THE LIFE OF
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
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Florence Nightingale
1887
from the picture by Sir William Richmond at Claydon

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

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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,[13] 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[14] 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[15] 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[16] 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.…

(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[17] 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.

“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” 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.

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.

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.

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.

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[31] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 manœuvred 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.

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.

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]

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.

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.”

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.”

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!

(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[51] 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 Commⁿ. 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[52] 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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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?”

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.…

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.”

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]

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.

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.

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]

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.”

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.”

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.

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[82] 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.

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.

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.

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[91] “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.

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[92] 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.

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.

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.”

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,[102] 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[106] 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 … 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.

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.

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.

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.

(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[115] 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[118] 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.

(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, Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia and 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.”

Footnotes:

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

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

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

[4] Vol. I. p. [496].

[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.”

[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.

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

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

[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.

[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.

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

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

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

[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.

[31] Bibliography A, No. 24.

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

[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.

[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.

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

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

[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.

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

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

[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.”

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

[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].

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

[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.

[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].