April 28, 1876.
My dear Friends,—Again another year has brought us together to rejoice at our successes, and, if to grieve over some disappointments, to try together to find out what it is that may have brought them about, and to correct it.
God seems to have given His favour to the manner in which you have been working.
Thanks to you, each and all of you, for the pains you have taken to carry out the work. I hope you feel how great have been the pains bestowed upon you.
You are not “grumblers” at all: you do try to justify the great care given you, the confidence placed in you, and, after you have left this Home, the freedom of action you enjoy—by that intelligent obedience to rules and orders, to render which is alone worthy of the name of “Trained Nurse,” of God’s soldier. We shall be poor soldiers indeed, if we don’t train ourselves for the battle. But if discipline is ever looked upon as interference, then freedom has become lawlessness, and we are no “Trained Nurses” at all.
The trained Englishwoman is the first Nurse in the world: if—IF she knows how to unite this intelligent obedience to commands with thoughtful and godly command of herself.
“The greatest evils in life,” said one of the world’s highest statesmen, “have had their rise from something which was thought of too little importance to attend to.” How we Nurses can echo that!
“Immense, incalculable misery” is due to “the immoral thoughtlessness”—he calls thoughtlessness immoral—of women about little things. This is what our training is to counteract in us. Think nothing too small to be attended to in this way. Think everything too small of personal trouble or sensitiveness to be cared for in another way.
It is not knowledge only: it is practice we want. We only know a thing if we can do it. There is a famous Italian proverb which says: “So much”—and no more—“each knows as she does.”
What we did last year we may look upon not as a matter of conceit, but of encouragement. We must not fail this year, and we’ll not fail. We’ll keep up to the mark: nay more, we will press on to a higher mark. For our “calling” is a high one (the “little things,” remember: a high excellence in little things). And we must answer to the call ever more and more strenuously and ever more and more humbly too.