“God bless you for it! I think it is a great work.”[25]
It was a great work, and it might have been delayed for scores of years, with a yearly unnecessary waste of thousands of lives, if she had not initiated it.
Florence Nightingale in her Last Days.
(From a drawing from memory. Copyright A. Rischgitz.)
Her words to Sir Bartle Frere at the outset had been: “It does seem that there is no element in the scheme of government (of India) by which the public health can be taken care of. And the thing is now to create such an element.”
As early as 1863, in her “Observations on the Sanitary State of the Army in India,” she had written:—
“Native ‘caste’ prejudices appear to have been made the excuse for European laziness, as far as regards our sanitary and hospital neglects of the natives. Recent railroad experience is a striking proof that ‘caste,’ in their minds, is no bar to intercommunication in arrangements tending to their benefit.”
Sir C. Trevelyan justly says that “a good sanitary state of the military force cannot be secured without making similar arrangements for the populations settled in and around the military cantonments; that sanitary reform must be generally introduced into India for the civil as well as the military portion of the community.”
And now that the opportunity arrived, all was done with wise and swift diplomacy. The way was smoothed by a call from Frere on his old friend Sir Richard Temple, at that time Finance Minister at Calcutta, asking him to help.