All the active interests of her life still occupied her. She interested herself closely in the progress of sanitary reform in India, and it was not till 1906 that her secretary had to inform the India Office that Sanitary Papers could no longer usefully be forwarded to her. Lord Elgin, who succeeded Lord Lansdowne as Viceroy in 1894, had sent his private secretary, Sir Henry Babington Smith, to call upon her, and through him she had still corresponded with the Governor-General. Her days of vigorous campaigning were over; she became more reconciled, as she grew older, to those “periods of Indian cosmogony” of which Lord Salisbury, in the years of her impatience, had reminded her. She realized more fully than before that in India the progress of sanitary education must be slow. In 1898 she received the Aga Khan. “A most interesting man,” she said in her note of the interview; “but you could never teach him sanitation. I never understood before how really impossible it is for an Eastern to care for material things. I told him as well as I could all the differences both in town and in country during my life. Do you think you are improving? he asked. By improving he meant Believing more in God. To him sanitation is unreal and superstitious; religion, spirituality, is the only real thing.” And, besides, Miss Nightingale had now to accept limitations in what she could any longer hope to effect. These limitations, and the work within them which she still was able to do, are touched upon in a piece from her pen in 1896.[247] “I am painfully aware how difficult, how almost impossible, it is for any one at a great distance to do anything to help forward a movement requiring unremitting labour and supervision on the spot. But it is my privilege to meet in England from time to time Indian friends who are heartily desirous of obtaining for their poorer fellow-countrymen the benefits which, through sanitary science, are gradually being extended to the masses here, both in town and country, and which are doing so much to promote their health and happiness. So I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.” And she went on to describe the steps which her friend Mr. Malabari was taking to promote sanitary education, and even to institute Health Missionaries, in selected districts of Rural India. The Government of India was co-operating to some extent in such work. In a Paper written in 1894[248] she tendered “cordial acknowledgments to Lord Cross, Lord Kimberley, and Mr. Fowler, the successive Secretaries of State for India, also to Lord Lansdowne and Lord Elgin, the Viceroys, for the personal interest they have shown” in the matter of Village Sanitation. She especially commended the practical and helpful spirit shown in the Government of India's Dispatch of March 1895 instituting “Village Sanitary Inspection Books.”
III
In the Army, too, Miss Nightingale continued to take a lively interest, and Sir Douglas Galton was still within—not always instant—call to give her information or advice:—
(Miss Nightingale to Sir Douglas Galton.) 10 South Street, Nov. 24 [1895]. Oh you Turk, oh you rascal, Sir Douglas, not to tell me that you were in London, not to reward me for my good resolution in not troubling you. I would have asked but few questions, but these called for haste. (i.) Most important: How the troops for Kumassi are to be supplied with water, day and night, fit to drink? Spirit ration only as medicine? Are they to have salt pork and beef? Then about their shoes, stockings, and boots? Are these things now recognized at Head Quarters? Probably I am disquieting myself in vain. Lord Lansdowne is so overwhelmed with amateur schemes for W. O. reform—not that I am in that line of business now at all; but I do not like to write to him just now. (ii.) Barracks at Newcastle-on-Tyne, depot where 5th Fusiliers are quartered, said to be[407] in an awful state of bad drainage: not denied, but remedy “would cost too much.” I know nothing of it personally. “Ladies Sanitary Association” dying to interfere. Sir Thomas Crawford dead, or I should have asked his advice. (iii.) We have another Nurse (a Sister of St. Thomas's) going out to India to join the Army Nursing Staff. Three are going out in three ships—they don't know where—each goes alone. (The I.O. sends them out like the famous pair of Painted Marmots who came over in three ships, on the crust of a twopenny loaf which served them for provisions during the voyage.) Mine asks me for an Army Medical Book. Don't misunderstand: the Nurses must not know anything about anything, to be looked well on by the Doctors, whose treatment is, I believe, what it was 40 years ago. But if there is a book which could put her up to things, not excepting the terrible increase of the vicious disease, do recommend it me if you can.
In 1895 came the reluctant retirement of the Duke of Cambridge from the post of Commander-in-Chief which he had held for nearly fifty years, and Sir Douglas suggested to Miss Nightingale that the old soldier might be pleased by a letter from her. “I should never have thought that myself,” she said; but she had a soft place in her heart for the Duke, as we have seen,[249] and she took kindly to the suggestion. She sent a sympathetic letter in which, as an old servant of the soldiers herself, she ventured to thank the Duke for his many services to the British Army. “I have had such a very nice answer,” she told Sir Douglas. The terms in which the Duke replied (Oct. 1) show that Miss Nightingale's kindly compliments had brought some balm to him in his “great grief and sorrow.”
One of Miss Nightingale's latest interventions in administrative affairs was an urgent plea for improvement in the barracks at Hong-Kong, about which she had received private information in connection with the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1896. She prepared a careful summary of the case, and through Sir Douglas Galton made representations both to the War Office (Sir Evelyn Wood) and to the Colonial Office (Mr. Chamberlain). Sir Evelyn Wood, I feel sure, must at any rate have listened attentively to what she had to say. In 1898 he gave an appointment to a godson of hers[250] and told her with what pleasure he had done so “as a patient of yours in 1856.” As for the Colonial Office, she noted a wise saw which some one told her: “If you get a private reply, the thing is done; if an official reply, all is up.” Her reply was official, but nevertheless something was done; though not, I think, all that she wanted. Another matter which much occupied Miss Nightingale's mind at this time was the effect of the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, especially in connection with India. In 1896–97 a Departmental Committee was appointed to report upon the facts, and there was much discussion. Miss Nightingale was besieged by both sides for her opinion. She had found reason in the facts for some modification of her former opinions.[251] She was still opposed to the complete reintroduction of the old system, but she thought, on close examination of the facts, that the balance of advantage, moral and physical, lay with some amount of sanitary precaution. She signed, with a reservation,[252] a memorial promoted by Princess Christian, Lady Jeune, and others, “expressing our anxious hope that effectual measures will be taken to check the spread of contagious diseases among our soldiers, especially in India.” There was much abuse of Miss Nightingale, and some praying over her for such “backsliding.” It was in connection with this matter that she wrote a characteristic comment upon one of her friends: “She does not want to hear facts; she wants to be enthusiastic.”
Study of the facts, forethought, good administration: these were the things which constantly occupied Miss Nightingale's mind in relation to military, as to other, affairs. They were the things which had been indelibly impressed upon her by the Crimean War. In the year of the Diamond Jubilee, the enterprising Mr. Kiralfy bethought himself of a Victorian Era Exhibition, in which one section should be devoted to Nursing. Great ladies took up the idea, and Miss Nightingale was besieged from many quarters to let herself be “represented” by photographs, busts, autographs, and “relics of the Crimean War.” Miss Nightingale at the first attack was in her most withering vein. “Oh the absurdity of people,” she wrote, “and the vulgarity! The ‘relics,’ the ‘representations’ of the Crimean War! What are they? They are, first, the tremendous lessons we have had to learn from its tremendous blunders and ignorances. And next they are Trained Nurses and the progress of Hygiene. These are the ‘representations’ of the Crimean War. And I will not give my foolish Portrait (which I have not got) or anything else as ‘relics’ of the Crimea. It is too ridiculous. You don't judge even of the victuals inside a public-house by the sign outside. I won't be made a sign at an Exhibition. Think of Sidney Herbert's splendid Royal Commissions which struck the keynote of progress in the British Army! Think of the unwearied toil of the Sanitarians! And you ask me for the photograph of a rat! and at the moment too when there is the Plague at Bombay!” But having delivered her mind in some letters to this effect, Miss Nightingale let her heart be persuaded. Lady Wantage, whom she held in affectionate admiration, climbed the stairs in South Street to press the suit in person, and Miss Nightingale surrendered. “Lady Wantage was so charming,” she wrote, half-ashamed of the surrender, “and she wouldn't ‘take’ when I went off upon Royal Commissions et id genus omne, and she stuck to her point and she was so gracious and she is such a very good woman.” So the “bust of Florence Nightingale” was lent, and her old “Crimean carriage,” brought down from a loft in the country, was patched up to serve as a “relic.” A distinguished writer (but he was a humorist) has averred that he once saw an Italian organ-grinder on his knees before a shop-window in St. Martin's Lane, having taken a dentist's showcase for relics of the saints. That was perhaps pushing things a little far; but “hope in the hem of the garment” is deeply rooted in men's hearts. “We want something to love,” said one of Miss Nightingale's friends in supporting Lady Wantage's petition, “and one cannot love Royal Commissions.” The Crimean relic served. At the Exhibition an old soldier was seen to go up to the carriage and kiss it. The bust was also bedecked. “Now I must ask you,” wrote Miss Nightingale to her cousin Louis (Oct. 16, 1897), when the Exhibition was to be closed, “about my bust. (Here I stop to utter a great many bad words, not fit to put on paper. I also utter a pious wish that the bust may be smashed.) I should not have remembered it, but that I am told somebody came every day to dress it with fresh flowers. I utter a pious wish that that person may be saved. You (for I know not what sins), it appears, are my ‘man of business.’ What is to be done about that bust?” Miss Nightingale's private meditations were the more earnest for her compliance in what she regarded as a mere triviality. The Exhibition was to her an occasion for giving thanks to God. “How inefficient I was in the Crimea! Yet He has raised up Trained Nursing from it!”
Memories of the Crimea were much in Miss Nightingale's mind during these years. On Waterloo Day, 1898, she made an interesting note:—
What an administrator was the Duke! He chose the ground for the battle—he, not the enemy. By his constructive arrangements, having forced them to accept the ground he chose, he, who had no staff fit to help him, supervised everything himself. He made each Corps lie down on the ground he had chosen for it the next day; the ammunition each would require was conveyed to it under his own orders (how many a battle has been lost from want of ammunition!); he provided for every possible contingency. Nothing was neglected, nothing lost, nothing failed. And so he delivered Europe from the greatest military genius the world has seen. How different was the Duke from Lord Raglan, excepting that both were honourable gentlemen! Lord Raglan was told in a letter by a chance Doctor, a volunteer, a civilian, a man whom nobody had ever heard of, that if the men were not better hutted, better fed, better clothed, in a few weeks he would have no army at all. Lord Raglan rode down at once alone with the exception of a single Orderly, and got off his horse and went into his informant's tent and said, “You know I could try you by Court Martial for this letter.” He answered, “My Lord, that is just what I want. Then the truth will come out. What signifies what becomes of me? But will you ride round first alone just as you are now at once and see whether what I have[411] said is true?” Lord Raglan did so, and found that it was within the truth. And so the Army was saved. The men were dying of scurvy from salt meat; but the shores of the Euxine were crowded with cattle.
The outbreak of war in South Africa led her thoughts to another interest which had much occupied her at Scutari—the better employment of the soldier in peace:—