Miss Nightingale was much disheartened, but she persevered. She corresponded with everybody of importance whom she could hope to influence. With Lord Lytton, who had succeeded Lord Northbrook as Viceroy in 1876, she was not acquainted; and Lord Beaconsfield she never approached, except on another matter, and then without any encouragement on his part.[171] In April 1878 Lord Salisbury became Foreign Secretary, and was succeeded at the India Office by Mr. Gathorne-Hardy (Lord Cranbrook), Mr. Edward Stanhope becoming Under-Secretary. Mr. Stanhope came to see her (June 1878); and in the following year she sent him the figures of mortality in the last Indian famine, which she had compiled with great labour from various sources of information, and correspondence ensued. She saw and corresponded largely with Sir James Caird, the English representative on the Famine Commission. She tried to incense Lord Houghton on the subject of Indian grievances. She saw and corresponded with Mr. Fawcett. She saw Mr. Bright. She kept up a large and regular correspondence with officials in India. She supplied materials for lectures in England; and, with skilled assistance, she had some maps drawn and engraved, to show the principal works which might be constructed. These maps did service at lectures; and Miss Nightingale also wrote repeatedly in newspapers and magazines—heralding “water-arrivals,”[172] pointing out districts which famine had not visited owing to previous irrigation, and others where similar works might be expected to prevent famine in future; comparing the cost of relief and prevention; urging the importance of extending education; calling attention to oppression in forms of land-tenure and by money-lenders; and generally seeking to arouse public interest at home in the life and sufferings of the voiceless millions in India.
The piece by Miss Nightingale which attracted most attention was an article on “The People of India” in the Nineteenth Century for October 1878. Sir James Knowles's magazine was then in the early days of its influence, and he gave the first place to this article, in which Miss Nightingale administered a wholesome shock to British complacency. “We do not care for the people of India,” she exclaimed. “The saddest sight in the world” was to be seen in the British Empire; it was the condition of the Indian peasant. She gave pitiable facts and figures of Indian famines, and passed on to describe in more detail the evils of usury in the Bombay Deccan. “I cannot tell you,” she wrote to a correspondent in the following year,[173] “the intense interest that I take in the subject: how to raise the indebted poor cultivators of India out of their wretched bondage of poverty, whether by monts de piété, by some National Bank, such as you propose, by some co-operative system, or by all or any of such means.” Miss Nightingale's article was received as a kind of manifesto by those who sympathized with her point of view, and the publication brought a large accession to her Indian correspondence. In official circles it caused some flutter. “I have read your article,” wrote a friend in the India Office (Aug. 8), “with the greatest interest and admiration. The official mind is much disturbed. I overheard a conversation between two magnates (not in the present Government) in which the article was described as a shriek, and the question was whether something could not be done to counteract the impression.” Lord Northbrook, after reading the article, sent to Miss Nightingale an elaborate criticism, not traversing her case in all points, but pleading that she had exaggerated the shadows. With Lord Salisbury's successor at the India Office there was the following correspondence:
(Miss Nightingale to Lord Cranbrook.) August 10 [1878]. Dear Lord Cranbrook—Very meekly I venture to send you a poor little article of mine on the People of India in the Nineteenth Century. I hope if you read it you will not call it a shriek (I am astonished at my own moderation). I am not so troublesome as to expect that you can find time to read it, but the India Office has untold treasures (which it does not know itself) in Reports on these subjects which will engage your busy time; and especially the Deccan Riots Commission Report, on the relation of the ryots and the extortionate money-lenders in the Bombay Deccan, will, I am sure, call for your attention. Can there be any private enterprise in trade or commerce, in manufacture, or in new interests, when to money-lenders are guaranteed by our own Courts the profits, the enormous and easy profits, which no enterprise of the kind that India most wants can rival? What are the practical remedies for extortionate usury in India, and principally in the Bombay Deccan? The Bill now before the Legislature at Simla does not seem to promise much. Does it? The whole subject is, I know, before you. Pray believe me (with some wonder at my own audacity), ever your faithful and grateful servant, Florence Nightingale.
(Lord Cranbrook to Miss Nightingale.) India Office, August 13 [1878]. Dear Miss Nightingale—Having been out of town for two days your note only reached me this morning. I read your article last week with much interest; but, without underrating the griefs of India, I think you generalise too much from one locality. Nevertheless there is enough to stir the heart and mind in search of remedies for admitted evils.—Yours very sincerely, Cranbrook.
The Secretary of State wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, in much the same sense; calling his attention to Miss Nightingale's article, saying that she had generalized too much, but adding, “I shall be truly glad if your legislation can afford a remedy.”[174] The Viceroyalty of Lord Lytton was more famous, however, for the forward policy in Afghanistan than for internal reforms. Miss Nightingale, as a disciple of Lord Lawrence, was wholly opposed to an aggressive policy which, moreover, had the effect of causing retrenchment in all departments except the military.
VI
Miss Nightingale in her propagandist zeal now turned to Mr. Gladstone. She made an article of his, called “Friends and Foes of Russia,” which appeared in the Nineteenth Century (January 1879), the occasion of a letter to him. In this article he had incidentally referred to the loss of “1,400,000 lives” in the last Indian famine. She pointed out to him that his estimate was far below the truth, and she sought to enlist him in a crusade for the Indian causes dear to her heart:—
(Mr. Gladstone to Miss Nightingale.) Hawarden, Jan. 26 [1879]. How many years have elapsed since your name used to sound daily in my ears, and how many sad events, events of varied sadness, have happened in the very place where I used to hear it! All through this Eastern controversy, the most painful of my life, it has been a consolation to know that I was in sympathy with you—especially I remember your most striking declaration about the war against Turkey. I am glad that you approve of my article on the Friends and Foes of Russia, glad that the error you notice is one of under-statement. I had not the means of complete reference when I sent off the sheets, and 1,400,000 seemed to me so awful that I trembled lest I should be over-stating. The first correction I received put four millions—and now you raise it higher still.[175] The Indian question under most vicious handling is growing gigantic and most perilous. Depend on it I will do what I can in it: but I fear this must be little. I fear that—apart from other reasons weighty enough—my taking a leading part in it would at once poison its atmosphere, now that it has come to be a main ground of the controversy between Government and Opposition. When I dealt with the Vernacular Press Act last year, there was no Indian controversy, and I took all the care in my power not to treat it as a contentious question. All this is now changed: and whatever I recommend about India the Tories will oppose. You can hardly be aware[293] of the extraordinary degree in which prejudice and passion have gathered round my very name (as well, I am bound to say, as favour and affection) since the Eastern Question came up. Whether by my fault or not, I can hardly say: but such is the fact. In the line I have followed I must steadily persist to the end of the conflict; but I have all along foreseen the likelihood that it would probably disable me, even if age and other circumstances did not, for rendering any other serious public service in the way of acting, which, it must always be remembered, is so different from that of objecting and censuring.… The whole Indian question will, however, force itself forward, and there will be plenty of hands to deal with it. Mr. Bright is coming here in two days, and I hope to have full conversation with him about it. Believe me, with warm regard and respect, sincerely yours, W. E. Gladstone.
Miss Nightingale continued the correspondence, and presently Mr. Gladstone called upon her to talk over Indian affairs, which were now beginning to assume some importance in his general campaign against the policy of Lord Beaconsfield. Mr. Gladstone's visit was in May. On June 26 Lord Lawrence died, and Miss Nightingale was deeply moved:—
(Miss Nightingale to Mr. Gladstone.) July 6 [1879]. I see you were at Lord Lawrence's funeral yesterday, and you may care to hear the story of his last days from one who has been privileged to know and serve with two such men as Sidney Herbert and John Lawrence—very different, but alike in the “one thing needful”—the serving with all their souls and minds and without a thought of self their high ideal of right. Lord Lawrence's last years were spent in work: he did not read, he studied; though almost blind, he waded with the help of a Private Secretary (who was a lady[176]) thro' piles of blue books—chiefly, but not wholly Indian—bringing the weight of his unrivalled experience to bear upon them. Up to Tuesday night, tho' very ill (he died on Friday), he worked. On the Thursday before, he had spoken in the House of Lords on the Indian Finance question. The disease, tedious and trying, of which he died, was brought on by the London School Board work. He used to come home quite exhausted, saying that he could have done the thing himself in half-an-hour; yet having entered, with a patience very foreign, to his nature, into all the niggling crotchets of everybody on the Board. He gave the impression, I believe,[294] of sternness in public, but the tenderness and the playfulness of his intercourse in private were beyond a woman's tenderness. He was a man of iron; he had gone thro' 40 years of Indian life, in times of danger, toil, and crisis; had been brought seven times to the brink of the grave; and had weathered it all—to die of a School Board at last! He had the blue eye, and the expression in it (before his operation), of a girl of 16, and the massive brow and head of a General of Nations rather than of Armies.… I received a letter from him the day after his death—dictated, but signed by himself, sending me some recent Indian Reports—private papers—which he had read and wished me to read—all marked and the page turned down where he had left off. This was his legacy. O that I could do something for India for which he lived and died! The simplicity of the man could not be surpassed—the unselfishness, the firmness. It was always, “Is it right?” If it was, it was done. It was the same thing: its being right and its being done.… A photograph was taken a few hours after death. If it had been a sketch by Carracci, or Leonardo, or Michael Angelo, we should have said, How far Art transcends Nature. In the holiest pictures of the Old Masters, I have never seen anything so beautiful or so holy. The lips are slightly parted (like those of a child in a rapture of joy on first awakening), with a child-like joy at entering into the presence of the Heavenly Father whom he had served so nobly and so humbly. The poor eyes are looking down, but as if they were looking inward into the soul to realize the rapture—like Milton's “And joy shall overtake him like a flood.” The face is worn. I think sometimes the youth, the physical beauty in the old Italian pictures of Christ do not give the full meaning of “it behoved Him to have suffered these things that He might enter into His glory”; or else, like Titian's “Moneta,” it is the mere ascetic. But here it was the joy arising out of the long trial, the Cross out of which came the Crown. The expression was that of the winged soul, the child-soul as in the Egyptian tomb-paintings, rising somehow without motion (spiritually) out of the worn-out body. (He said on the Sunday, “I can't tell you how I feel: I feel worn out.”) All India will feel his loss. No one now living knows what he did there—in private, I mean, as well as in public—the raising of the people by individuals as well as by Institutions—the letters and messages from Sikhs to him, the Indian gentlemen who used to come to see him here and treated him as their father. The little curs here have barked and bit round the heels of the old lion. He heard them but he heeded not. And now he is gone to undertake yet greater labours, to bless more worlds in the service of God. Lady Lawrence wished to give every one something which had belonged to his[295] personal use. But it was found he had nothing. There were some old clothes, and a great many boots, patched; but nothing else, not even a pin, except his watch, 20 years old, and his walking-stick, which she kept. The lady who served as his secretary after his blindness had his old shoe-horn, and told me this story with an infinite relish of its beauty. It was so characteristic of him. Pardon me if I have taken up your time with my thoughts of John Lawrence. I felt as if I were paying him a last tribute in commending his memory to you.