And also the following letter written to the Buckinghamshire County Council in 1892, begging them to appoint a sanitary committee:—
“We must create a public opinion which will drive the Government, instead of the Government having to drive us—an enlightened public opinion, wise in principles, wise in details. We hail the County Council as being or becoming one of the strongest engines in our favour, at once fathering and obeying the great impulse for national health against national and local disease. For we have learned that we have national health in our own hands—local sanitation, national health. But we have to contend against centuries of superstition and generations of indifference. Let the County Council take the lead.”
And how justly, how clearly, she was able to weigh the work of those who had borne the brunt of sanitary inquiry in the Crimea, with but little except kicks for their pains, may be judged by the following sentences from a letter to Lady Tulloch in 1878:—
“My Dear Lady Tulloch,—I give you joy, I give you both joy, for this crowning recognition of one of the noblest labours ever done on earth. You yourself cannot cling to it more than I do; hardly so much, in one sense, for I saw how Sir John MacNeill’s and Sir A. Tulloch’s reporting was the salvation of the army in the Crimea. Without them everything that happened would have been considered ‘all right.’
“Mr. Martin’s note is perfect, for it does not look like an afterthought, nor as prompted by others, but as the flow of a generous and able man’s own reflection, and careful search into authentic documents. Thank you again and again for sending it to me. It is the greatest consolation I could have had. Will you remember me gratefully to Mr. Paget, also to Dr. Balfour? I look back upon these twenty years as if they were yesterday, but also as if they were a thousand years. Success be with us and the noble dead—and it has been success.—Yours ever,
“Florence Nightingale.”
We see from this letter how warmly the old memories dwelt with her, even while her hands were full of good work for the future.
The death of Lord Herbert in 1868 had been a blow that struck very deeply at her health and spirits.