The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2 of 2

by Sir Edward Tyas Cook

III

As Public Health Missionary for India, Miss Nightingale made the state of the town of Madras a text for constant exhortations. Madras ranked at that time second for unhealthiness among the great cities of India (Delhi being first[168]). Whereas the death-rate in Calcutta and in Bombay was falling, in Madras it was rising.[169] Miss Nightingale, like every other sanitary expert who had examined the facts, ascribed the high rate of mortality to the deplorable state of the drains; and there were Indian officials, both in London and in India, who turned to her in the hope that she might be able to stir up the higher authorities to insist on something being done. Her friend, Mr. Clark, had devised a scheme; either it should be carried out, or a better one should be substituted. On this subject there is a long correspondence amongst her Papers; and as her principal correspondent was Lord Salisbury, it is not devoid of dry humour. Lord Salisbury confessed that the subject was beyond him; all he could clearly ascertain was that there were as many different opinions as there were persons professing to understand it; but he had good news for his correspondent. The next Governor of Madras was to be the Duke of Buckingham, and the Duke had a curious passion for details. He might be expected, it seemed to be suggested, to take to drains like a rat. So Miss Nightingale waited, and presently Lord Salisbury was sent to the Constantinople Conference on the Eastern Question. At Madras nothing had come of the Duke's love of detail; and as soon as Lord Salisbury returned to England, Miss Nightingale returned to the charge. Lord Salisbury sent her memorandum of suggestions to the Duke, and in due course forwarded to her the Duke's reply (of July 24, 1877). The Governor was studying the question closely, and Lord Salisbury hoped that Miss Nightingale would be pleased. True, there was delay; but then, as he had previously written to her, “The period of growth of all projects in India, in point of length, savours much of the periods of Indian cosmogony.” “I think you will be satisfied,” he now wrote (Aug. 22), “that the Governor of Madras is giving his mind very heartily to the question; and that his previous experience, and the kind of observations into which his singular taste for detail has guided him, have given him some special qualifications for coming to a right decision.” And then came what in a postscript to the High Priestess of sanitation might be thought a “blazing indiscretion,” if it were not obviously a piece of teasing: “I was much impressed at Constantinople with the advantage of having no drains at all, but keeping dogs instead.” I am afraid that from the moment of the receipt of this letter Miss Nightingale's opinion of Lord Salisbury fell; but she was not to be shaken off, and, in consultation with Dr. Sutherland (with hints, too, from an Indian official), she sent a reasoned reply to Lord Salisbury, to his jest about the Constantinople dogs (erroneously called scavengers) and all. She had the advantage of knowing all about Constantinople, and the merits of its natural drainage. As for Madras, she thought that there had been “consideration” enough (it had lasted for more than 20 years), and that the Secretary of State ought to insist on action, in which connection she sent various proposals. Lord Salisbury's reply to Miss Nightingale did not appear to be promising. “The indecision of the Madras Government,” he said (Sept. 19), “is partly due to the fact that various authorities have to be consulted, and no orders from the Secretary of State will prevent those authorities from differing. But the real difficulty,” he added, “is money.” It was all that the Madras Government could do to find money for “imperious necessities.” The implication was that the protection of the public health was not an imperious necessity. A rank heresy, this, in Miss Nightingale's eyes. In sending on Lord Salisbury's letter to Dr. Sutherland, her comment was: “And they call me a dangerous man!” To which Dr. Sutherland replied: “So you are! They tell you a thing can't be done, and you won't believe them! It is all nonsense that the Municipality cannot find money to drain with, and no number of letters can make it sense.” Lord Salisbury's action was, however, more favourable to Miss Nightingale than his letter, for it was presently announced in the Madras papers that the Secretary of State had ordered drainage works of some sort to be carried out at once. If this were so, the words “at once” were interpreted with some reference to “the periods of Indian cosmogony.” The scientific drainage of Black Town, the most thickly populated quarter of Madras, was begun in 1882; that of the remainder of the town was in progress twenty-five years.

IV

Miss Nightingale's interest in details of sanitary reform was gradually merged into larger questions. Recurrent Indian famines gave a new turn to her thoughts. “I have been doing sanitary work for India for 18 years,” she explained in a letter to Lord Houghton (Nov. 27, 1877); “but for the last four have been continually struck by this dreadful fact: What is the good of trying to keep people in health if you can't keep them in life? These ryots are being done to death by floods, by drought, by Zemindars, and usurers. You must live in order to be well.” This indisputable proposition appealed strongly to her emotions. “My mind,” she wrote to Mr. Chadwick (Sept. 14, 1877), “is full of the dying Indian children, starved by hundreds of thousands from conditions which have been made for them, in this hideous Indian famine.… How I wish that some one would now get up an agitation in the country—as Mr. Gladstone did as regards Bulgaria—which should say to the country, You shall, as regards Indian famines and the means of preventing them, among which Irrigation and Water Transit must rank foremost; if we had given them water, we should not now have to be giving them bread.” Miss Nightingale had reached this conclusion by herself in 1873, and it was strongly confirmed in the following year. In February 1874 she was moved to write to Sir Arthur Cotton, “the greatest living master,” as she truly called him, “of the Water Question.” Her letter—the letter of one enthusiast to another—greatly delighted the old Anglo-Indian. “If,” he wrote (Feb. 4), “fifty years of hard work and contempt had produced no other return but a letter from you, it would be an honour beyond what I deserve. The plot is now rapidly thickening, and I have not the smallest doubt that your having taken up this great subject will turn the scale. It is impossible for any person not resident in India to conceive the strength of the prejudice in the minds, not only of the civil officials, but of multitudes out of office on both the points of irrigation and navigation in India. I am assured that there is not a single person in high office now in India who is not in his heart opposed to them both. But we have arrived at a most remarkable crisis now, first in the occurrence of this most terrible famine, and, second, in the revolution in the India Office. Lord Salisbury will think for himself in spite of an Indian Council composed—with only the exception of Sir B. Frere—of men of incurable old Indian bias.” Sir Arthur Cotton's inventive genius has left a permanent impress upon India; but he was now en disponibilité, and he was one of those enthusiasts who, when out of office and unable to carry on their plans, conceive the world to be in wilful conspiracy against them. Moreover, in urging the case for canals, he overstated it by too uncompromising a criticism of railways. During ensuing years Sir Arthur Cotton was one of the most voluminous of Miss Nightingale's correspondents. She was fully alive to the faults of manner which hindered the acceptance of his ideas, and from time to time she pleaded with him for more moderation and less asperity. She herself was sometimes blamed, by Mr. Jowett and others, for over-emphasis. She would laughingly wonder in reply what they thought of Sir Arthur Cotton who gave the public “strong alcohol,” in comparison with which anything of hers was but “watered milk.” She had not far pursued her researches into the Irrigation question before she perceived that it was intimately bound up with the Land question. Who was to pay for irrigation? Were the ryots willing to pay a water-rate? Could they pay it? Were not the Zemindars rapacious? Was not the cultivator at the mercy of the usurers? Sir George Campbell was full of such subjects, and Miss Nightingale proceeded, with his assistance, to master the intricacies of Land tenure in various parts of India, and especially of the “Permanent Settlement” in Bengal. One subject led her on to another, and she became deeply interested in the questions of representation, land, education, usury. She became, in short, an Indian Reformer, or an Indian Agitator, at large.

V

Her immediate effort, however, was thrown into the advocacy of Irrigation. In view alike of the poverty of India, and of the ever present danger of famine, she held that it was the duty of the Government to promote Irrigation in every way—by great works as well as small, by wells and tanks as much as by great and small canals—by encouraging private capital as well as by making great national grants and loans. The Indian tax-payer was poor, it was said to her; the way to make him less poor, she replied, was to irrigate his land.

Miss Nightingale began her Irrigation campaign with an appeal to Lord Salisbury, and she approached him on a point which she thought would be common ground. She knew that he was of a scientific turn of mind, and hoped he would agree with her that the first thing needful was to obtain complete and trustworthy statistics. She sent him some tentative figures as to the cost of irrigation works already carried out, and the financial results accruing therefrom, confessing, however, that she had experienced great difficulty in obtaining the figures. “I have been too long on the search for such returns myself,” he replied (May 10, 1875), “not to sympathise with your distress.” He proceeded at some length to enumerate “the difficulties in the way of a really rigorous exhibit,” and to state the questions which seemed to him still unsolved with regard to irrigation in general; for instance, “Is irrigation,” he asked, “the creation or merely the anticipation of fertility? Does it make vegetable wealth, which but for it would never have existed, or does it crowd into a few years the enjoyment of the whole productive power of the soil?” Meanwhile he had her figures submitted to critical annotation at the India Office, directed various Papers to be sent to her, and promised to see whether fuller returns could be obtained. As nothing definite resulted, Miss Nightingale suggested the appointment of a Committee or Commission to investigate and report. The suggestion elicited a characteristic reply from Lord Salisbury. “As for a Commission,” he wrote (Nov. 1, 1875), “I doubt its efficiency. Commissions are very valuable to collect and summarize opinion, and they are often able to decide one or two distinct issues of fact. But they are too unwieldy for the collection and digestion of a great variety of facts and figures. With the best intentions, their work is slow and routinier, and in their report they gloss over the weak places with generalities.… As a rule, administrative force is in the inverse proportion of the number of men who exercise it. One man is twice as strong as two; two men are twice as strong as four. Boards and Commissions are only contrivances for making strong men weak.”

From time to time she jogged Lord Salisbury's elbow, asking whether he had yet been able to obtain trustworthy figures, and beseeching him to initiate a great irrigation policy. “Do not for a moment imagine,” he wrote (Feb. 27, 1876), “that I have forgotten the question. The more I go into it, the deeper the mystery appears. Every one who has a right to entertain an opinion on it vindicates that right by entertaining a different one from his neighbour. General Strachey and Sir Barrow Ellis have been engaged upon the matter for years. Both of these assert with confidence that one set of statements is true, while the Government of India, backed by Mr. Thornton, our excellent Public Works Secretary, assert it with no less confidence to be false.… When I am able to get a little light I will let you know; but as long as my oracles flatly contradict each other, I am not likely to get nearer certainty than I am now.” As Lord Salisbury was disinclined to a Committee of experts, she begged him to procure returns from India, and she drew up a model form of inquiry, on which particulars might be asked of the extent of cultivated land in each district, the amount of land under irrigation, the cost of annual repairs, and so forth, and so forth. Lord Salisbury took the suggestion into consideration, and some returns were called for, but nothing came of it for the time. Miss Nightingale then tried to obtain information in another way. There were, she was told, masses of data in the India Office itself, which only needed analysis and tabulation to yield valuable results. Lord Lawrence had introduced to her Mr. Edward Prinsep (late Settlement Commissioner, Punjab) as a man likely to be helpful in such work. She made friends with him; Sir Louis Mallet gave facilities, and Mr. Prinsep began making researches on Miss Nightingale's behalf. Unfortunately for her success, she had the correctitude to ask Lord Salisbury's permission. Lord Salisbury referred her request to the Revenue Department, who in a solemn minute represented the serious precedent that would be set by allowing an outsider to delve in official archives, and Mr. Prinsep had to discontinue his researches. “You are doubtless aware,” Sir Louis Mallet told her dryly, “that in the India Office opinions diametrically opposed are usually entertained on every subject which is discussed.” There was only one certainty, he added, that any decision taken at one time would be reversed at another. Ultimately a good deal of information was collected by a Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Works in India (1878) and by Famine Commissions. Returns, such as Miss Nightingale asked for, are now regularly made.

Some irrigation works were carried out during these years,[170] but no great forward policy in that direction was instituted. The “forward policy” presently adopted was of a very different sort. The thoughts of the politicians were absorbed in other things; the opinions of the bureaucrats were divided, and there was stringency in Indian finance. If the experts could not agree on the proper basis of estimating the results of irrigation, still less were they at one on the kind of irrigation work that was desirable. Every one was agreed in favour of irrigation “in principle”; but as soon as it became a question of detail, whether in finance or in engineering, there were as many opinions as there were experts. One school said, “Borrow the money and the land will be so enriched that the ryot will be able to pay increased taxation.” Another school retorted, “But he will be squeezed out of existence first; therefore, retrench all round, and wait for better times.” Or, if the financial difficulty were overcome, engineering difficulties were raised. One school said, “Make navigable canals,” but that meant fulness of water in them. Another said, “Make canals primarily for irrigation,” but that meant depletion. And so the controversy continued, with no decided impulse from the men in office. Famines came and went; some works were carried out as a form of “relief”; no great preventive policy was established.