the deeper significance of her work in the Crimean War lies elsewhere. It was as Administrator and Reformer, more than as Angel, that she showed her peculiar powers. Queen Victoria, with native shrewdness and a touch of humour, hit off the truth about Miss Nightingale's services in the Crimea in concise words: “Such a clear head. I wish we had her at the War Office.”

The influence of Miss Nightingale's service in the Crimea was great. Some of it is obvious, and on the moral side Longfellow's poem said the first, and the last, word. She may also be accounted, if not the founder, yet the promoter of Female Nursing in war, and the Red Cross Societies throughout the world are, as we shall hear, the direct outcome of her labours in the Crimea. The indirect, and less obvious, results were in many spheres. From a sick-room in the West End of London Miss Nightingale played a part—and a much larger part than could be known without access to her Papers—in reforming the sanitary administration of the British army, in reconstructing hospitals throughout the world, in founding the modern art of nursing, in setting up a sanitary administration in India, and in promoting various other reforms in that country.

Miss Nightingale's return from the Crimea, it will thus be seen, was not the end of her active life. In a sense it was the beginning. The nursing at Scutari and in the Crimea was an episode. The fame which she shunned, but which nevertheless came to her, gave her a starting-point for doing work which was destined, as she hoped, and as in large measure was granted, to be of permanent service to her country and the world. The first chapter of the Third Part shows her laying her plans for the health of the British soldier, and the subsequent chapters tell what followed. This is the period of Miss Nightingale's close co-operation with Sidney Herbert. To the writer this later phase of Miss Nightingale's life—with its ingenious adjustment of means to ends, its masterful resourcefulness, its incessant industry, and then with its perpetual struggle against physical weakness and its extraordinary power of devoted concentration—has seemed not less interesting than the Crimean episode.

The Fourth Part describes, as its main themes, the work which Miss Nightingale did, concurrently with that described in the preceding Part, as Hospital Reformer and the Founder of Modern Nursing. Other chapters introduce two topics which might at first sight seem widely separate, but which were yet closely associated in Miss Nightingale's mind. They deal with her, respectively, as a Passionate Statistician and as a Religious Thinker. The nature of her speculations is fully explained in the latter chapters, and elsewhere in the memoir. It will be seen that Miss Nightingale had thought out a scheme of religious belief which widely differed from the creeds of Christian orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant, but which yet admitted of accommodation to much of their language and formularies. It admitted also, as will appear in due course, of close alliance with mysticism. Miss Nightingale believed intensely in a Personal God and in personal religion. The language which expressed most adequately to her the sense of union with God was the language of the Greek and Christian mystics. But “law” was to her “the thought of God”; union with God meant co-operation with Him towards human perfectibility; and for the discovery of “the thought of God” statistics were to her mind an indispensable means.

In the Fifth Part we are introduced to a new interest in Miss Nightingale's life, a new sphere of her work. For forty years she worked at Indian questions. She took up the subject at first through interest in the army. It was a natural supplement to her efforts for the health of the British soldier at home, to make a like attempt on behalf of the army in India. Gradually she was drawn into other questions, and she became a keen Indian reformer all along the line. Her assiduity, her persistence, her ingenuity were as marked in this sphere as in others; it was only her immediate success that was less.

In relation to the primary object with which she began her Indian campaigns, Miss Nightingale's life and work have great importance. The Royal Commission of 1859–63, which was due to her, and the measures taken in consequence of its Report, were the starting-point of a new era in sanitary improvement for the army. The results have been most salutary. Miss Nightingale's friendship with Lord Stanley and with Sir John Lawrence here served her somewhat as that with Mr. Herbert served in the earlier campaign. In the wider sphere of Indian sanitation generally Miss Nightingale's efforts were not so successful. The field was perhaps too vast, the conditions were too adverse, for any great and immediate success to be possible. Yet this and her other efforts for India were the part of Miss Nightingale's life and work to which she attached most importance, and by the record of which she set most store. Even in the Will (afterwards revoked) directing her Papers to be destroyed, she made exception of those relating to India; and, as already stated in the preface, one of her few pieces of autobiographical record related to her Indian work. Perhaps it was the special affection which a mother often feels for the least robust or least successful child. Perhaps it was that she took long views; and that, foreseeing a future time when many of the reforms for which she had toiled might be accomplished, she desired to be remembered as a pioneer. “Sanitation,” said a high authority in 1894, “is the Cinderella of the Indian administrative family.”[2] The difficulty of finding money and a reluctance to introduce Western reforms in advance of Eastern opinion are objections with which we shall often meet in the correspondence of Indian officials with Miss Nightingale, and they are still raised in the present day.[3] On the other hand, the Under-Secretary for India, in his Budget Statement for 1913, declared that “the service which has the strongest claim after education on the resources of the Government is sanitation,” and explained that “the Budget estimate of expenditure for sanitation comes this year to nearly £2,000,000, showing an increase of 112 per cent over the expenditure of three years ago.” So perhaps Cinderella is to go to the ball; if ever the glass slipper is found, let it be remembered, as this Memoir will show, that Miss Nightingale was the good fairy.

Her Indian work continued as long as she was able to work at all, and from 1862 onwards it forms one of the recurring themes in our story. The Sixth Part, while continuing that subject, introduces another sphere in which Miss Nightingale's life and work have important significance. From the reform of Hospital Nursing she turned, in conjunction with the late Mr. William Rathbone, to the reform of workhouse nursing. And as one thing led to another, it will be seen that Miss Nightingale deserves to be remembered also as a Poor Law Reformer.

The Seventh Part comprises the last thirty-eight years of Miss Nightingale's life (1872–1910), and a word or two may here be said to explain an apparent alteration of scale. In a biography the scale must be proportionate not to the number of the years, but to their richness in characteristic significance. After 1872, the year in which (as Miss Nightingale put it) she