[170] E.g. the “Buckingham Canal,” connecting the canals N. and S. of Madras (made as a Famine Relief work, after being “under consideration” for a quarter of a century). Miss Nightingale celebrated this tardy achievement in an article in the press: see Bibliography A, No. 99.
[171] In 1879 the Registrar-General retired, and Miss Nightingale wrote to Lord Beaconsfield urging the claims of Dr. Farr to the post. As the greatest of English statisticians, and as the senior in the Registrar-General's office, he would have been the right man, but Lord Beaconsfield gave the appointment to Sir Brydges Henniker. Dr. Farr thereupon retired from the Public Service. In the following year he was made C.B. (at Miss Nightingale's instance, through Sir Stafford Northcote).
[172] The title of an article by Miss Nightingale in Good Words. For it, and other Indian writings, see Bibliography A., Nos. 82, 84, 90, 92, 97–100.
[173] Mr. Francis William Fox; he had sent to her his pamphlet on Reform in the Administration of India, suggesting inter alia a National Agricultural Bank. Miss Nightingale's letter of three sheets (June 18, 1879) is eloquent both of her profound knowledge of Indian conditions and of her enthusiastic interest in Indian problems.
[174] The letter to Lord Lytton is printed in vol. ii. p. 80 of Mr. A. E. Gathorne-Hardy's Memoir of Lord Cranbrook (1910).
[175] The India Office gave 1,250,000 as the total of deaths in the Famine. Mr. Caird, after investigating the question in India, gave 4,050,000 as his estimate. Miss Nightingale's was 5 to 6 millions. “I begin to think now,” wrote Sir Louis Mallet (March 10, 1879) when Mr. Caird's estimate was made, “that your ‘Shriek'’ was a better expression of the truth than any other utterance.”
[176] Miss Gaster.
[177] In General Sir Arthur Cotton: His Life and Work, by his daughter, Lady Hope.
[178] See The Irrigation Works of India, by Robert Burton Buckley, C.S.I., Chief Engineer, Indian Public Works Department (retired), second edition, 1905. This is an exhaustive work on the subject, with maps, woodcuts, and statistics (such as Miss Nightingale had asked Lord Salisbury to obtain). An account of some later irrigation works may be found in the Engineering Supplement of the Times, May 21, 1913.
[179] Foreshadowed in Lord Curzon's “Statement on Famine” in the Legislative Council, Simla, October 19, 1900: see Speeches of Lord Curzon (Calcutta, 1900), vol. ii. pp. 25–27.