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

IV

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

V

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

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

VI

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

VII

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

VIII

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV

ADVISER-GENERAL ON HOSPITALS AND NURSING
(1868–1872)

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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