CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXII.India—Correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere—Interest in village girls—The Lamp.

India—Correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere—Interest in village girls—The Lamp.

We come now to Miss Nightingale’s most monumental achievement of all, the reform of sanitary conditions in India—a reform ever widening and developing, branching forth and striking its roots deeper. Her interest in that vast population, that world-old treasury of subtle religious thought and ever-present mystical faith, may perhaps have been in part an inheritance from the Anglo-Indian Governor who was counted in her near ancestry. But there can be little doubt that her ardent and practical desire to improve the conditions of camp life in India began in her intimate care for the soldiers, and her close knowledge of many things unknown to the ordinary English subject. The world-wide freemasonry of the rank and file inour army enabled her to hear while at Scutari much of the life of the army in the vast and distant dominions of Burma and Bengal, and she had that gift for seeing through things to their farthest roots which enabled her to perceive clearly that no mere mending of camp conditions could stay the continual ravages of disease among our men. The evil was deeper and wider, and only as conditions were improved in sanitary matters could the mortality of the army be lessened. She saw, and saw clearly, that the reason children died like flies in India, so that those who loved them best chose the agony of years of parting rather than take the risks, lay not so much in the climate as in the human poisons and putrefactions so carelessly treated and so quickly raised to murder-power by the extreme heat.

Much of this comes out clearly in her letter to Sir Bartle Frere, with whom her first ground of friendship had arisen out of their common interest in sanitary matters.

What manner of man Sir Bartle was may be divined from a letter to him written by Colonel W. F. Marriott, one of the secretaries of theBombay Government, at the time of his leaving Bombay:—

“The scene of your departure stirred me much. That bright evening, the crowd on the pier and shore as the boat put off, the music from theOctavia, as the band played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as we passed, were all typical and impressive by association of ideas. But it was not a shallow sympathy with which I took in all the circumstances. I could divine some of your thoughts. If I felt like Sir Bedivere, left behind ‘among new men, strange faces, other minds,’ you must have felt in some degree like King Arthur in the barge, ‘I have lived my life, and that which I have done may He Himself make pure.’ I do not doubt that you felt that all this ‘mouth honour’ is only worth so far as it is the seal of one’s own approving conscience, and though you could accept it freely as deserved from their lips, yet at that hour you judged your own work hardly. You measured the palpable results with your conceptions and hopes, and were inclined to say, ‘I am no betterthan my fathers.’ But I, judging now calmly and critically, feel—I may say, see—that though the things that seem to have failed be amongst those for which you have taken most pains, yet they are small things compared with the work which has not failed. You have made an impression of earnest human sympathy with the people of this country, which will deepen and expand, so that it will be felt as a perpetual witness against any narrower and less noble conception of our relation to them, permanently raising the moral standard of highest policy towards them; and your name will become a traditional embodiment of a good governor.”[24]

Frere had seen that the filthy condition of many of the roads, after the passing of animals and the failure to cleanse from manure, was of itself a source of poison, though the relation between garbage and disease-bearing flies was then less commonly understood, and he was never tired of urging the making of decent roads; but this,he knew, was only a very small part of the improvements needed.

His correspondence with Miss Nightingale began in 1867, and in that and the five following years they exchanged about one hundred letters, chiefly on sanitary questions.

It was part of her genius always to see and seize her opportunity, and she rightly thought that, as she says in one of her letters, “We might never have such a favourable conjunction of the larger planets again:

“You, who are willing and most able to organize the machinery here; Sir John Lawrence, who is able and willing, provided only he knew what to do; and a Secretary of State who is willing and in earnest. And I believe nothing would bring them to their senses in India more than an annual report of what they have done, with your comments upon it, laid before Parliament.”

In order to set in motion the machinery of a sanitary department for all India, a despatch had to be written, pointing out clearly and concisely what was to be done.

Frere consulted Miss Nightingale at everypoint about this despatch, but spoke of the necessity for some sort of peg to hang it on—“not,” he said, “that the Secretary of State is at all lukewarm, nor, I think, that he has any doubt as to what should be said, or how—that, I think, your memoranda have fixed; the only difficulty is as to the when....

“No governor-general, I believe, since the time of Clive has had such powers and such opportunities, but he fancies the want of progress is owing to some opposing power which does not exist anywhere but in his own imagination.

“He cannot see that perpetual inspection by the admiral of the drill and kit of every sailor is not the way to make the fleet efficient, and he gets disheartened and depressed because he finds that months and years of this squirrel-like activity lead to no real progress.”

The despatch with its accompanying documents went to Miss Nightingale for her remarks before it was sent out. Her commentary was as follows:—

“I find nothing to add or to take away in the memorandum (sanitary). It appears to me quiteperfect in itself—that is, it is quite as much as the enemy will bear, meaning by the enemy—not at all the Government of India in India, still less the Government of India at home, but—that careless and ignorant person called the Devil, who is always walking about taking knowledge out of people’s heads, who said that he was coming to give us the knowledge of good and evil, and who has done just the contrary.“It is a noble paper, an admirable paper—and what a present to make to a government! You have included in it all the great principles—sanitary and administrative—which the country requires. And now you must work, work these points until they are embodied in local works in India. This will not be in our time, for it takes more than a few years to fill a continent with civilization. But I never despair that in God’s good time every man of us will reap the common benefit of obeying all the laws which He has given us for our well-being.“I shall give myself the pleasure of writing to you again about these papers. But I write thisnote merely to say that I don’t think this memorandum requires any addition.“God bless you for it! I think it is a great work.”[25]

“It is a noble paper, an admirable paper—and what a present to make to a government! You have included in it all the great principles—sanitary and administrative—which the country requires. And now you must work, work these points until they are embodied in local works in India. This will not be in our time, for it takes more than a few years to fill a continent with civilization. But I never despair that in God’s good time every man of us will reap the common benefit of obeying all the laws which He has given us for our well-being.

“I shall give myself the pleasure of writing to you again about these papers. But I write thisnote merely to say that I don’t think this memorandum requires any addition.

“God bless you for it! I think it is a great work.”[25]

Itwasa great work, and it might have been delayed for scores of years, with a yearly unnecessary waste of thousands of lives, if she had not initiated it.

Florence Nightingale in her Last Days.(From a drawing from memory. Copyright A. Rischgitz.)

Florence Nightingale in her Last Days.

(From a drawing from memory. Copyright A. Rischgitz.)

Her words to Sir Bartle Frere at the outset had been: “It does seem that there is no element in the scheme of government (of India) by which the public health can be taken care of. And the thing is now to create such an element.”

As early as 1863, in her “Observations on the Sanitary State of the Army in India,” she had written:—

“Native ‘caste’ prejudices appear to have been made the excuse for European laziness, as far as regards our sanitary and hospital neglects of the natives. Recent railroad experience is a striking proof that ‘caste,’ in their minds, isno bar to intercommunication in arrangements tending to their benefit.”

Sir C. Trevelyan justly says that “a good sanitary state of the military force cannot be secured without making similar arrangements for the populations settled in and around the military cantonments; that sanitary reform must be generally introduced into India for the civil as well as the military portion of the community.”

And now that the opportunity arrived, all was done with wise and swift diplomacy. The way was smoothed by a call from Frere on his old friend Sir Richard Temple, at that time Finance Minister at Calcutta, asking him to help.

Those who know India best, and know Miss Nightingale best, are those who are most aware of the mighty tree of ever-widening health improvement that grew from this little seed, and of the care with which Miss Nightingale helped to guard and foster it.

“She was a great Indian,” her friend General Evatt repeated to me more than once, “and what a head she had! She was the only humanbeing I have ever met, for instance, man or woman, who had thoroughly mastered the intricate details of the Bengal land-purchase system. She loved India, and she knew it through and through. It was no wonder that every distinguished Indian who came to England went to see Miss Nightingale.”

She bore her ninety years very lightly, and made a vision serene and noble, as will be seen from our picture, though that does not give the lovely youthful colouring in contrast with the silvery hair, and we read of the great expressiveness of her hands, which, a little more, perhaps, than is usual with Englishwomen, she used in conversation.

It was a very secluded life that she lived at No. 10 South Street; but she was by no means without devotees, and the bouquet that the German Emperor sent her was but one of many offerings from many high-hearted warriors at her shrine.

And when she visited her old haunts at Lea Hurst and Embley she delighted in sending invitations to the girls growing up in thosevillage families that she had long counted among her friends, so that to her tea-table were lovingly welcomed guests very lowly, as well as those better known to the world.

Her intense and sympathetic interest in all the preparations for nursing in the South African campaign has already been touched upon, as well as her joy that some of her own nurses from among the first probationers at St. Thomas’s were accepted in that enterprise with praise and gratitude.

It would be a serious omission not to refer my readers to a very moving letter which she wrote to Cavaliere Sebastiano Fenzi, during the Italian War of Independence in 1866, of which a part is given in Mrs. Tooley’s book, and from which I am permitted to quote the following:—

“I have given dry advice as dryly as I could. But you must permit me to say that if there is anything I could do for you at any time, and you would command me, I should esteem it the greatest honour and pleasure. I am a hopeless invalid, entirely a prisoner to my room, andoverwhelmed with business. Otherwise how gladly would I answer to your call and come and do my little best for you in the dear city where I was born. If the giving my miserable life could hasten your success but by half an hour, how gladly would I give it!”

How far she was ahead of her time becomes every day more obvious; for every day the results of her teaching are gradually making themselves felt. For example, it can no longer, without qualification, be said, as she so truly said in her own day, that while “the coxcombries of education are taught to every schoolgirl” there is gross ignorance, not only among schoolgirls, but also even among mothers and nurses, with regard to “those laws which God has assigned to the relations of our bodies with the world in which He has put them. In other words, the laws which make these bodies, into which He has put our minds, healthy or unhealthy organs of those minds, are all but unlearnt. Not but that these laws—the laws of life—are in a certain measure understood, but not even mothers thinkit worth their while to study them—to study how to give their children healthy existences. They call it medical or physiological knowledge, fit only for doctors.”

In her old age, loved and honoured far and wide, she toiled on with all the warm enthusiasm of a girl, and the ripe wisdom of fourscore years and ten spent in the service of her one Master, for she was not of those who ever tried to serve two. And when she died at No. 10 South Street, on August 10, 1910—so peacefully that the tranquil glow of sunset descended upon her day of harvest—the following beautiful incident was recorded inNursing Notes, to whose editor I am specially indebted for bringing to my notice the verses in which the story is told[26]:—

“At Chelsea, under the lime tree’s stir,I read the news to a pensionerThat a noble lord and a judge were dead—‘They were younger men than me,’ he said.“I read again of another death;The old man turned, and caught his breath—‘She’s gone?’ he said; ‘she too? In campWe called her the Lady of the Lamp.’“He would not listen to what I read,But wanted it certain—‘The Lady’s dead?’I showed it him to remove his doubt,And added, unthinking, ‘The Lamp is out.’“He rose—and I had to help him stand—Then, as he saluted with trembling hand,I was abashed to hear him say,‘The Lamp she lit is alight to-day.’”F. S.

“At Chelsea, under the lime tree’s stir,I read the news to a pensionerThat a noble lord and a judge were dead—‘They were younger men than me,’ he said.

“At Chelsea, under the lime tree’s stir,

I read the news to a pensioner

That a noble lord and a judge were dead—

‘They were younger men than me,’ he said.

“I read again of another death;The old man turned, and caught his breath—‘She’s gone?’ he said; ‘she too? In campWe called her the Lady of the Lamp.’

“I read again of another death;

The old man turned, and caught his breath—

‘She’s gone?’ he said; ‘she too? In camp

We called her the Lady of the Lamp.’

“He would not listen to what I read,But wanted it certain—‘The Lady’s dead?’I showed it him to remove his doubt,And added, unthinking, ‘The Lamp is out.’

“He would not listen to what I read,

But wanted it certain—‘The Lady’s dead?’

I showed it him to remove his doubt,

And added, unthinking, ‘The Lamp is out.’

“He rose—and I had to help him stand—Then, as he saluted with trembling hand,I was abashed to hear him say,‘The Lamp she lit is alight to-day.’”

“He rose—and I had to help him stand—

Then, as he saluted with trembling hand,

I was abashed to hear him say,

‘The Lamp she lit is alight to-day.’”

F. S.

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