Reformers, who are familiar with the ways of the political world, more often sigh than rejoice when they hear that a subject in which they are interested has been “referred to a Royal Commission.” They know that the chances are many to one that the subject, like the Report, will be placed on a shelf and stay there. Sometimes the reference is a well-understood euphemism for such an intention; and even when it is not, there are many things which may bring about the same result. The Commission will perhaps produce a litter of Reports from whose discordant voices no definite conclusion can be drawn. In any case the Report, or Reports, will have to “engage the earnest attention” of His or Her Majesty's Government, and the attention, earnest or otherwise, is sure to be prolonged. Before the process has come to an end, many things may have happened to overlay the subject in question. Every generation of reformers sees a certain number of subjects on which its heart has been set deeply interred under a pile of Blue-books.

This was the danger with which Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale were confronted in August 1857 in the case of their Royal Commission on the sanitary condition of the British Army. Against the risk of an equivocal Report they had, indeed, guarded themselves in advance; but the danger of a definite Report leading to no immediate action had still to be met. Mr. Herbert was no less anxious than Miss Nightingale to meet it. He had devoted unsparing toil to the Commission; his toil would be reduced to futility if the Report were merely to be pigeon-holed. They laid their plans on the consideration mentioned at the end of the last chapter—namely, the effect which the disclosures of the Royal Commission was likely to have on public opinion. Mr. Herbert communicated the gist of the Report privately to Lord Panmure. It could be officially presented and published sooner or later as the negotiations with Ministers might go. Mr. Herbert pointed out to Lord Panmure that the Report was “likely to arrest a good deal of general attention”; that there was time to take measures towards reform before the Report became known to the public; that the simultaneous publication both of its recommendations and of orders and regulations founded upon them would “give the prestige which promptitude always carries with it.” Mr. Herbert would gladly give every assistance in his power towards that end. He put the case with his usual suavity. But there was iron within the velvet. The publication of the Report could properly be postponed for a while, but not indefinitely. Lord Panmure had to choose between committing himself to instant reform, so as to whitewash the Government beforehand, and postponing reform, in which case he would have to reckon with a public opinion inflamed by the disclosures of the Report. And meanwhile Miss Nightingale still held her Report in reserve, for use in an appeal to public opinion, should the negotiations fail to secure any guarantee for prompt reform.

The plan of active reform agreed upon between her and Mr. Herbert was that four Sub-Commissions should be appointed, with Mr. Herbert himself as Chairman of each, to settle the details of reform, and in some measure to execute it, in accordance with the general recommendations of the Report. These Sub-Commissions were severally (1) To put the Barracks in sanitary order, (2) To organize a Statistical Department, (3) To institute a Medical School, and (4) To reconstruct the Army Medical Department, to revise the Hospital Regulations, and draw up a Warrant for the Promotion of Medical Officers. This last, from its comprehensive and cleansing scope, was called by Miss Nightingale “The Wiping Commission.” Mr. Herbert sent these proposals to Lord Panmure on August 7,[267] and two days later he wrote to Miss Nightingale: “Panmure writes fairly enough, but he has gone to shoot grouse. I have asked Alexander to meet me at the Burlington on Wednesday at 3, to discuss and settle things. So I have disposed of your time and rooms.” The grouse, however, were not quite ready, and on the 14th Mr. Herbert caught Lord Panmure on the wing. Mr. Herbert seemed to carry his point, the four Sub-Commissions were agreed to in general terms, and, as he sent word to Miss Nightingale on the same day, he was “able to leave for Ireland with a lighter heart after seeing Pan. But I am not easy about you. Here am I going to lead an animal life for a month, get up early, pursue your animal, catch him, eat him, and go to sleep. Why can't you, who do men's work, take man's exercise in some shape?… This is my parting sermon. I use, for the purpose of scolding you, a liberty which nothing gives me but my hearty regard and affection for you.”

Mr. Herbert had well earned his month's fishing. But as Dr. Sutherland presently wrote to her, “one thing is quite clear, that women can do what men would not do, and that women will dare suffering knowingly where men would shrink.” Miss Nightingale would not, and could not, take man's rest because she felt her cause too intensely; she could not be of so light a heart as her friend, because she knew “her Pan” a little better than he did. Dr. Andrew Smith, she heard, was putting up a stiff fight against reform. Lord Panmure stayed on in the Highlands late into the autumn, paying only a flying visit or two to London. His subordinates were as laborious as ever in piling up objections. He became frightened at his own acts, and at one time revoked (but afterwards, under pressure, reinstated) the authority he had given for the Wiping Sub-Commission. Mr. Herbert returned to England in September, and came up to London to see Miss Nightingale before the first meeting of the first Sub-Commission. Many weeks elapsed before all of them were set on foot. She meanwhile was incessantly at work, and Dr. Sutherland, who lived at Highgate, was constantly with her. She wrote reminders to Lord Panmure, “although I hear you saying, There is that bothering woman again,” and she begged Mr. Herbert to do the like. She drafted instructions and schemes for each of the Sub-Commissions. As each of them set to work, there were meetings in her rooms to settle the procedure. There were periods, as Miss Nightingale afterwards recalled, “when Sidney Herbert would meet the Cabal, as he used to call it, which consists of ‘you and me and Alexander and Sutherland, and sometimes Martin and Farr,’ every day either at Burlington Street, or at Belgrave Square, and sometimes as often as twice or even three times a day.” A few extracts from her correspondence will show the extent of her work and the eagerness of her temper:—

II

A later letter from Sir John McNeill is quoted at the head of this chapter. He considered that compared with the work which she was doing now, what she had done at Scutari was “a trifle”—“mere child's play” was the phrase which she herself used in making the comparison. Preceding pages will, I think, have inclined the reader to the same conclusion, or, at any rate, have enabled him to understand what Miss Nightingale and Sir John meant. And this large and difficult work was being done by a woman who had already taxed her physical strength dangerously in the East, and who was now threatened, in the opinion of competent observers, by a complete breakdown. Of the members of what was called her “Cabinet,” Sir John McNeill was the one for whose intellectual power and judgment she had the highest respect, to Mr. Herbert she was personally the most attached, but to Dr. Sutherland also she sometimes opened her inner thoughts and feelings. He was of a somewhat wayward disposition, which alternately pleased and vexed the business-like Lady-in-Chief, but he was an indispensable helper, whilst in his wife Miss Nightingale inspired deep affection, and the two women interchanged intimate religious experiences. All Miss Nightingale's friends, and Dr. Sutherland as a medical man more especially, saw that she was over-working. Change of air and seclusion she herself felt compelled to seek; and she found them at Malvern, in the establishment of Dr. Johnson, who had moved thither from Umberslade[268]; but rest from work she would not, and could not, take. She was at Malvern in August and September, and again in December. Her faithful Aunt Mai—her “true mother,” as the niece at this time called her—kept watch over her alike at Malvern and in London. The society of her own mother and sister, with their many and lively interests, she found distracting. Whether at the Burlington or at Malvern, she desired to use every hour of strength for her work and for nothing else. And when Dr. Sutherland joined the others in begging her to desist, her heart was heavy within her. She was sore that her friend should understand her so little. She surmised that he had been prompted by her sister. She was morbidly anxious at this time that no member of the family except Aunt Mai should know how ill she was. She had attained her freedom for the life of independent work, at a great price, as the first Part of this Memoir has shown. Perhaps in her present over-wrought condition she was haunted by a dread lest the galling solicitude of her family might lure her back into the cage. Dr. Sutherland had written two letters at the end of August begging her to put all work aside. She was thinking of everybody's “sanitary improvement,” he said, except her own. “Pray leave us all to ourselves, soldiers and all, for a while. We shall all be the better for a rest. Even your ‘divine Pan’ will be more musical for not being beaten quite so much. As for Mr. Sidney Herbert, he must be in the seventh heaven. Please don't gull Dr. Gully, but do eat and drink and don't think. We'll make such a precious row when you come back. The day you left town it appeared as if all your blood wanted renewing, and that cannot be done in a week. You must have new blood, or you can't work, and new blood can't be made out of tea, at least so far as I know. There is a paper of Dr. Christison's about 28 ounces of solid food per diem. You know where that is, and depend on it the Dr. is right.… And now I have done my duty as confessor, and hope I shall find you an obedient penitent.” To this letter she replied as follows:—

Dr. Sutherland urged her to take at any rate a week's complete rest. But she would not. Her cause was her life, and she could not for the sake of life lose what alone made life worth living. While they were delaying, the soldiers were dying. Her work would not wait. She begged him to come down to Malvern and work with her in order that they might have everything ready to put before Mr. Herbert in London by the time he returned from his fishing. Dr. Sutherland wrote pretty excuses. Mrs. Sutherland made counter-suggestions. Why should not Miss Nightingale stay on at Malvern altogether? “Would not Mr. Herbert,” she wrote (Sept. 11), “go to you for a few days, settle all the points, and then communicate daily by letter? You have so much tact that you would be able to maintain your influence. Do think if this be possible. It is quite against my own interest to desire it, for if you come to London, I may get a glimpse of your dear face.” But Miss Nightingale persisted, and Dr. Sutherland surrendered. He went down to Malvern, was himself ill there, and Miss Nightingale reported progress of “the sick baby” to his wife. But the two invalids, we may be sure, talked of other things than their ailments.

III

So little was Miss Nightingale in a mood to succumb to her physical weakness, that she had offered to go out to India, where her friend Lady Canning was at the Viceroy's side during the Mutiny. “Miss Nightingale has written to me,” wrote Lady Canning to her mother (Nov. 14); “she is out of health and at Malvern, but says she would come at twenty-four hours' notice if I think there is anything for her to do in her ‘line of business.’ I think there is not anything here, for there are few wounded men in want of actual nursing, and there are plenty of native servants and assistants who can do the dressings. Only one man, who was very ill of dysentery, has died since we went to the hospital a fortnight ago. The up-country hospitals are too scattered for a nursing establishment, and one could hardly yet send women up.”[271] Miss Nightingale was very serious in the offer, for she had made it twice; first through Mr. Herbert, and then in a personal letter, carried by her cousin, Major Nicholson, who had been ordered to India at this time. She thought of herself as a soldier in the ranks; and absorbed intently though she was in her work for the Army at home, she would have considered active service in the field a superior call. Had the Viceroy felt the need of accepting Miss Nightingale's offer, it is possible that her power of will and the excitement of activity might have carried her through the ordeal; but she had barely strength for the work on which she was already engaged.

Of her daily life during this period, at Malvern and in London successively, her sister's letters give a vivid description:—

While Miss Nightingale was lying ill at Malvern, she was being courted in counterfeit at Manchester. Her parents and sister were visiting Manchester to see the “Art Treasures Exhibition,” and the newspapers had included Florence in the party. The sightseers, wrote Lady Verney, took Lady Newport, “a very sweetlooking woman in black,” for Florence and “treated her like a saint of the Middle Ages. ‘Let me touch your shawl only,’ they said as they crowded round, or ‘Let me stroke your arm.’ Mrs. Gaskell told me we could have no idea how deep the feeling is for you in the hearts of the people.”

The feeling would perhaps have been yet deeper if the people had known the work which Miss Nightingale was still doing, and the delicate health from which she was suffering. At the end of 1857 she thought that death might overtake her in the middle of her work with Sidney Herbert, and she wrote this letter to him “to be sent when I am dead”:—

Then she asked her uncle to assist her in making a will. She was anxious about the Nightingale Fund, to the management of which she had not as yet been able to devote attention. She proposed to leave it to St. Thomas's Hospital. The property to which she would ultimately be entitled upon the death of her father and mother she proposed to apply to the building of a model Barrack according to her ideas; “that is, with day-rooms for the men, separate places to sleep in (like Jebb's Asylum at Fulham), lavatories, gymnastic-places, reading-rooms, etc., not forgetting the wives, but having a kind of Model Lodging-House for the married men.” In a letter of instructions to her uncle, she named Sir John McNeill, Mr. Herbert, and Dr. Sutherland as the men who would best carry out such a plan. She included a few family bequests; but what was nearest to her heart at this time was to leave personal keepsakes to Mrs. Herbert and other friends who had “worked for her long and faithfully.” For this purpose, in order that there might be no question about possession, she begged her sister to send up to London from Embley various goods and chattels which had personal association with herself. And she had one other wish; it related to her “children.” “The associations with our men,” she wrote to her sister (Dec. 11), “amount to me to what I never should have expected to feel—a superstition, which makes me wish to be buried in the Crimea, absurd as I know it to be. For they are not there.”

CHAPTER IV

REAPING THE FRUIT
(1858–1860)

Matthew Arnold.

“You must now feel,” wrote Sir John McNeill to Miss Nightingale (May 13, 1858), when her work for the health of the British soldier at home was beginning to bear fruit, “that you have not laboured in vain, that you have made your talent ten talents, and that to you more than to any other man or woman alive, will henceforth be due the welfare and efficiency of the British Army. Napoleon said that in military affairs the moral are to the physical forces as four to one, but you have shown that he greatly underrated their value. The rapidity with which you have obtained unanimous consent to your principles much exceeds my expectations. I never dared to doubt that truth and justice and mercy would prevail, but I did not hope to live long enough to see their triumph when we first communed here of such things.[272] I thank God that I have lived to see your success.” Sir John's thanksgiving was caused by the tone and the result of a debate which had taken place in the House of Commons upon May 11, 1858. Lord Ebrington, prompted by Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale, had moved a series of Resolutions with regard to the Health of the Army, founded upon the Report of the Royal Commission. He had laid special stress upon the figures, due to Miss Nightingale's insight and industry, comparing the mortality in the Army and in civil life respectively; he called attention to the horrible state of the Barracks, and his Resolutions concluded thus: “That in the opinion of this House, improvements are imperatively called for not less by good policy and true economy, than by justice and humanity.” The Government accepted the Resolutions, and Miss Nightingale's campaign had thus obtained the unanimous approval of the House of Commons.

She had worked indefatigably, and through many channels, and she continued so to work, in order to focus and stimulate public opinion in the sense of Lord Ebrington's Resolutions. By the end of 1857 the Sub-Commissions on Army Medical Reform were making good progress, and the Report of the Royal Commission was about to be published. She devised an effective means of forcing its salient feature upon the attention of every person most concerned in the evils or most influential towards securing the necessary remedies. I have referred already (p. 352) to her diagrams illustrative of the mortality in the British Army. As finally prepared with Dr. Farr's assistance, they showed most effectively at a glance, by means of shaded or coloured squares, circles and wedges, (1) the deaths due to preventable causes in the Hospitals during the Crimean War, and (2) the rate of mortality in the British Army at home: “our soldiers enlist,” as she put it, “to Death in the Barracks.” She now wrote a memorandum, explaining the diagrams and pointing their moral, and had 2000 copies printed. This anonymous publication—entitled Mortality of the British Army—is called in her correspondence Coxcombs, primarily from the shape and colours of her diagrams. She had proposed, and Mr. Herbert agreed, that the memorandum and diagrams should be included as an appendix in his Report, in order that her pamphlet might appear as “Reprinted from the Report of the Royal Commission,” and thus be given the greater authority. So soon as the Report was issued, she distributed her Coxcombs to the Queen and other members of the Royal Family, to Ministers, to leading members of both Houses of Parliament, and to Medical and Commanding Officers throughout the country, in India and in the colonies. She had a few copies of the diagrams glazed and framed, and three of these she sent to the War Office, the Horse Guards, and the Army Medical Department. I do not know whether these Departments hung up the present. “It is our flank march upon the enemy,” she wrote in sending an early copy to Sir John McNeill, “and we might give it the old name of God's Revenge upon Murder.”

The Report of the Royal Commission appeared at the beginning of February (1858), and the Secretary sent one of the earliest copies to Miss Nightingale. “I like him very much,” she replied (Feb. 5); “I think he looks very handsome. Lady Tulloch says I make my pillow of Blue-books. It certainly has been the case with this.” She did not sleep over it, however. She was immediately up and doing. Among her papers there is a curious collection of letters and memoranda, partly in her handwriting, partly in that of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert, showing how industriously they set to work to pull wires in the press. The monthly and quarterly Reviews were in those days deemed of great importance in influencing public opinion, and Miss Nightingale drew up and sent for Mr. Herbert's criticism a list of the principal among them, entering against each magazine or review the name of the writer whom she designated as the ideal contributor of an article upon the Report. They had as much trouble in adjusting the parts as a theatrical manager finds in settling his cast. Lord Stanley, for example, promised to write, but he was particular about his place of appearance. It must be the Westminster Review or nowhere, and Miss Nightingale had already allotted that place to the principal star, Mr. Herbert himself.[273] And, moreover, the managers in this instance were drawing up a cast for other people's houses, and the editors did not in all cases prove amenable. Mr. Elwin, the editor of the Quarterly, rejected the article submitted to him. But Mr. Reeve, of the Edinburgh, was an old friend of Miss Nightingale, and he accepted her nominee, though he displeased her by mangling the article in the Ministerial interest. However, in the dailies, the monthlies and the quarterlies, the Report had, on the whole, “a good press,” and, what is no less important for influencing public opinion, a prompt press.

II

These things had hardly been arranged when there was a political crisis, and this involved Miss Nightingale and her allies in additional work. Lord Palmerston's Government was defeated on the Conspiracy Bill, and resigned. Lord Derby came in (Feb. 25), with General Peel as Secretary for War. Here, then, we say good-bye, for the present, to “the Bison.” He had been dilatory to the last. Mr. Herbert had hoped to see the Army Medical School established in January, and had written to Miss Nightingale to nominate suitable men for the various chairs—“not,” he added despairingly, “that Panmure would appoint any one even if the Angel Gabriel had offered himself, St. Michael and all angels to fill the different chairs. He is very slow to move.” Miss Nightingale took formal leave of Lord Panmure later in the year, in sending him a copy of one of her books. “You shock me,” he replied from the Highlands (Nov.), “by telling me I once called you ‘a turbulent fellow.’ Had any one else said so, I should have denied it, but I must have been vilely rude. Accept my apology now; and to bribe you to do so, I send you a box of grouse.” Mr. Herbert at first cherished high hopes of Lord Panmure's successor. Miss Nightingale and Mr. Herbert were particularly anxious upon a personal point. The Army Medical Department had not yet been reformed, and it was known that Sir Andrew Smith would shortly retire. By seniority Sir John Hall would have claims to the post, and his appointment would, the allies considered, be disastrous to the cause of reform; it would be useless, they felt, to frame new regulations without an infusion of new blood. This, therefore, was the first point on which representations were made to Lord Panmure's successor. “I have seen General Peel,” wrote Mr. Herbert to Miss Nightingale (Feb. 27), “and he promised to make no appointment nor to take any step in regard to the Medical Department or sanitary measures till he has conferred with me. I think Peel may do well if we can put him well in possession of the case.” General Peel duly did what they wanted on this personal issue. “I hope we may assume,” wrote Mr. Herbert to Miss Nightingale (May 25), “that Smith is really gone. It is no use trying to realize the enormous importance of such a fact.” They must now, he continued, “fix the appointment of Alexander.” Three days later he wrote to Dr. Sutherland: “Please tell Miss N. that I warned Peel against the expected recommendation of Sir J. Hall, and he will, I think, be prepared to turn a deaf ear to it. I wrote yesterday to him on another subject and threw in some praise of Alexander.” Such is the gentle art of influencing Ministers. On June 11 Dr. T. Alexander was appointed to succeed Sir Andrew Smith. Dr. Alexander unhappily died suddenly at the beginning of 1860, but it was a great thing for the Reformers, at a time when the Army Medical Department was being recast, to have one of themselves at the head of it, instead of a supporter of the ancien régime. “I cannot say,” wrote Mr. Herbert to Miss Nightingale (Sept. 16, 1858), “how glad I am to have your account of Alexander. Everything in futuro must depend on him. You cannot maintain a commission sitting permanently in terrorem over the Director-General, and Alexander seems able and willing to be his own commission.” So the allies had done at least one good stroke of business with General Peel. Another of the new ministers—Lord Stanley, the Colonial Secretary—was also helpful. “He will send the Coxcombs out to the Colonial Governors,” wrote Mr. Herbert (March 16); “he offered any service his position can enable him to give to assist our cause, and suggests that a Commission should inspect Colonial barracks, and he proposes to discuss the matter with you.” Presently, however, Lord Stanley was moved from the Colonial to the India Office; where Miss Nightingale enlisted his interest in another sanitary campaign, which was thenceforward to fill a large space in her working life, as will appear in a later Part. So, then, the new Government seemed promising; but it soon began to appear that at the War Office the cobwebs were beyond the power of the new broom to sweep away. Some reforms were carried out, but the permanent officials were as obstructive under General Peel as under Lord Panmure. “These War Office Subs.,” wrote Mr. Herbert to Miss Nightingale (June 29), “are intolerable—half a dozen fellows sitting down to compose Minutes just for the fun of the thing on a subject which they cannot possibly know anything about! Peel ought not to let these Subs. interfere, spoil and delay as they do. That office wants a thorough recasting, but I doubt whether Peel is the man to do it. He has a clear head and good sense, but I think he is over-powered by the amount of work which Panmure by the simple process of never attempting to do it found so easy.”

But alike amid hope and care, amid fear and anger, Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale worked away at their reforms unceasingly. Throughout the year 1858 she was in a very weak state of health. She divided her time, as before, between Malvern and Old Burlington Street, travelling backwards and forwards in an invalid carriage, and escorted by Mr. Clough, now sworn to her service. Her aunt, Mrs. Smith, was still in frequent attendance upon her. Her father was with her for a while at Malvern, and, like every one else, enjoined the desirability of rest. “Well, my dear child,” he wrote afterwards from Lea Hurst (Sept. 25), “it's no small matter to see your handwriting again, and to make believe that you are a good deal more than half alive. But the worst of it is, that there's no depending upon you for any persistence in curing yourself, while you have so many others to cure. I often wonder how it is that you who care so little for your own life should have such wonderful love for the lives of others.” She seldom saw her mother and sister. In June 1858 her sister married. “Thank you very much,” wrote Miss Nightingale to Lady McNeill (July 17), “for your congratulations on my sister's marriage, which took place last month. She likes it, which is the main thing. And my father is very fond of Sir Harry Verney, which is the next best thing. He is old and rich, which is a disadvantage. He is active, has a will of his own and four children ready-made, which is an advantage. Unmarried life, at least in our class, takes everything and gives nothing back to this poor earth. It runs no risk, it gives no pledge to life. So, on the whole, I think these reflections tend to approbation.” For herself she “thinks,” wrote her aunt, “that each day may be the last on which she will have power to work.”

And her ally, Mr. Herbert, was also feeling the strain. He had all the four Sub-Commissions at work, and from time to time during this year (1858) he broke down—on one occasion under a sharp attack of pleurisy. It was now Miss Nightingale's turn to lecture him. She wrote to Mrs. Herbert, begging her not to let Sidney call. “I really am not ill,” he wrote (March 18), “only washy and weak, while I always recover wonderfully, and paying you a visit to-morrow will do me no harm but the contrary.” She wrote to Mr. Herbert himself, suggesting a cure at Malvern. “I should like to come,” he said (Sept. 16), “and look at the Place which I have a notion I shall some day go to, and see you episodically, unless you had rather not be seen.” But I do not think that either of the allies expected, or desired, the other to take the advice which they interchanged. Well or ill, each of them worked unrestingly.

III

Upon the matter of Barracks, Mr. Herbert did the harder work.[274] He inspected barracks and hospitals throughout the Kingdom; he wrote or revised each report upon them. But he or Dr. Sutherland, or Captain Galton, or all of them, reported the results of each inspection to their “Chief,” as they sometimes called her, and she was unfailing in suggestions and criticisms. When the London barracks were being overhauled (for General Peel had obtained a substantial grant from the Treasury for immediate improvements), the “woman's touch” came into play. She called into counsel her Crimean colleague, Mr. Soyer, and took the improvement of the kitchens in hand. The work was only just begun when Mr. Soyer died suddenly. “His death,” she wrote to Captain Galton (Aug. 28), “is a great disaster. Others have studied cookery for the purposes of gormandizing, some for show, but none but he for the purpose of cooking large quantities of food in the most nutritious manner for great numbers of men. He has no successor. My only comfort is that you were imbued before his death with his doctrines, and that the Barracks Commission will now take up the matter for itself.” In the work of the other three Sub-Commissions Miss Nightingale had a large share. Mr. Herbert, Dr. Sutherland, Dr. Farr (Statistics) were in constant consultation with her, personally or by correspondence. There are hundreds of letters to her at this period, full of technical detail. “I give in,” writes Mr. Herbert; “your arguments are not to be answered.” “I want your help very much.” “I send a disagreeable letter I have received from Sir J. Hall. I will call on you to-morrow and talk it over.” “I send you a copy of the Instructions.” “I want help and advice.” At every stage of each transaction the allies were in close co-operation. The correspondence with Dr. Sutherland is sometimes in a lighter vein, and Mrs. Sutherland's letters to Miss Nightingale are deeply affectionate. But the doctor, who was not always very business-like, sometimes tried the patience of the exacting Lady-in-Chief. Her aunt records a day when a tiff with Dr. Sutherland caused her niece a serious attack of palpitation of the heart. Mr. Herbert was ill at the time and was waiting for a draft, which Dr. Sutherland was to prepare, for submission to the Secretary of State. Miss Nightingale was requested to put pressure upon the doctor. At last the draft came, and Mr. Herbert did not like it. He begged Miss Nightingale to use her influence in obtaining some revisions. Dr. Sutherland did not take this move kindly, and declined to call upon her. The quarrel, however, was speedily composed. At a later date, Miss Nightingale spent some weeks in the house of William and Mary Howitt at Highgate. “It is not a mere phrase,” wrote Mary Howitt, “when I say that we shall feel as if she had left a blessing behind.” I suspect that this visit was in order to enable Miss Nightingale to keep a firmer touch upon the “Big Baby,” as she and Mrs. Sutherland sometimes called the doctor. “This is the first day of grouse shooting, Caratina,” wrote he, when the Barracks Commissioners were in the north; “but as you will allow none of your ‘wives’ to go to the moors, the festival has passed off without observance.”

Thus, then, the Reformers worked during 1858. Their main labours were interrupted in the middle of the year by a last fight over the Netley Hospital. Lord Panmure had gone ahead with the building in spite of Miss Nightingale's objections and of her conversion of Lord Palmerston to her views (p. 341). But since then, the Report of the Royal Commission had appeared, the Hospitals and Barracks Sub-Commission had presented an interim report against Netley, and there was a new Secretary of State. Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale made a hard fight, and she wrote a series of newspaper articles[275] in the hope of stirring up public opinion. But General Peel was actuated by the same motives that governed Lord Panmure. He appointed another Committee to report on the adverse Report, and proceeded with the building. “Unhappily, the country which has led the van in sanitary science,” says an impartial authority, “has as its chief military hospital a building far from satisfactory.”[276]

Miss Nightingale's final defeat on this particular issue suggested to her the importance of instructing public opinion upon the whole question of Hospital Construction. She accordingly contributed two Papers on the subject to the Social Science Congress at Liverpool in October 1858. Her friend, Dr. Farr, who was present, reported the marked attention which the reading of the Papers attracted, and at the request of Lord Shaftesbury, the President of the Congress, Miss Nightingale presented her manuscript to the city of Liverpool as a memento of the occasion. These Papers were the germ of her famous Notes on Hospitals, to which we shall come in the next Part of this Memoir.

IV

On the main issue of Army Medical Reform, Miss Nightingale sought to influence public opinion by the distribution among carefully selected persons of her Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army. The Notes were written, and for the most part printed, in the preceding year, and I have already described them. The distribution of them at this time brought her letters of encouragement from many of the most illustrious and influential personages in the land. The Prince Consort, in an autograph letter of thanks, took occasion to assure her once more of “the Queen's high appreciation of her services.” The Princess Royal, then Crown Princess of Prussia, begged for a copy; and Miss Nightingale, in reply (Nov. 9), asked Sir James Clark to express for her how “very gratifying the Princess Royal's kind message was. I cannot tell you the deep interest I feel in that young heart so full of all that is true and good, or with what pleasure I anticipate the benefit to her country and ours from her being what she is.” These two women, between whom there were many points of sympathy, were often to correspond and to meet in later years. The Duke of Cambridge, in a particularly cordial letter, assured Miss Nightingale “that the whole Army is most sensible of the devotion with which you may be said to have sacrificed yourself to its work on a recent memorable occasion, and I cannot but add my personal admiration of your noble conduct on that as on all other occasions.” The Duke added the hope that from time to time he might have it in his power to carry out her “valuable suggestions for the comfort and welfare of the troops.” Miss Nightingale often trounced the Commander-in-Chief in her correspondence. He had so little sympathy with any radical reform that she could not consider his popular title of “The Soldier's Friend” to be really well deserved. Yet she had a certain fondness for him, and was alive to his better qualities. She had seen him first during the Crimean War, and she recalled a characteristic incident. “What makes ‘George’ popular,” she wrote, “is this kind of thing. In going round the Scutari Hospitals at their worst time with me, he recognized a sergeant of the Guards (he has a royal memory, always a great passport to popularity) who had had at least one-third of his body shot away, and said to him with a great oath, calling him by his Christian and surname, ‘Aren't you dead yet?’ The man said to me afterwards, ‘Sa feelin' o' Is Royal Ighness, wasn't it, m'm?’ with tears in his eyes. George's manner is very popular, his oaths are popular, with the army. And he is certainly the best man, both of business and of nature, at the Horse Guards: that, even I admit. And there is no man I should like to see in his place.”[277]

Miss Nightingale was careful to send copies of her Notes to those who, by their pens, could influence public opinion. Among these was Harriet Martineau, to whom Miss Nightingale wrote (Nov. 30): “The Report is in no sense public property. And I have a great horror of its being made use of after my death by Women's Missionaries and those kinds of people. I am brutally indifferent to the wrongs or the rights of my sex. And I should have been equally so to any controversy as to whether women ought or ought not to do what I have done for the Army; though a woman, having the opportunity and not doing it, ought, I think, to be burnt alive.” Miss Martineau, promising to be discreet, asked if she might make use of Miss Nightingale's facts and suggestions. The offer was promptly accepted, and Miss Martineau was supplied with copious powder and shot. Miss Nightingale was probably the more attracted by Miss Martineau's offer to popularise her Notes owing to a very earnest letter from Dean Milman. He had read the Notes “with serious attention and profound interest,” and asked (Dec. 18): “Is all this important knowledge, this strong practical good sense, this result of much toil, thought, experience to be confined to half-averted official ears, to be forced only on the reluctant attention of a few, and most of these too busy and perhaps too opinionated to profit by it? Is it to be buried in that most undisturbed grave of wise thought and useful information, a blue book? that most repulsive, unapproached, unapproachable place of sepulture? Surely you have not lived and laboured your life of devotion, your labour of love, to leave public opinion untouched and unenlightened but by what may creep out, as the general result of your views, or what may be adopted by Government, perhaps imperfectly and parsimoniously? Are the many, who alone by the expression of their judgment and feelings can keep the few up to their work, and encourage them by their approval and co-operation, to remain ignorant of what is of such vital import to the army, to the country, to mankind?” A series of articles by Miss Martineau in The Daily News, and afterwards a popular volume,[278] carried Miss Nightingale's suggestions, at second-hand, into a large circle. Between these two women there was a marked attraction. The correspondence about the illness and death of Miss Martineau's niece, and her reliance upon Miss Nightingale's sympathy, are particularly touching. Each of them had sorrows, each was seriously ill, and each alike at once turned to her public work.

At the end of 1858 Miss Nightingale put out one of the most effective of her controversial pieces. Her facts and figures about the mortality of the Army in the East, as printed in her Notes and in the Royal Commission's Report, had not passed unchallenged, and a pamphlet had appeared calling them in question. Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale suspected in it the hand of Sir John Hall, and she immediately prepared a reply. This is entitled A Contribution to the Sanitary History of the British Army during the late War with Russia. It was published, early in 1859, anonymously, but all her friends detected her “Roman hand.” The pamphlet which provoked it is dismissed in a contemptuous footnote: “An obscure pamphlet, circulated without a printer's name, reproduces nearly every possible statistical blunder on this and other points. It purports to be a defence of the defunct Army Medical Department, ‘By a Non-Commissioner,’ but it is more like a jeu d'esprit.” The answer contained in the body of Miss Nightingale's brochure is conclusive, and the “coxcombs” were repeated in a yet more telling and attractive form than before. It is the most concise, the most scathing, and the most eloquent of all her accounts of the preventable mortality which she had witnessed in the East. “In a few truthful words,” wrote Sir John McNeill, in acknowledging an early copy (Dec. 26), “you have told the whole dreadful story, and I do not think that we shall hear any more of controversial medical statistics. ‘Facts are chiels that winna ding and downa be disputed.’ So sang Burns, and he was seldom mistaken in his opinions. I have read every word of the Contribution, and pondered every column and diagram, and I come to the conclusion that it is complete and unanswerable, but that it would be disparaging to such a work to regard it as controversial. I wish with all my heart that every young officer in the British Army had a copy of it. The old I have little hope of.” Miss Nightingale's mastery of the art of marshalling facts to logical conclusions was recognized by her election in 1858 as a member of the Statistical Society.

V

The new year (1859) brought an event of great importance to the cause of Army Reform. In March, Lord Derby's stop-gap government was defeated on Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill, and after a general election Lord Palmerston returned to power. Mr. Sidney Herbert, who for some years had been working at army reform as an outsider, now became Secretary for War. “I must send you a line,” he wrote to Miss Nightingale (June 13), “to tell you that I have undertaken the Ministry of War. I have undertaken it because in certain branches of administration I believe that I can be of use, but I do not disguise from myself the severity of the task nor the probability of my proving unequal to it. But I know that you will be pleased to hear of my being there.… I will try to ride down to you to-morrow afternoon. God bless you!” Mr. Herbert's task was not rendered less severe by the appointment of Mr. Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer. They were close and affectionate friends, but public economy was with Mr. Gladstone the greater friend. Much of Mr. Herbert's strength was exhausted in disputes with the Chancellor of the Exchequer over the question of the national defences. Mrs. Herbert sent to Miss Nightingale the current riddle: “Why is Gladstone like a lobster?” “Because he is so good, but he disagrees with everybody.” Mr. Herbert could by no means always count upon the Treasury for consent in all his schemes for improving the sanitary and moral condition of the Army. Still he was able, as Secretary of State, to accomplish a great deal; and it will be convenient here,—with some slight anticipation, in certain cases, of chronological order—to summarize shortly the fruits of the long collaboration between Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale for the health of the British soldier. She herself wrote such a summary in 1861, in a Paper to which reference has been made already (p. 312), and I often use her own words.

The Barracks and Hospitals Improvement Commission had already done a good deal when he came into office, and he continued the work. Buildings were ventilated and warmed. Drainage was introduced or improved. The water-supply was extended. The kitchens were remodelled. Gas was introduced in place of the couple of “dips,” by the light of which it was impossible for the men to read or pursue any occupation except smoking. Structural improvements were made in many cases, and Mr. Herbert, so far as he could extract money from the Treasury, reconstructed buildings which had been condemned by his Commission. This policy was abandoned for many years after his death, and later generations heard in consequence of sanitary scandals in barracks at Windsor and Dublin and elsewhere. The General Report of the Barracks and Hospitals Commission, dated April 1861, was presented to Parliament in that year, and many of Miss Nightingale's friends, on reading it, referred to it as “her book.” They were not far wrong, for much of the Report, and especially the long section dealing with the proper principles of Hospital and Barrack Construction, was in large measure her work.

Miss Nightingale, in order to ensure that such principles should be better understood and carried out in the future, induced Mr. Herbert to appoint a special Barracks Works Committee, “to report as to measures to simplify and improve the system under which all works and buildings, other than fortifications, are constructed, repaired, and maintained, in order to give a more direct responsibility to the persons employed in those duties.” Of this committee Captain Galton was a member, and the Draft Report was submitted to Miss Nightingale for criticism and suggestion.[279] There are many causes to which the improved health of the Army in our own time may be attributed, but the chief of them has probably been the improvement of barrack accommodation, and for this the name of Florence Nightingale deserves to be held in grateful remembrance by the Army and by the nation.

As a supplement to the improvements in barrack kitchens, Mr. Herbert introduced a reform in a direction which Miss Nightingale had pressed upon Lord Panmure's attention[280]; he established a School of Practical Cookery at Aldershot, for the training of regimental and hospital cooks in the art of giving men a wholesome meal. Miss Nightingale had been painfully impressed in the Crimea by the importance of this reform.

The second Sub-Commission was charged with the duty of reorganizing the Army medical statistics. This was one of the requirements of rational reform which had most forcibly struck Miss Nightingale in the East. The emphasis which she laid upon this side of her experience, the persistence with which she pressed the matter, the statistical skill with which she showed the way to a better system, are amongst the most valuable of her services to the cause of Army Reform. When the suggestions of the Sub-Commission were carried out, the British Army Statistics became the best and most useful then obtainable in Europe.[281]

The third Sub-Commission was to carry out another of Miss Nightingale's favourite ideas: the establishment of an Army Medical School. There were here the most wearisome delays and obstructions,[282] and it was not until Mr. Herbert himself became Secretary of State that he was able to give effect to his Sub-Commission's Report. And even then, as soon as the Minister's personal oversight was averted, the War Office “Subs.” set to work to defeat their chief. Mr. Herbert had appointed the staff in 1859, but it was not till September 1860 that the first students arrived at Fort Pitt, Chatham. They promptly came to the conclusion “that the School was a hoax.” As well they might, for the School was without fittings or instruments of any kind! The explanation, which may be read elsewhere,[283] is remarkable even in the annals of departmental muddles. There was, apparently, no method known to the red-tape of the routine-men whereby the School could be fitted, and it might have remained empty indefinitely, but that a trenchant letter from Miss Nightingale secured the personal intervention of the Secretary of State. “There! At last!” wrote Mr. Herbert to her, in forwarding the official order at the end of its long travels through departments and sub-departments. The Army Medical School was peculiarly Miss Nightingale's child, and she watched over its early stages with constant solicitude. Mr. Herbert had commissioned her, in consultation with Sir James Clark, to make the Regulations. She had the nomination of the professors. For the chair of Hygiene she nominated Dr. E. A. Parkes, whose acquaintance she had made during the Crimean War. It would be difficult to exaggerate the services which the stimulating teaching of this great sanitarian rendered to the cause of military hygiene. He had much correspondence with Miss Nightingale in connection with the syllabus of his first course of lectures. In every administrative difficulty the professors went to her for help. The correspondence between her and Dr. Aitken[284] is especially voluminous. She had made a successful fight, against much opposition, to have pathology included in the professoriate, and Dr. Aitken was ultimately appointed to the chair. He it was who set Miss Nightingale in motion about the fittings of the School. He often asked her to “give us another push.” “Kind thanks,” he wrote (March 1861) when a further hitch had arisen, “for placing our train on the proper line.” Her intervention at headquarters was necessary even to extract pay for the professors. “I have just received an intimation from the War Office,” Dr. Aitken wrote to her (Aug. 7, 1860), “that Sir John Kirkland has been authorised to issue my pay; so I presume the numerous officials concerned have been able to satisfy each other that I am in existence. The ‘at once’ in this instance is equal to six days—an activity I am inclined to believe is due to your exertions on Sunday.” Sunday was the day of the week on which, if on no other, she always saw Mr. Herbert. Dr. Aitken was sarcastic, and not without cause, about the Circumlocution Office; but it is possible that the fault was not always only on one side. Professors are said to be sometimes “children” in matters of business; and on one tale of woe addressed to Miss Nightingale, the docket (in Dr. Sutherland's handwriting, but doubtless at her dictation) is this: “I hope the present difficulty has been got over, but it will be well to bear in mind that the School is so nearly connected with the administrative part of the War Office, that all your future proceedings, whether by minute or otherwise, should be concise and practical.” The School survived the perils of its infancy, and introduced a most beneficent reform by affording means of instruction in military hygiene and practice to candidates for the Army Medical Service. “Formerly,” as Miss Nightingale wrote, “young men were sent to attend sick and wounded soldiers, who perhaps had never dressed a serious wound, or never attended a bedside, except in the midst of a crowd of students, following in the wake of some eminent lecturer, who certainly had never been instructed in the most ordinary sanitary knowledge, although one of their most important functions was hereafter to be the prevention of disease in climates and under circumstances where prevention is everything, and medical treatment often little or nothing.” Miss Nightingale's services as the true founder of the School were publicly acknowledged at the time. Dr. Longmore, the Professor of Military Surgery, told the students that it was she “whose opinion, derived from large experience and remarkable sagacity in observation, exerted an especial influence in originating and establishing this School.”[285] “In the Army Medical School just instituted,” wrote Sir James Clark, “hygiene will form the most important branch of the young medical officer's instruction. For originating this School we have to thank Miss Nightingale, who, had her long and persevering efforts effected no other improvement in the Army, would have conferred by this alone an inestimable boon upon the British soldier.”[286]

The School was afterwards moved to Netley. It is now in London, is one of the Medical Schools in the University, and is placed in convenient proximity to a military hospital. The Tate Gallery, on the Embankment at Millbank, stands between two buildings which are of peculiar interest to any one concerned in the life and work of Florence Nightingale. To the east of the Gallery is the Royal Alexandra Hospital, a general military hospital for the London district. It is built, of course, on the “pavilion” plan, and in every other respect conforms to Miss Nightingale's ideas of what a hospital should be—with many additions to its resources, which the progress of science has suggested since her day. A complete apparatus for X-ray treatment, capable of being packed into five cases for service in the field, is likely to attract the special attention of a visitor. But in connection with Miss Nightingale there was something else which struck me more. As I went through the surgical wards with the Commandant, the smart “orderlies” (old style, now the trained men of the Army Medical Corps) stood at attention. The Colonel entered into conversation with the Sergeant of a ward. He was awaiting promotion until he had qualified in the hospital, under the Matron, Sisters, and Staff Nurses. Promotion in the Corps is now dependent on an examination plus a certificate from the nursing authorities. Into how great a thing has the introduction of female nursing for the Army, due to Miss Nightingale, grown, and how ironical are some of time's revenges which the development has brought with it! Originally the female nurses occupied the lowest place; sometimes they were little more than superior domestics, often they were amateurs, and their position was always a little nondescript. Now they represent the most highly-trained and professional element, and without a certificate from them no male hospital attendant can win full promotion! And there was another thing that struck me. After a tour of the surgical wards, I inquired about the medical wards; but time was pressing, “and you would find little to see there,” said the Colonel, “for the Army is so healthy in these days that there are few medical cases.”[287]