward to Osborne before the 24th the commissions with which you favoured me, I send (1) the Portfolio of plans for the Hospital near the Plotzen See, and, in this envelope, the criticism upon the plans. Also, in another envelope (2) a sketch of the Nursing "hierarchy" required to nurse this Hospital (with a Training School attached), even to ages desirable--as desired by Your Royal Highness. Also (3) the methods of continuous examination in use (with full-sized copies of the Forms) to test the progress of our Probationers (Probe-Schwestern). Also (4) lists of the clothing and underclothing (even to changes of linen) we give to and require from our Probationers and Nurses, and of the changes of sheets. Your Royal Highness having directed me to send patterns "in paper" of our Probationers' dress, I have thought it better to have a complete uniform dress such as our Probationers wear, for in-doors and out-doors, made for Your Royal Highness's inspection, even to bonnet, cap, and collar, which will arrive by this Messenger in a small box and parcel. I am afraid that the aspect of these papers will be quite alarming from their bulk. But I can only testify my gratitude for your Royal Highness's great kindness by fulfilling as closely as I can the spirit of your gracious will. I am sorry to say that I have not yet done encumbering your Royal Highness. The plans for Lying-in Cottages had to be completed at the War Office and are not quite ready. But they shall be forwarded "before the 24th." I think we have succeeded in producing a perfectly healthy and successful Lying-in Cottage, by means of great _sub-division_ and incessant cleanliness and ventilation, which includes the not having _any_ ward _constantly_ occupied. In one of these Huts we have had 600 Lyings-in consecutively without a single death or case of puerperal disease or casualty of any kind. (This experience is, I believe, without a fellow, but will, I trust, have many fellows before long.) Believe me, your Royal Highness's enquiry about these things does the greatest good, not only with regard to what is proposed in Prussia, but in stirring up the War Office, the Medical authorities, and other officials _here_ to consider these vital trifles more seriously. And thus thousands of lives of poor women, of poor patients of all kinds, will be saved, even in England, through your Royal Highness's means. Hitherto Lying-in Hospitals have been not to cure but to kill. As I have again to trouble your Royal Highness about these subjects, I will not now enter into two or three other little things with which I was commissioned. May I beg always to be considered, Madam, the most faithful, ready and devoted of Your Royal Highness's servants.

(_The Crown Princess of Prussia to Miss Nightingale._) OSBORNE, _Dec._ 24 [1868]. I don't wish to lose a _minute_ in thanking you for your great kindness and for all the trouble you have taken for me. Your letter is so _excellent_, and all the information you give is _most_ valuable, and will be of untold use, not only to _me_ as a guide in my humble endeavours to promote a _serious_, _conscientious_, and _rational_ spirit in the treatment of sanitary matters, but to many others in Germany. Your precious time has _not_ been wasted while you were writing for me, I assure you. The dress I think _very_ neat and nice, and not clerical looking (which is, in my eyes, an advantage). I was so vexed that I forgot to tell you the other day how much I admired _Una and the Lion_. I read it this summer in Germany, and thought it touching and lovely in the extreme. I "colported" it right and left! After I have arrived at Berlin and had leisure thoroughly to go into every detail of the materials you have given me, I will write to you again. These few lines are only to express my earnest thanks. The Crown Prince wishes me to say how sorry he is never to have seen you. He shares my feelings when your name is mentioned. I trust that the next time I am in this country I shall see you again. I remain, dear Miss Nightingale, yours gratefully, VICTORIA.

Negotiations with the Nightingale Fund were presently opened, and the Crown Princess sent Fräulein Fuhrmann, who afterwards superintended the Victoria Training School for Nurses in Berlin (p. 204), to receive her own training as a Nightingale Nurse at St. Thomas's.

III

The Nightingale Training School had for many years been extending the area of its influence, and Miss Nightingale herself, in spite of her incessant work in other fields, never lost general control and supervision of it. Year after year, she kept up correspondence, both voluminous and intimate, with Mrs. Wardroper, the Matron. Her brother-in-law, Sir Harry Verney, was now Chairman of the Council of the Nightingale Fund; her cousin, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, had succeeded Mr. Clough as Secretary--a duty which he continues to discharge to this day. Sir Harry Verney saw Miss Nightingale frequently with regard to the business of the School. Between Mr. Bonham Carter and her there is a great mass of correspondence extending over forty years and more; conducted sometimes by an exchange of letters through the post, sometimes by notes of question and answer at her house, as in the case of Dr. Sutherland. Mr. Bonham Carter, alike as Secretary of the Fund and as a cousin devoted to Miss Nightingale personally, gave his time and zeal without stint to the work; but he had independence of character. He was once asked how he contrived to do other things besides serve Miss Nightingale. "When it was getting late," he explained, "I used to say, Now I must go home to dinner." His devotion, good sense, and business-like habits contributed largely to the success of the undertaking, and saved Miss Nightingale much trouble in matters both of detail and of general administrative policy; but questions of what may be called the superior direction of the School were always referred to her, and there were many occasions on which her personal influence was felt to be indispensable. It was especially brought to bear whenever a contingent of Nightingale Nurses was sent from St. Thomas's to occupy new ground. The phrase quoted at the head of this chapter, from a letter by Miss Agnes Jones, when she was thus sent to pioneer work in the Liverpool Workhouse, exactly expresses one side of the relationship between the nurses and Miss Nightingale. But she was more to them than a Chief. She was not a distant and almost impersonal abstraction like "The Widow at Windsor." The Lady in South Street was not only the queen of the Nightingale Nurses, she was also their mother. The principal lieutenants who went out on important service, and many members of the rank and file, maintained constant correspondence with her--sending to her direct reports, consulting her in difficulties, looking to her, and never in vain, for counsel and encouragement. Miss Nightingale took especial pains to help and to influence the Lady Superintendents who went from St. Thomas's in command of nursing parties. Among her earlier papers containing thoughts about her future work, there is more than one reference to "Richelieu's 'Self-multiplication.'" She strove to extend her work by creating lieutenants in her own image.

One of the most important of the missionary voyages of the Nightingale Nurses during these years was to New South Wales. Miss Nightingale had for some time been in correspondence with Sir Henry Parkes, then Colonial Secretary in New South Wales, about the nursing in the Sydney Infirmary, and in December 1867 Miss Osburn sailed with five nurses to take up the position of Lady Superintendent. The nurses arrived in time to nurse Prince Alfred, when he was shot during his visit to the Colony. There is a letter from Sir William Jenner to Miss Nightingale (July 4, 1868) saying, "I have received the Queen's commands to tell you how very useful they were. Her Majesty says, 'She is sure this information will give Miss Nightingale much pleasure.'" In one respect the nurses were more successful than Miss Nightingale desired. At first all went well. There were difficulties with the doctors and others, of course, but Sir Henry Parkes was always helpful. There was "no flirting," Miss Osburn reported (May 20), "and all the nurses cling round me in difficulties like true Britons." But they did not cling for long. Their services were too much appreciated. In a few years' time all the five had either married or received valuable appointments outside the Infirmary, and Miss Osburn had to recruit her staff from the Colony itself. Miss Nightingale thought that the expedition had thus "failed"; but there was something to be said on the other side, and the diffusion of the Nightingale band did much to promote the extension of trained nursing in the Colony.

Another expedition of great importance was an extension of the Liverpool experiment to London. In 1868 Mr. (afterwards Sir) William Wyatt, the leader of a reform party in St. Pancras, had entered into correspondence with Miss Nightingale with regard to the new Infirmary (built under the Act of 1867) at Highgate; he submitted the plans of the building, and suggested the introduction of Nightingale Nurses. She approved the plans, encouraged him in his good work, and in the following year (1869) Miss Elizabeth Torrance was appointed matron, with nine nurses under her. The experiment was presently extended, and a training school for nurses was established at the Infirmary. There are about one hundred letters from Miss Torrance a year, a figure which will give some idea of the close touch which Miss Nightingale kept with important lieutenants. She considered Miss Torrance "the most capable Superintendent they had yet trained" (1870), and the letters bear out the estimate. They are those of a canny, capable and devoted woman--taking everything quietly as part of the day's work, with no fussiness or needless self-importance. "I have never seen such nurses," wrote the Medical Superintendent, when Miss Torrance and her staff had been at work for some months; "they are so thoroughly conversant with disease that one feels quite on one's mettle in practice. What strikes me most is the real interest they take in the work, and this is the secret of their success"--not attainable by the pauper nurses whom they displaced. Inspectors, Guardians, and other officials would have done well to feel quite on their mettle in Miss Torrance's presence also; for her letters show her to have been possessed of a humorous shrewdness which took the measure of men, by no means always at their own valuation. Miss Torrance amongst other reforms introduced useful work into the occupation of the inmates. "The achievement I am most proud of," she wrote (1871), "is getting the men's suits cut out and made. I found a tailor in No. 2 Ward who cut out some, and I sent them into Nos. 1 and 4 to be made, but there was a tailor in No. 1 who made difficulties, 'You see, ma'am, it's such a very old-fashioned cut.'" Once a week at least the Matron wrote reporting progress or difficulties to Miss Nightingale, who replied with advice, books, presents. Nurses, of whom the Matron reported well, came in batches to see Miss Nightingale. "They returned," wrote Miss Torrance, of one occasion of the kind, "beaming with delight, but as they all talked about it at once I did not gather very clearly what passed. Sister A., however, feared that Sister B. 'must have tried Miss Nightingale.'" Sister B., it seems, had the same fear about Sister A. Nurses and Matron alike regarded their reception by Miss Nightingale as a high privilege. "I always feel refreshed _for months_," wrote Mrs. Wardroper (March 1871), "after one of those affectionate receptions you accord me." None of Miss Nightingale's "soldiers" left her cabinet without feeling a better and a braver woman. Miss Torrance presently fell from grace in Miss Nightingale's eyes by becoming engaged to be married. At a critical period of the engagement, she failed to keep some appointments at South Street, and Miss Nightingale did not recover equanimity till she recalled to herself a saying of Mr. Clough's: "Persons in that case should be treated as if they had the scarlet fever."

In November 1869 there were receptions in South Street such as a sovereign sometimes accords to warriors or statesmen on the eve of a great emprise. A Superintendent of Nurses (Mrs. Deeble) and a staff of six Ward Sisters were setting out from St. Thomas's to take charge of the War Office Hospital at Netley. Miss Nightingale received them all, gave them presents and addressed words of encouragement. "That I have 'seen Miss Nightingale'" wrote one of them, "will be one of the white mile-stones on my road, to which I shall often look back with feelings of gratitude and pleasure. I trust that I shall never forget some of the things you said to me, and that 'looking up' I may be enabled to show by my future life that your great kindness has not been thrown away." "The Netley sisters," wrote Mrs. Wardroper, "are overflowing with love and gratitude for all the interest and trouble you have so kindly taken for and in them. Your reception, pretty presents, and good advice have quite won their hearts. To know you, and to have heard from your own lips, that each one has your best wishes and prayer for success will do much to cheer and help them." "I have been preaching to them four hours a day," wrote Miss Nightingale to M. Mohl (Nov. 21), "and expounding Regulations. Some of them are very nice women. One was out with Dr. Livingstone and Bishop Mackenzie on the Zambesi Mission. One, a woman who would be distinguished in any society, accidentally read my little article on 'Una,' and wrote off to us the same night offering to go through our training (which she did) and join us."

"Expounding Regulations" was always a part of Miss Nightingale's exhortation on such occasions. In this particular case she had a hand in making the Regulations. In other cases she often found them very stupid. They were generally made by men, who were incapable, she thought (as we have heard already), of devising suitable regulations for women. "Oh, how I wish there were no men," she wrote on one occasion when trying to compose a hospital quarrel. But even bad regulations must be observed, till they can be altered, and women did not always understand that some diplomacy was necessary to obtain the alteration. "Women," she said, "are unable to see that it requires wisdom as well as self-denial to establish any new work." As the work which the Nightingale Nurses had at this time to do was all new, there were many difficulties and most of them came up to Miss Nightingale for solution or advice. When a very long-winded letter arrived, she would often send it on unread to Dr. Sutherland, for him to digest and advise upon. It was her comfortable persuasion that he had nothing else to do, and she scolded him if there was any delay; but sooner or later he did the work for her, and his advice in such matters never failed in shrewd common sense. Sometimes he would say, "This letter shows a fit of temper on the nurse's part, and is a case for a little homily from you." In such homilies Miss Nightingale would mingle an appeal to higher motives with a reference to her own example and experience--as in the following letter:--

(_To a Discontented Nurse._) _April_ 22 [1869]. Do you think I should have succeeded in doing anything if I had kicked and resisted and resented? Is it our Master's command? Is it even common sense? I have been even shut out of hospitals into which I had been ordered to go by the Commander-in-Chief--obliged to stand outside the door in the snow till night--been refused rations for as much as 10 days at a time for the nurses I had brought by superior command.[119] And I have been as good friends the day after with the officials who did these things--have resolutely ignored these things _for the sake of the work_. What was I to my Master's work? When people offend, they offend the Master, before they do me. And who am I that I should not choose to bear what my Master chooses to bear? You have many high and noble points of character. Else I should not write to you as I do. But the spirit of opposition in which you are working (or rather _were_ at the time you wrote, for I am satisfied it was only an ebullition of the moment), and yet doing your work well and doing good, would, if it really were persisted in, materially increase the difficulties of that work to which, I am sure, you are devoted.

[119] See Vol. I. p. 291.

IV

There was one failure in the work of the Nightingale Fund which led Miss Nightingale to write a new book, than which none ever cost her more labour. In 1867 the Midwifery School established in King's College Hospital[120] had to be closed owing to the high rate of mortality in the lying-in wards. As soon as the figures were brought to Miss Nightingale's notice, she set to work in examining the whole subject of mortality in lying-in wards. She soon found that no trustworthy statistics of mortality in child-bed had yet been collected. She searched for them throughout this country and from foreign hospitals and doctors. She discovered that in lying-in wards everywhere the death-rate was many times the amount of that which took place in home deliveries. This fact showed that public attention should at once be called to the subject, and at the same time it opened up larger questions. There was one school of medical opinion which held that the mortality must in the nature of things be large in lying-in wards; there was another which held that the high rate of mortality therein might be prevented. The inquiries which Miss Nightingale had made for the Crown Princess of Prussia[121] inclined her to the latter view, and she pursued her researches in all directions, collecting an immense mass of information and calling in the assistance of sanitary engineers and other authorities. It should be remembered in all this that the introduction of antiseptics has much altered the conditions since the time of Miss Nightingale's work now under consideration. Materials for a book accumulated, but time to put them into shape was wanting. Dr. Sutherland, on whose assistance she mainly relied, was no more able than she herself to give undivided attention to the subject; but at last with his help the book was written. It was published in October 1871, with the title _Introductory Notes on Lying-in Institutions_. The book did for this special subject something of the same service which _Notes on Hospitals_ had done in the general sphere. Miss Nightingale showed by statistical evidence that many lying-in wards and institutions were pest-houses; she showed the importance of isolation and extreme cleanliness; and furnished model rules, plans and specifications for sanitary lying-in hospitals. In the latter pages, the book was an extension of the _Notes on Nursing_ to this special branch. She urged the importance of training-schools for midwives; described the ideal of an institution of the kind; and pleaded for "Midwifery as a Career for Educated Women." There was much agitation at the time for the admission of women to the medical profession. Miss Nightingale in a letter addressed "Dear Sisters," suggested that there was "a better thing for women to be than 'medical men,' and that is to be _medical women_." She was in the country when the book was passing through the press; and Dr. Sutherland, in sending a last revise with some suggestions of his own, said (July 22), "I return the proof corrected. Don't swear, but read the reasons on the accompanying paper. It is a good thing you are at Lea Hurst or your 'dear sisters' would infallibly break your head. They will probably break your windows. However, you are clearly right, and let them scream and stamp. The Book is a very good contribution to the subject, and will excite surprise and some opposition. But the facts are too strong." Miss Nightingale put out her book tentatively in a questioning spirit, as she explained in this characteristic dedication (which had received Mr. Jowett's imprimatur, but puzzled some of the reviewers):--

If I may dedicate, without permission, these small "Notes" to the shade of Socrates' Mother, may I likewise, without presumption, call to my help the questioning shade of her Son, that I who write may have the spirit of questioning aright and that those who read may learn not of me but of themselves? And further, has he not said: "The midwives are respectable women and have a character to lose."[122]

[120] Vol. I. p. 464.

[121] See above, p. 189.

[122] _Theaetetus_, 150.

V

The preparation of this book had been delayed by the Franco-German War of 1870-71, which brought a great addition to Miss Nightingale's labours. There is a huge pile of documents on the subject amongst her Papers. A letter to an old friend gives an idea of one branch of the correspondence:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Harriet Martineau._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _Feb._ [1871]. Oh this year of desolation! The one gleam of comfort through it all was the rush of all English-speaking people, in all climates and in all longitudes,--not the rich and comfortable, but the whole mass of hard-working, honest, frugal, stupid people--who have contributed every penny they could so ill spare. Women have given the very shoes off their feet, the very suppers out of their children's mouths--not to those of their own creed, not to those of their own way of thinking at all, but--to those who _suffered most_. In this awful war, all, all have given--every man, woman, and child above pauperism. I have been so touched to receive from places I had never even heard of, but which it would take me a day to enumerate,--from congregations who had "seen my name in a stray London newspaper" as helping in the relief of the war sufferers--sums collected by halfpence (with a long letter to say how they wished the money spent)--from poor hard-working negro congregations in different islands of the West Indies--poor congregations of all kinds, Puritan chapels in my own dear hills, National Schools, Factories, London dissenting congregations without a single rich member, London ragged schools who having nothing to give, gave up their only feast in the year that the money might be sent to the orphans in the war "who want it more than we."

Some of the letters from distant parts of the Empire show that Florence Nightingale had already become somewhat of a legendary figure. It was known that scenes of misery and horror were being enacted in Europe. It was assumed that she was ministering in the midst of them. In one of the letters there seems to be a confused idea that she was in two places at once--both directing the movement in London and nursing in some Red Cross hospital in France or Germany. And there is a sense in which this vague and legendary conception was true. Miss Nightingale played a busy part, though entirely behind the scenes, in the work of aid at the London headquarters; whilst among the devoted women who nursed the wounded or succoured other sufferers from the war, there were probably few who did not derive inspiration from the example of the Crimean heroine.

The outbreak of the war had found English philanthropy unprepared. The British Government had been a party to the Geneva Convention, but nothing had been done to organize a Society under its rules until the alarm was sounded by Colonel Loyd Lindsay (Lord Wantage). A letter from him in the _Times_ of July 22, 1870, led to the formation of the National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded, which afterwards became the British Red Cross Aid Society. One of the first acts of the Committee, of which Colonel Loyd Lindsay was Chairman, was to consult Miss Nightingale, and a letter from her was read to the public meeting at which the Society was constituted. The words of stirring appeal were received with loud cheers. If she had not been confined to a sick bed, she would have volunteered to go out as a nurse. As it was, she must leave that work to others, and she gave the volunteers a characteristic note of caution: "Those who undertake such work must be not sentimental enthusiasts, but downright lovers of hard work. If there is any work which is simple, stern necessity, it is that of waiting upon the sick and wounded after a battle--serving in war-hospitals, attending to and managing the thousand-and-one hard dry practical details which nevertheless mainly determine the question as to whether your sick and wounded shall live or die. If there is any nonsense in people's ideas of what hospital nursing is, one day of real duty will root it out. There are things to be done and seen which at once separate the true metal from the tinkling brass both among men and women."[123] There were those amongst her entourage who wished that she could lay all other work aside and take control of the organization. The state of her health made this impossible, but she was closely connected with the Society's work throughout. Her brother-in-law, Sir Harry Verney, and her cousin's husband, Captain Galton, were active members of the Executive Committee. Sir Harry's daughter, Miss Emily Verney, was an active member of the Ladies' Executive Committee.[124] Captain Galton and her cousin, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, were sent early in the war to visit the hospitals of France and Germany; and when the war was over, the task of reporting upon the correspondence of the Society's agents and of the English doctors was entrusted to Dr. Sutherland.[125] Through all these personal connections, Miss Nightingale kept close touch with the Society's work. She thought that there was a lack of vigour at the start. Why, she wanted to know, did not the Society advertise itself more? "If it had been in hiding from its creditors instead of being an Aid Society, it could not have had a more complete success; if it had been sick and wounded itself, what could it have done less?" Its advertisement ought to appear every day "immediately above the Theatrical Announcements--with a list of articles wanted, and an acknowledgement of those received. It makes me mad to see advertisements only of the 'Voysey Defence Fund' and the 'Derby Memorial Fund.' What _does_ it matter whether Voysey is defended or not, and whether Lord Derby has a memorial or not?"[126] The Committee in reply hoped to do more presently; as it did--it collected nearly £300,000 and rendered a great deal of aid, both in France and in Germany. From the moment that the war was seen to be inevitable, Miss Nightingale had been deluged with correspondence. The French authorities applied to her for plans of temporary field hospitals. The Crown Princess of Prussia applied for assistance and advice in all sorts. "The dreaded letter has come," she wrote to Dr. Sutherland; "what _am_ I to answer; how to express sympathy with Prussia without alienating France?" Miss Nightingale's personal sympathies were rather on the French side. "I think," she wrote (Dec. 20), "that if the conduct of the French for the last three months had been shown by any other nation it would have been called _as it is_ sublime. The uncomplaining endurance, the sad and severe self-restraint of Paris under a siege now of three months would have rendered immortal a city of ancient Rome. The Army of the Loire fighting seven days out of nine barefoot, cold and frozen, yet unsubdued, is worthy of Henry V. and Agincourt. And all for what? To save Alsace and Lorraine, of which Paris scarcely knows." In writing to the Crown Princess on hospital matters she put in a plea for clemency in the hour of final victory. "Prussia would remember," she was sure, "the future wars and misery always brought about by trampling too violently on a fallen foe, and Germany will show to an astonished Europe that moderation of which victorious nations have hitherto shown themselves incapable." Miss Nightingale, here as in other matters, hoped more of human perfectibility than she was to find; the immediate future was to belie her picture alike of the severe self-restraint of Paris, and of the unexampled moderation of Prussia. In rendering aid to the sick and wounded she was, however, consistently impartial. Wherever she heard of good work being done, whether in France or in Germany, she was ready to help, and she gave disinterested advice to the nursing service in both armies. Throughout the war, she had a large correspondence both at home and with all sorts and conditions of people in France and Germany.

[123] The letter is printed in the _Times_ of August 5, 1870. It was dated August 2, "the day," as Miss Nightingale noted in the letter, "of Sidney Herbert's death nine years ago."

[124] She died in 1872--"such a genius for working for men," Miss Nightingale wrote of her, "so lovely, so loving, and so beloved."

[125] _Report of the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded during the Franco-German War, 1871_, pp. 149-177.

[126] Letters to Captain Galton, August 1870.

At home, she was diligent in collecting money and gifts in kind for the Aid Society. She wrote constant letters and memoranda to members of the Executive Society; advising on all matters, from the general administration of field ambulances to the pattern of hospital suits, vetoing (when she could) impracticable suggestions, sending lists of the things most urgently needed. She received and answered a constant stream of applications from persons inquiring what to send, and from doctors and nurses wanting to volunteer for service. Abroad, her correspondence was on a similar scale. Distributing agents of the Society, nurses, workers of all kinds wrote, consulting her in cases of perplexity or giving information on points that they thought likely to interest her. The private reports preserved among Miss Nightingale's papers contain a mass of information about the treatment of the sick and wounded, of which she expressed the opinion that it far surpassed in horror, as of course it vastly exceeded in scale, anything that she had witnessed in the Crimea. Self-devotion on the part of volunteers, though it could not remedy the evils, was conspicuous in relieving them, and many letters to Miss Nightingale are eloquent of the inspiration which was derived from her example in the Crimea and from the messages of sympathy, encouragement and advice which she now sent. "Tell Miss Nightingale," said the warm-hearted Grand Duchess of Baden, "that I have endeavoured to follow implicitly everything she has recommended, and that I love and respect her more than any one in the world." There are letters, too, from English and German nurses and workers in which Miss Nightingale is addressed as "dearest of all friends" or "beloved mistress" and "queen." Her services to both of the belligerents were recognized by decorations. The French Société de Secours aux Blessés conferred its bronze cross upon her (July 1871), and from H.M. the Emperor and King she received the Prussian Cross of Merit (Sept.). But there was more significance in what she gave than in what she received. Among the English ladies who rendered most devoted service during the war was the wife of an officer (Colonel Cox) who had known Miss Nightingale in the Crimea; among the German ladies who had done the like was Madame Werckner of Breslau. When the war was over, both ladies asked the favour of an interview with Miss Nightingale. Madame Werckner became her personal friend, and wrote with enthusiastic gratitude when she was asked to visit Embley: "the home of your childhood." And Mrs. Cox wrote (July 15): "How can I ever thank you for the loving reception you gave me? I can only say that never whilst I live can it be forgotten." To Mrs. Cox's work the English Committee referred in their Report. Of Madame Werckner Miss Nightingale told something in an address to the Probationers at St. Thomas's. "At a large German station, which almost all the prisoners' trains passed through, a lady went every night during all that long, long dreadful winter, and for the whole night, to feed and warm and comfort and often to receive the last dying words of the miserable French prisoners, as they arrived in open trucks, some frozen, some as dead, others to die in the station, all half-clad and starving. Night after night, as these long, terrible trainsfull dragged their slow length into the station, she kneeled on its pavement, supporting the dying heads, receiving their last messages to their mothers; pouring wine or hot milk down the throats of the sick; dressing the frost-bitten limbs; and, thank God, saving many. Many were carried to the prisoners' hospital in the town, of whom about two-thirds recovered. Every bit of linen she had went in this way. She herself contracted incurable ill-health during these fearful nights. But thousands were saved by her means. She is my friend. She came and saw me, and it is from her lips I heard the story."

The Crown Princess of Prussia also came to South Street, and "she let me tell her," wrote Miss Nightingale,[127] "a good deal of behind the scenes of Prussian Ambulance work. I do like her so very much and twice as much now that she is really worn and ripened by genuine hard work and anxiety." This visit was productive of large results. The Princess and Miss Nightingale had been in communication throughout the war--partly by direct correspondence, and partly through an English lady, Miss Florence Lees, who was serving in German hospitals. At the beginning of the war the Princess had telegraphed and written to Miss Nightingale begging her to recommend a thoroughly competent English lady for such duty. Miss Lees (Mrs. Dacre Craven) had been sent; she was one of the ablest of the ladies who received training at the Nightingale School, and was presently to play an important part in the development of trained nursing in London. Miss Lees was placed by the Crown Princess in charge of the nursing at a war hospital which she had arranged at Homburg; Miss Lees was also employed to visit and report upon the war hospitals at Metz and other places. She was in constant correspondence with Miss Nightingale, who from this and many other sources of information had formed a very poor opinion of the Prussian nursing, medical and ambulance service. After collating various reports with Dr. Sutherland, Miss Nightingale said to him that "the abnormally bad among the Crimean hospitals were luxurious compared with the normal Prussian hospitals." "The only Prussian hospitals up to the present standard of sanitary experience," she added, "are those of the Princess herself, and in them it was H.R.H. who taught the doctors, and not the doctors who taught her." I do not know whether she communicated to the Princess the further opinion that the root of the evil was the bureaucracy; "it shows what it means to be without the free play of public opinion, through Parliament and press, which calls every Public Office, and almost every Society, to account." But upon the facts Miss Nightingale spoke freely, as she was requested to do, and the Princess asked her to send documents:--

(_The Crown Princess of Germany to Miss Nightingale._) OSBORNE, _July_ 28 [1871]. I return the deeply interesting and important papers which the Crown Prince and myself have read _most_ attentively and word for word. The Crown Prince wishes me to thank you particularly for your having let him see these papers. Much was not new to him. You _know_ how much interest he takes in sanitary matters, how anxious he is for reforms wherever needed. Every remark offered is therefore always gratefully received by us. Let me repeat, dear Miss Nightingale, how great a happiness it was to me to see you again. Ever yours, with sincerest admiration and respect, VICTORIA, CROWN PRINCESS OF GERMANY.

[127] Letter to Harriet Martineau, Sept. 20, 1870.

Of the great and practical interest which the Princess already took in hospitals, we have heard above. The experiences of the Franco-Prussian War quickened it yet more, and in 1872 she drafted a report on hospital organization. Subsequently a Home and Nursing School, named after her, was established in Berlin, and the "Victoria Sisters," following the lead of the Nightingale Nurses, undertook the nursing in municipal hospitals. The success of the Victoria Training School led in its turn to the establishment of similar institutions throughout Germany. And thus Miss Nightingale's words came true, that the trouble which she took to inform and inspire the Crown Princess "will bear fruit."

The experience of the Franco-German War bore fruit in the better organization of the Red Cross movement, especially in this country, and the inspiration here too may be traced back to Miss Nightingale. The "Red Cross" owes its inception, as already stated, to a Swiss physician, M. Henri Dunant. He had witnessed the horrors of war on the bloody field of Solferino, and he devoted his life thenceforward to the promotion, and then to the extension, of the Geneva Convention. In 1872 M. Dunant read a paper in London upon the movement. His first words were these: "Though I am known as the founder of the Red Cross and the originator of the Convention of Geneva, it is to an Englishwoman that all the honour of that Convention is due. What inspired me to go to Italy during the war of 1859 was the work of Miss Florence Nightingale in the Crimea."[128]

[128] M. Dunant's Paper is reported in the _Times_ of August 7, 1872. He sent a copy of it to Miss Nightingale: see Bibliography B, No. 31.

VI

It will have been seen that during the years treated in the foregoing chapters (1867-1871) Miss Nightingale did an enormous amount of work. Her health during the same period had been no better. Country air did not bring any accession of strength; there is evidence of sleepless nights in numbers of her letters dated in the small hours of the morning; and during 1870 and 1871 especially her letters and diaries speak of great weakness. She was able to do as much as she did only by the devotion of the same friend, Dr. Sutherland, whose relations with his task-mistress have been described in an earlier chapter. More and more, indeed, she seems to have fallen into the habit, which had become almost a necessity, of saying nothing, doing nothing, writing nothing (her letters to Mr. Jowett and a few other intimate friends alone excepted) without first consulting Dr. Sutherland. I have illustrated this point incidentally in previous pages, but such occasional references give an inadequate account of the extent to which she relied upon him. "The only way I can work now," she wrote to him in 1870, "is by receiving written notes from you, and working them up into my own language, then printing and showing you the work." Her Papers, with hundreds upon hundreds of drafts and memoranda in Dr. Sutherland's hand, show that such was in fact the way in which the work was done, and the process was applied not only to things ultimately printed, but almost to the whole range of her correspondence. He was sometimes called upon to draft even the most delicate family letters. She was asked to suggest an inscription for a memorial to Agnes Jones at Liverpool. Dr. Sutherland had first to try his hand at it. She was put out by an unwarranted liberty which a publisher had taken with her name. The case was sent to Dr. Sutherland, with a pressing appeal, "What _shall_ I do? I have no one to act for me." He acted for her. He had artistic tastes, and served as eyes for her at the International Exhibition of 1871, when he selected some French bronzes for her to give to Mr. Jowett. Whenever she was asked to join a Society, or subscribe to a new institution, Dr. Sutherland had first to advise and report. Sometimes she accompanied her references to him with amusing comments, as to Uncle Sam in earlier days. Did Dr. Sutherland advise her to join a new "Central Philanthropic Agency"? She was inclined against it, remembering that "When Crosse invented a new insect, my grandmother was heard to exclaim, 'Are there not enough insects already?'" Sometimes a reference may have been made only, or mainly, for the fun of the thing; as when the Census Paper was left at South Street in 1871 and she sent it off by special messenger to Dr. Sutherland at the War Office to know how she was to fill it up. "Am I the head of this household?" Dr. Sutherland forbore to say that no doubt was conceivable about _that_. "Occupation column: as I think that _every_ body ought to have a defined occupation, I should like to put what mine is, but I don't know how to define it." "Oh," replied Dr. Sutherland, "say, Occupation, None." The last column inquired whether the householder was "Deaf-and-dumb, blind, imbecile, or lunatic?" "I shall return," said she, "Imbecile and Blind, and if everybody did the same now, it would be true." "Don't," replied he; "you are the exception." But for the most part her references to him were on matters which either called for some quick application of worldly wisdom or involved considerable drudgery. His shrewd good sense never failed; and the drudgery, though it may have been delayed, was always done in the end. She is asked to express an opinion on some Indian Health Reports, and is tired. Off they go to Dr. Sutherland, who replies: "I have been through them all; you may safely say they are very well done." Or, pamphlets, memorials, prospectuses, are sent to her, and she is in no mood to master them. They are consigned to him; and in course of time neat little digests are returned, and she is advised what to do or say. Every important letter is similarly sent to him with a note saying, "What am I to answer?" or "What does all this come to?" or "Please advise." "You _must_ come to-morrow to see my letter before it goes." "I want to ask you some questions, and you must be good." In years when Miss Nightingale was much in the country (as in 1870 and 1871), Dr. Sutherland's daily work for her was the heavier, because all communications were through the post. There was fret and jar between them in personal intercourse, as we have heard, and opportunity for misunderstanding was increased when two busy people were exchanging ideas by letter. This was especially the case when any work was on hand of which the scope had not been precisely defined, and Miss Nightingale was often impatient. "I could do work," she wrote on one occasion, "if it were real work, done at the least expenditure to myself. But to do a minimum of work at the greatest expenditure to myself (by driving, pumping, etc.) is now physically impossible to me." Such complaints and such references to her weakness were frequent. To the latter Dr. Sutherland always referred in terms of sympathy--"I know you are very ill," "I beg you to let me help as much as I can," and so forth. With regard to the complaints, he sometimes laughed them aside: "Thanks for your parting kick, which is always pleasant to receive by them as likes it." "You are a true Paddy, you like to trail your coat, but I won't tread on it." Sometimes he defended himself--"If you knew what I have had to do, I am quite sure you would not have written about the proof as you have done"; and sometimes he refrained from defence other than simple denial--"I scarcely know how otherwise to reply to your attack than simply to state that it is groundless. Am I such a fool, I ask myself, as to do what she says I have done?" But this admirable man never lost his temper, and never made her reproaches an occasion for declining to help her any more. "All I can say is, I am ready to help." "I am at your orders in this as in all things." Such is the continual note of his messages. In private meditations often, and in letters occasionally, Miss Nightingale spoke of herself as a "vampyre." When she wrote in some such sense to Mr. Jowett, he told her to put such talk aside as idle, for "that way madness lies." Yet in a sense there was an element of truth in what she said. She was terribly exacting. She accepted no excuses, made few allowances, and sometimes assumed that those who worked with her had nothing else to do. Dr. Sutherland was a hard worker, but allowed himself diversions. At Norwood he had a garden, and Miss Nightingale was sarcastic about his fondness for digging ponds. But he had also, besides a strong interest in their common work, an abiding admiration for the gifts, the character, and the self-devotion of his friend. In addition to his own bread-winning work, he gave an immense amount of time and labour to Miss Nightingale. In any estimate of her services to great public causes, and especially in connection with sanitation in India, an honourable place is due to the collaborator who helped her through many years with unfailing devotion.

PART VII

WORK OF LATER YEARS

(1872-1910)

I ask no heaven till earth be Thine, Nor glory-crown, while work of mine Remaineth here. When earth shall shine Among the stars, Her sins wiped out, her captives free, Her voice a music unto Thee, For crown, New Work give Thou to me. Lord here am I.

I found this in an intensely evangelical Baptist American's work--a lecture he had delivered upon me. Now these lines appear to me exactly true, and an extraordinary advance in the way of truth on English Evangelicalism which banishes work, like sin, from heaven, and has no idea that heaven is to be made out of earth by us.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (from a letter to her father, 1869).

CHAPTER I

"OUT OF OFFICE"--LITERARY WORK

(1872-1874)

I am glad that you have given up drudgery for public offices.... The position which you held was always a precarious one, because dependent on "temples of friendship" and the goodwill of the Minister. I am glad that you have a straightforward work to do now in which you are dependent on yourself.... I want you to have a new life and interest. The way of influencing mankind by ideas is the more excellent way.--BENJAMIN JOWETT (_Letters to Miss Nightingale, 1871, 1872_).

"Something which you said to me on Sunday has rather disquieted me, and I hope that you will allow me to remonstrate with you about it. You said that you were going to ask admission as a Patient to St. Thomas's Hospital. Do not do this. (1) Because it is eccentric and we cannot strengthen our lives by eccentricity. (2) Because you will not be a Patient but a kind of Directress to the institution, viewed with great alarm by the doctors. (3) When a person is engaged in a great work I do not think the expense of living is much to be considered; the only thing is that you should live in such a way that you can do your work best. (4) I would not oppose you living at less expense if you wish, though I think that a matter of no moment; but I would live independently. (5) Do you mean really to live as a Patient? it will kill you. I do not add the annoyance to your father of a step which he can never be made to understand; I look at the matter solely from the point of view of your own work. I have cared about you for many years; and though I have little hope of prevailing with you, I would ask you not to set aside these reasons without consideration." So Mr. Jowett wrote to Miss Nightingale on June 22, 1872. "I am flattered to hear," he wrote a little later (July 11), "that you have disregarded duty and conscience for my sake. I hope that you will never in future obey a conscience which tells you to kill yourself. Will you try to hope and be at peace; and just ask of God time to complete your work? You who have done so much for others ought sometimes to reflect that you have had a great blessing and happiness."

The intention which Miss Nightingale had formed and from which Mr. Jowett dissuaded her was not a passing fancy. It was in accord with a deep-seated conviction, as may be seen from a document already quoted (p. 103). Nor, though she listened to Mr. Jowett's advice, did she entirely abandon her purpose. Later in the year, she still thought of giving up her pleasant house in South Street, and she set various friends to report upon furnished apartments in the immediate neighbourhood of St. Thomas's Hospital. They could not find anything that seemed suitable, and she gave up the idea; but as she could not go to St. Thomas's, she contrived, as we shall hear in a later chapter, that St. Thomas's should come to her. She devoted herself from this time more largely than heretofore to the detailed supervision of the Nightingale School. Both in what she did, and in what she now left undone, the year 1872 marks a new departure in her life. It is explained by a summary entry in her diary: "This year I go out of office."

Miss Nightingale had been "in office," as she called it, continuously since her departure for Scutari in October 1854. She had been closely employed, that is to say, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially, upon the administrative work of various Departments in matters pertaining to her special interests. With the advent of Mr. Gladstone to power in 1868, her work in this sort had much diminished. Her friend, Captain Galton, had gone from the War Office. She occasionally intervened in minor matters, as on one occasion when her friend, Mr. Lowe, agreed with Mr. Cardwell to accept her view about a certain pension to the widow of an officer, and there were other cases of the kind: as when she obtained an attentive hearing from Mr. Bruce (Home Secretary) for a memorandum which she submitted on the working of the Contagious Diseases Act. But her constant employment in connection with the War Office was over. She had argued with herself, in some meditations during 1871, whether she ought to make a bid, as it were, for "office" again. She could still exercise a certain official influence, she thought, if she chose to seek out Ministers and a