She had not waited for the actual appointment of the Commission to begin collecting, preparing, and digesting evidence for it. Her first concern was to draft a circular of inquiry which should be sent to all the Stations in India. It lacked nothing, as will be supposed, in requiring fulness of statistical detail. When she had prepared it, she sent it in proof to Sir John McNeill for his suggestions, asking him also (May 9, 1859) “kindly to give an opinion as to the general direction which the Enquiry should take.” In cases where she was personally acquainted with Governors or high military or medical officers in India, she wrote soliciting their good offices. Sir Charles Trevelyan, then Governor of Madras, promised cordial co-operation. Then she and Dr. Farr set to work on such statistical records as were obtainable from the East India House. There is a bundle of correspondence amongst her Papers relating to the difficulties she encountered, and surmounted, in obtaining official sanction for clerical work in this regard. Dr. Farr's appetite for statistics was as insatiable as hers, and she had taken means to lay in ample supplies:—

(Miss Nightingale to Dr. Farr.) Highgate, June 2, [1859]. Your Commission was gazetted on May 31 and Mr. Herbert is in town. As it will be necessary to obtain the Statistics of Sickness, Mortality, and Invaliding of the Indian Army from the Medical Boards there, would not some of the proposed forms for the Army Medical Dep. be better than any other, filled up for each station with the Diseases annually for a period say of 10 years? Or would it be necessary to provide others? We must, of course, have the most minute Statistics—both for Soldiers and Officers in the Queen's, Company's and native troops. And these we should get by this method for 10 years. I suppose the Medical Boards have the Presidency Medical Book Records. Would it be necessary to get the Returns for each Corps separately? Would it not be important to get the ages—age and time of service at Death or Invaliding?

Hampstead, Dec. 6 [1859]. In consequence of your intemperate desire to have the Indian Medical Service Regulations, we have applied at the Great House for copies. And the answer is that they have only one Office copy, and if we want any we must send to India. Knowing their weakness, we had (in our “Queries”) previously sent to two hundred Stations in India for copies of all “Regulations,” and we hope the result will satisfy your literary appetite.

Dr. Farr, then, was being fed with statistics. Officials in India were being kept busy with forms to be filled up, and with the preparation of other written evidence. In November 1859 the Commission began taking oral evidence in London, but this was a comparatively minor part of its labours, and during 1860 no public sittings were held. They were resumed in 1861. Lord Stanley had then succeeded Mr. Herbert in the chair, but Miss Nightingale's grip upon the Commission was not relaxed. Two of the Commissioners, Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Farr, were in close touch with her. The former was with her almost every day; the latter asked her to send him questions which he should put to witnesses. As in the case of the former Royal Commission, so now Miss Nightingale saw some of the witnesses before they gave their evidence. Among her visitors in this sort was Sir John Lawrence, as already mentioned, and a friendship began which had important consequences. Seeing that everything was thus in good train, Miss Nightingale was able during the years 1859–60–61 to devote her main work to those other matters with which we have been concerned in preceding Parts. In 1862, her main interest was in the Indian Commission, and the amount of work which she gave to it during 1862–1863 was enormous.

Her manner of life during these years was similar to that described in a previous chapter. Work for the Commission required her constant attendance in London or within easy distance of it. In 1862 she lived either in a hotel (Peary's, 31 Dover Street), a hired house (9 Chesterfield Street), or Sir Harry Verney's house in South Street. During August and September she took a house in Oak Hill Park, Hampstead. In 1863 she divided her time between Hampstead, hired houses in Cleveland Row, and Sir Harry Verney's. Her affectionate friend, Mrs. Sutherland, did all the house-hunting for her. Cleveland Row was selected for its nearness to the War Office; and the convenience of the site so far constrained Dr. Sutherland's sanitary conscience that he declared Cleveland Row to be “the airiest place in London.”

III

Few of my readers have come to close quarters, I suppose, with the Indian Sanitary Commission's Report. It is a very formidable thing, consisting of two bulky volumes, containing respectively 1069 and 959 pages—in all 2028 pages, mostly in small print. Of this mountainous mass, the greater part bears in one way or another the impress of Miss Nightingale. It was she, in the first place, as already stated, who drafted the questions which were sent to every military station in India. The replies, signed in each case by the commanding officer, the engineer officer, and the medical officer, occupy the whole of the second volume. The replies, as they came in from India, were sent to her to analyse. There were van-loads of them, she said, which cost her £4:10s. to move whenever she changed houses. With the analysis made by her and Dr. Sutherland, these replies anticipated, as she afterwards noted,[10] the Statistical Survey of India which Lord Mayo ordered ten years later. It was said at the time that such a complete picture of life in India, both British and native, was contained in no other book in existence. In October 1861 she was formally requested by the Commission to submit remarks on these Stational Reports. She had completed the task by August 1862. The “Observations by Miss Nightingale,” which occupy twenty-three pages of the Report, are among the most remarkable of her Works, and in their results among the most beneficent. They are also extremely readable; and to make them more instructive, she included a number of woodcuts illustrating, not only Indian hospitals and barracks, but native customs in connection with water-supply and drainage.[11] The Treasury—horrified perhaps at the idea of popularizing a Blue-book—made some demur to the cost, but Miss Nightingale was allowed to solve the difficulty by paying for the printing, as well as for the illustrations, out of her private purse.

She made full use of the opening which the niggardliness of the Treasury gave her. She hurried the printers, and had a large number of her “Observations” struck off for private use. “I have looked once more,” wrote Lord Stanley (Nov. 21), “through your Remarks, and like them better the oftener I read them. The style alone (apart from the authority which your name carries with it) will ensure their being studied by many who know nothing of the subject. They will admirably relieve the dryness of our official Report. I hope every Indian and English newspaper will reprint them, in extracts at least. They must be circulated with our Report, separately from the too voluminous mass of evidence which we can't help appending. You have added one more to your many and invaluable services in the cause.” “Miss Nightingale's Paper,” wrote Dr. Farr to Dr. Sutherland (Dec. 1), “is a masterpiece, in her best style; and will rile the enemy very considerable—all for his good, poor creature.”[12] But it was not only among the Commissioners that she circulated her Paper. She sent it confidentially to many of her influential friends. “The picture is terrible,” wrote Sir John McNeill (Aug. 9), “but it is all true. There is no one statement from beginning to end that I feel disposed to question, and there are many which my own observation and experience enable me to confirm.” A copy went to John Stuart Mill, who was much pleased with the “Observations,” and was certain that “the publication of them would do vast good.” Miss Nightingale had a copy bound for the Queen, and sent it—as also a copy of her Paper on Sidney Herbert—through Sir James Clark, who marked passages for the Queen to read. Her Majesty, he found from conversation, had not confined her reading to those passages. The Queen in return sent a copy of her Collection of Prince Albert's Speeches. “The Queen,” wrote Miss Nightingale to M. Mohl (Feb. 14, 1863), “has sent me her book with such a touching inscription. She always reminds me of the Greek chorus with her hands clasped above her head wailing out her irrepressible despair.”[13] Miss Nightingale sent her “Observations” also to Sir John Lawrence, who studied them closely, and corresponded with her on the subject. Another copy went to Sir Charles Trevelyan.[14] “Having,” he wrote (Oct. 31, 1862), “undertaken the duties of Financial Member of the Council of India, I may now be able to give some help in carrying the recommendations of your Commission into practical effect. You must not expect from me as much as Sidney Herbert did, for my power will not be the same. The Governor-General and the local Governors will alone be in that position. But I shall do what I can. Perhaps you will send me a copy of your Abstract of the Evidence, and direct my attention to the points of more immediate importance. I shall be obliged for any hints.” Miss Nightingale responded by sending him papers enough to occupy all his time on the voyage. She seems at this time to have entertained some hope that her health would permit her, when the Report was out, to visit India in person; for one of Sir Charles's letters refers to such a visit, and expresses the pleasure which it would give to Lady Trevelyan and himself to receive her as their guest, and in every way to assist her mission. But this was not to be. Her knowledge of India and Indian questions was already great, and presently it became so minute as to encourage a legend that she herself had once been there.[15] But she never saw the country. It is not always either the “life-long resident,” or, on the other hand, “Padgett, M.P.,” who is better qualified than the student to perceive and serve a country's need.

Miss Nightingale's “Observations” form a synopsis of the whole subject. Giving chapter and verse from the Stational reports for each of her statements, she shows, first, that the prevailing diseases were camp diseases such as she had seen in the Crimean War—largely due to the selection of unsuitable sites. Among the causes were Bad Water, Bad Drainage, Filthy Bazaars, Want of Ventilation, and Surface Overcrowding in barrack-huts and sick-wards. Her remarks under these several heads are often characteristically racy. “Where tests have been used, the composition of the water reads like a very intricate prescription, containing nearly all the chlorides, sulphates, nitrates, and carbonates in the pharmacopoeia, besides silica and quantities of animal and vegetable matter, which the reports apparently consider nutritive.” “If the facilities for washing were as great as those for drink, our Indian army would be the cleanest body of men in the world.” “There is no drainage, in any sense in which we understand the word. The reports speak of cesspits as if they were dressingrooms.” “Except where the two Lawrences have been—there one can always recognize their traces—the bazaars are simply in the first savage stage of social savage life.” Under the head of “Overcrowding,” she brings together various instances with figures and woodcuts; she quotes one report which said that the men (300 men per room!) “are generally accommodated in the barrack without inconvenient overcrowding,” and she asks, “What is convenient overcrowding?” “At some stations the floors are of earth, varnished over periodically with cow-dung: a practice borrowed from the natives. Like Mahomet and the mountain, if men won't go to the dunghill, the dunghill, it appears, comes to them.” Her next section, on “Intemperance,” is scathing. In India, as at home,[16] it was a current opinion of the time that the soldier is by nature a drunken animal; the only question seemed to be as to how he had better get drunk. At one station, though the men were reported as “mostly temperate,” she found that on a ten years' average one man in three was admitted into hospital directly from drink. “The men are killed by liver disease on canteen spirits to save them from being killed by liver disease on bazaar spirits. May there not be some middle course whereby the men may be killed by neither?” Under “Diet,” she notes the absurdity of a uniform ration, in amount and quality, in all seasons and climates; and ventures to doubt whether cesspits are desirable adjuncts of kitchens. Her next head is “Want of Occupation and Exercise”—a fruitful source of vice and disease. It is a most interesting chapter, full of valuable hints and illustrated by an amusing drawing, sent to her by Colonel Young, of “Daily Means of Occupation and Amusement passim.” Here, as in much else of Miss Nightingale's work, she collected all the better opinions; she picked out from the returns before her any hopeful experiments; enlarged upon them, and drove the moral home. Her chapter on “Indian Hospitals” is naturally very full and detailed. She discusses the prevalent structural defects; suggests improvements in the internal arrangements; and notes that there were “neither trained orderlies nor female nurses.” On the subject of “Hill Stations,” Miss Nightingale's “Observations” show a fear lest too much reliance should be placed upon their superior salubrity. She quotes instances of terrible sanitary defects on hill stations, and enforces the moral that “the salvation of the Indian army must be brought about by sanitary measures everywhere.” After discussing “Native Towns,” “Soldiers' Wives,” and “Statistics,” Miss Nightingale insisted generally on the importance of instituting a proper system of sanitary service in India. Henceforth, to the end almost of her long life, she regarded herself, and in large measure was able to act, as a sanitary servant to the army and peoples of India.

Miss Nightingale's “Observations” were only part of her share in the labours of the Commission. They were followed in the Report by an Abstract, arranged under Presidencies, of the Returns on which the “Observations” were founded. This analysis, occupying nearly a hundred pages, was drawn up, as already stated, by Miss Nightingale and Dr. Sutherland. The manuscript of it, preserved amongst her papers, is mainly in her handwriting. And she did much more, as will presently be related.