These were subjects in which Miss Nightingale was directly concerned, but questions of many other kinds were referred to her. I find in the correspondence with the War Office during these years that, in addition to matters otherwise mentioned in this chapter, her advice was asked upon such subjects as an Apothecaries' Warrant, barracks for Ceylon, “Fever Tinctures,” Instructions for Cholera, fittings for Military Hospitals, the proposed amalgamation of the Home and Indian Medical Services, the organization of Hospitals for Soldiers' Wives, Sanitary Instructions for New Zealand, revision of soldiers' rations, staff appointments at Netley, appointment of West Indian staff surgeons, an outbreak of Yellow Fever in Bermuda, the relation of Commissariat Barracks and Purveying at Foreign Stations, victualling on transports and the Mhow court-martial.[51] On one occasion she was asked to send hints for a speech in the House of Commons. Lord Hartington, then Under-Secretary for War, would have to defend a large increase in the votes for Hospital and Medical Service. The Crimean War and Miss Nightingale's crusade had raised the expenditure from £97,000 in 1853–54 to £295,000 in 1864–65. “Could you send me a paragraph for Lord Hartington's speech,” she was asked, “to show the salient points of what the nation gets for its money? Something pithy, put in your best manner.” “There is nothing in the world I should like so much,” she replied (Feb. 29, 1864), “as to have to do Lord Hartington's speech and stand in his shoes on such an occasion.” She sent some pithy comparisons; and, in case the Minister wanted something heavier, a detailed memorandum. I suppose Lord Hartington chose the heaviness and rejected the pith; for when Miss Nightingale read the parliamentary report, she thought the speech a poor performance.[52] The same kind of references to Miss Nightingale went on when in 1866, on Lord de Grey's transference to the India Office,[53] Lord Hartington became Secretary of State for War. “Can you throw light,” she was asked (June 21, 1866), “on the position of the medical officers of the Guards? This is very pressing. The whole matter is an awful mess, and Lord Hartington is anxious to leave it in some way of settlement.” On the following day a lucid and exhaustive Memorandum on the subject went in from her.
In July 1864 Miss Nightingale was engaged on a piece of work for the War Office which was closely associated with her Crimean experiences and with her European repute. It was in August of that year that the international congress was held which framed the famous Geneva Convention. The British delegates were Miss Nightingale's friend, Dr. Longmore, and Dr. Rutherford, and she drafted their Instructions. The principle of the Convention was the neutralization of the wounded under the Red Cross. Societies formed under the Red Cross were soon organized throughout Europe, and the movement led to a great development of volunteer-nursing in war time.
Sometimes Miss Nightingale sent in suggestions on her own account. She was in close touch with soldiers and sailors, and a woman's sympathetic insight appears in this letter:—
(Miss Nightingale to Captain Galton.) Sept. 21 [1863]. People are complaining that when a Regiment sails, many of their wives and children are left behind, and the soldiers are unable to make any provision for their support until they have reached their destination, say China or Calcutta (after a four months' voyage round the Cape), and have been able to send money through their Captains to their families at home. Meanwhile the families have gone through five or six months of distress. For sailors leaving a port in England or Ireland, the Admiralty provides power to leave a standing order that a certain amount of pay is to be sent regularly to their families. The W.O. objects that a similar arrangement would “involve a change in their book-keeping.” It would involve no change. It would involve a small addition. I am willing to go the length of 6d. to furnish an account-book to the W.O., which would enable them to keep these additional accounts. The W.O. also objects that it would deprive the Captain of the chance of fining the soldiers for any military offence. But they can learn the Admiralty system; and whilst there are other ways of “doing” the soldiers, their pay is the only means of providing bread for their families starving (or doing worse) at home. Surely the soldiers might be allowed to leave, for the probable duration of their voyage, and for a month or two beyond it, a sum to be paid weekly to their representatives at home. Sir E. Lugard has been tried and failed. Pray set this right. But the W.O. would not be the W.O., if such things as these were not. And when they have ceased to be, the War Office will have ceased to be.
Satire was not the only weapon which Miss Nightingale employed in order to get things done. Sometimes she appealed to the motive of rivalry. Was the Minister hanging back? Well, all she could say was that Sidney Herbert would have done the thing in a moment. There were difficulties in the way, were there? The subordinate officials were piling up what they were pleased to call “reasons” to the contrary, were they? Well, “on this day many years ago,” she wrote (June 18, 1862), “the French guns kept coming up again and again to get us out of the yard at Hougomont, and we answered in strong language, often repeated, till we kept the ground that we had won. I never heard the French guns called reasons. And I advise you to answer in the same way, because there is no other way of answering. Lord de Grey's Minute is the gun which just has to be fired over again.” And sometimes she resorted, as of old, to a little bullying. “I send you,” she wrote (March 26, 1863), “my protest about the Medical School. Make what use of it you like. But, if we fail, I shall refer it to Lord Palmerston who, as you know, befriended us on a former occasion (after Hawes's death)”—a home thrust, this, as it was by a personal reference to Lord Palmerston that she had secured Captain Galton's appointment.
There was one occasion when, for a wonder, the pressure to be prompt and decided came not from her, but from the War Office. The Governorship of the Woolwich Hospital fell vacant; she had been sent a list of names with a request to advise upon them, and she had not immediately replied. “I wrote,” she explained (Feb. 11, 1863), “to various authorities the very moment your and Lord de Grey's letters were put into my hands. The answers cannot be long delayed. But what would you think of my opinion if I volunteered it about men whom I know only by name? Had you asked me about Lord William Paulet or Colonel Storks or Sir Richard Airey, I could have given you an opinion off-hand with the utmost want of modesty. The very moment I have any reliable information you shall have it. But it takes some time to make such an inquiry, or what would it be worth? And Woolwich, I suppose, is not on fire, or with the enemy at the gates?” But for some reason or other, the War Office was in a hurry, and the appointment was made before her inquiries were completed. Her conscientiousness thus lost her the chance of deciding a piece of patronage. Not, indeed, that she felt any loss in such a case. She was nothing of a jobber. She pulled wires, as I have told, in some special appointments where she believed that a high public cause was at stake; but she was never actuated by personal favouritism, or by the love of personal influence on behalf of individuals. For this very post, she had received fifty letters of application, she said, but she had taken no action upon them. Only once, she said on another occasion, had she solicited anything as a personal favour from the War Office. It was an appointment for a Presbyterian Chaplain, who was not personally known to her, but whose hard and deserving case (as she thought it) had been brought to her notice. She was once sent a list of the Army Medical Service, and asked by a Minister to mark the names, for his private and confidential use, with her approbation or otherwise. This she respectfully declined to do. When she was asked a specific question about an officer whom she had known in the Crimea or elsewhere, she gave an opinion freely, and generally managed to put it pointedly; as of a certain Commandant: “As you often see in those round-headed, red-faced men, he has a great deal of conscience and very little judgment.”
VI
A subject, in which Miss Nightingale took great and painful interest during these years, was the State regulation of vice. The legislation of 1864, 1866, and 1869 was already being promoted and considered in 1862. The subject was odious to Miss Nightingale, but her experiences in foreign hospitals and at Scutari had made her peculiarly familiar with it. Her private correspondence with doctors and military officers shows that for some years before 1862 she had given much thought and study to the question, and had carefully tested conclusions drawn from her personal observations by statistics and by the opinions of other persons. She hated the system of regulation on moral grounds, but she was equally convinced that the case for it had not been satisfactorily established by statistical evidence on hygienic grounds. On this point, two of the medical men, upon whose judgment she placed most reliance—Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Graham Balfour (the head of the Army Statistical Department)—agreed with her. With their assistance she worked up the case against the continental system, and at the request of Sir George Lewis, who was considering the matter in 1862, she wrote a private paper, which was circulated among some members of the Government and others. “Your facts,” wrote Captain Galton to her (April 29, 1862), “have shaken Lord de Grey's views on the subject of police inspection.” With Mr. Gladstone, she was less successful. He found her Paper “of deep interest and full of important fact and argument,” and said that, as a result of reading it and her letters, he should approach the subject “with much of circumspection as well as of anxiety”; but he “doubted the possibility of making a standing army a moral institution.” Therein she profoundly differed, and she urged, in rejoinder, that nothing should be done on his assumption, at least until the other had been given a fair trial—by increasing the soldiers' facilities for marriage, by giving them better opportunities for instruction and recreation, by encouraging physical exercise and manual handicrafts. Official opinion steadily hardened, however, in the direction of regulation; and presently public opinion was tested by a series of articles in the Times in favour of the continental system. Miss Nightingale thereupon supplied Harriet Martineau with facts and figures, and the Times was answered by the Daily News. Miss Nightingale also printed her own Paper for a more extended, though still “private and confidential,” circulation. Dr. Sutherland chivalrously assumed the sole authorship, and was acrimoniously attacked by some of his professional brethren. The Army Medical Department was working hard for regulation, and some person therein, suspecting Miss Nightingale as the real leader of the opposition, disgraced himself by sending her an anonymous letter of vulgar abuse. This of course did not deter her, and, when legislation was proposed, she lobbied indefatigably (through correspondence) against it. The opinion of the House of Commons was, however, overwhelmingly in its favour. When the legislation was passed, the War Office invited her assistance in the selection of medical officers under the Act; but she refused to touch what she regarded as an accursed thing. It was left to another of the remarkable women of the nineteenth century, to secure, after a struggle of sixteen years, the repeal of the Acts; but though Miss Nightingale shrank from taking a public part in that crusade, she gave support privately to Mrs. Josephine Butler. At a later time, however, Miss Nightingale somewhat modified her views.[54]
Miss Nightingale's failure during the years 1862–64 to arrest the movement of public opinion in the direction which she detested, increased her eagerness to promote what she considered the more excellent way. She was the life and soul at headquarters of the movement for increasing the supply of Reading-rooms, Soldiers' Clubs, Recreation-rooms, and facilities for useful employment. “I will tell you,” she wrote to the Reverend Mother of the Bermondsey Convent (Jan. 3, 1864), “how I spent my Christmas Day and the Sunday after, those being two holidays: in preparing a scheme, by desire of Lord de Grey, for employing soldiers in trades.” She wrote a Memorandum on “Methods of Starting an Exhibition (Soldiers' Trades),” and such an exhibition was held at Aldershot in the summer of 1864.[55] Whenever there was a difficulty to be overcome, or an opportunity to be seized, Miss Nightingale was appealed to. For instance, there was a fight for a certain disused Iron House at Aldershot. Miss Nightingale's party (supported at the War Office) wanted it for a Men's Recreation Room; the Horse Guards wanted it for an Officers' Club. A promise had already been given in favour of the former, but Sir George Lewis was wavering. “Lord de Grey thinks,” wrote Captain Galton (April 29, 1862), “that the best course for the Iron House is for Sir H. Verney to ask Sir G. L. in the House about it, alluding to his former promise, and if it could be arranged that Monckton Milnes, Gen. Lindsay, or any other persons could cheer or support the proposals, it would pledge Sir G. L. to act at once.” Miss Nightingale set her parliamentary friends to work, and the fight for the Iron House was won. Lord de Grey succeeded in getting a vote on the Estimates for the encouragement of such places. Miss Nightingale revised for him a set of Regulations for Reading-Rooms. She also, at his request, drew up (in concert with Captain Pilkington Jackson) an inventory of the appropriate furniture and other fitments. Her zeal in this matter was known abroad; at Montreal and Halifax and Gibraltar commanding-officers who were trying to start or develop instructions of the kind applied to her. She often succeeded in obtaining War Office grants for them, and these she supplemented by gifts of her own. No inconsiderable portion of her resources at this time went in subscriptions of this sort, either in money or in kind (carpentering equipment, bagatelle boards, books, prints, and the like). It is pleasant to read the letters in which the non-commissioned officers and men of regiments, which had been served by Miss Nightingale in the Crimea, sent thanks, through their commanding officers, to “that noble lady for her continued interest in the welfare of the British soldiers.”
It was a cause of great pleasure to Miss Nightingale that in 1864 her old friend of the Scutari days, General Storks, who had encouraged her there in work of this kind,[56] was appointed to the command at Malta. “I am very grateful to you,” he wrote (Nov. 10), “for seeing me the other day, and can only express the great gratification I experienced on that occasion. I can never forget the time when I was associated with you in the great work which has produced such satisfactory results, and for which the whole army will ever thank you. When one reflects on the condition of the soldier ten years ago and what it is now, there is cause for wonder at the difficulties you have overcome, and the results you have achieved.… (Nov. 18.) All the arrangements contemplated at Malta, both legislative (if necessary) and administrative, shall be submitted for your consideration and approval in draft before they are acted upon, and I need not say how grateful I shall be for your kind assistance.” In later years Miss Nightingale took a friendly interest in the Soldiers' Institute at Portsmouth, founded by Miss Sarah Robinson. A meeting was held in its support at the Mansion House in 1877, at which Lord Wolseley presided, and a letter from Miss Nightingale was read. “If you knew,” she said, “as I do (or once did), the difference between our soldiers cared for in body, mind, and morals, and our soldiers uncared for—the last, ‘hell's carnival’ (the words are not my own), the first, the finest fellows of God's making; if you knew how troops immediately on landing are beset with invitations to bad of all kinds, you would hasten to supply them with invitations to, and means for, good of all kinds: remembering that the soldier is of all men the man whose life is made for him by the necessities of his Service. We may not hope to make ‘saints’ of all, but we can make men of them instead of brutes. If you knew these things as I do, you would forgive me for asking you, if my poor name may still be that of the soldiers' ever faithful servant, to support Miss Robinson's work in making men of them at Portsmouth, the place of all others of temptation to be brutes.”