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It is my hope that my younger readers may find this volume all the more to their liking if it is not without interest to people of my own generation. Girls and boys of fourteen to sixteen are already on the threshold of manhood and womanhood, but even of children I am sure it is true that they hate to be “written down to,” since they are eagerly drinking in hopes and ideas which they cannot always put into words, and to such hopes and ideas they give eager sympathy of heart and curiosity of mind.

Florence Nightingale’s Home, Embley Park, Romsey, Hants.

For one of her St. Thomas’s nurses, among the first nine women to be decorated with the Red Cross, the heroine of this story wrote what might well be the marching orders of many a good soldier in the divine army, and not least, perhaps, of those boy scouts and girl guides who would like better a life of adventure than the discipline of a big school or the “duties enough and little cares” of a luxurious home; and as the words have not, so far as I am aware, appeared in print before, it may be worth while to give them here:—

“Soldiers,” she wrote, “must obey orders. And to you the ‘roughing’ it has been the resigning yourself to ‘comforts’ which you detested and to work which you did not want, while the work which wanted you was within reach. A severe kind of ‘roughing’ indeed—perhaps the severest, as I know by sad experience.

“But it will not last. This short war is not life. But all will depend—your possible future in the work, we pray for you, O my Cape of Good Hope—upon the name you gain here. That name I know will be of one who obeys authority, however unreasonable, in the name of Him who is above all, and who is Reason itself—of one who submits to disagreeables, however unjust, for the work’s sake and for His who tells us to love those we don’t like—a precept I follow oh so badly—of one who never criticizes so that it can even be guessed at that she has criticism in her heart—and who helps her companions to submit by her own noble example....

“I have sometimes found in my life that the very hindrances I had been deploring were there expressly to fit me for the next step in my life. (This was the case—hindrances of years—before the Crimean War.)” And elsewhere she writes: “To have secured for you all the circumstances we wished for your work, I would gladly have given my life. But you are made to rise above circumstances; perhaps this is God’s way—His ways are not as our ways—of preparing you for the great work which I am persuaded He has in store for you some day.”

It is touching to find her adding in parenthesis that before her own work was given to her by the Great Unseen Commander, she had ten years of contradictions and disappointments, and adding, as if with a sigh from the heart, “And oh, how badly I did it!”

There we have the humility of true greatness. All her work was amazing in its fruitfulness, but those who knew her best feel sometimes that the part of her work which was greatest of all and will endure longest is just the part of which most people know least. I mean her great labour of love for India, which I cannot doubt has already saved the lives of millions, and will in the future save the health and working power of millions more.

Florence Nightingale would have enriched our calendar of uncanonized saints even if her disciplined high-hearted goodness had exercised an unseen spell by simply being, and had, by some limitation of body or of circumstance, been cut off from much active doing: for so loving and obedient a human will, looking ever to the Highest, as a handmaiden watches the eyes of her mistress, is always and everywhere a humane influence and a divine offering. But in her life—a light set on a hill—being and doing went hand in hand in twofold beauty and strength, for even through those years when she lay on her bed, a secluded prisoner, her activities were world-wide.

In addition to the work for which she is most widely revered and loved, Miss Nightingale did three things—each leaving a golden imprint upon the history of our time:—

She broke down a “Chinese wall” of prejudice with regard to the occupations of women, and opened up a new and delightful sphere of hard, but congenial, work for girls.

She helped to reconstruct, on the lines of feminine common sense, the hygiene and the transport service of our army—yes, of the entire imperial army, for what is a success in one branch of our dominions cannot permanently remain unaccepted by the rest. And in all her work for our army she had, up to the time of his death, unbounded help from her friend, Lord Herbert.

Last, and perhaps greatest of all, she initiated, with the help of Sir Bartle Frere, Sir John Lawrence, and other enlightened men of her time, the reform of insanitary and death-dealing neglect throughout the length and breadth of India, thus saving countless lives, not only from death, but from what is far worse—a maimed or invalid existence of lowered vitality and lessened mental powers.

One of her friends, himself a great army doctor holding a high official position, has repeatedly spoken of her to me as the supreme embodiment of citizenship. She did indeed exemplify what Ruskin so nobly expressed in his essay on “Queens’ Gardens”—the fact that, while men and women differ profoundly and essentially, and life would lose in beauty if they did not, the state has need of them both; for what the woman should be at her own hearth, the guardian of order, of health, of beauty, and of love, that also should she be at that wider imperial hearth where there are children to be educated, soldiers to be equipped, wounded lives to be tended, and the health of this and future generations to be diligently guarded.

“Think,” she said once to one of her nurses, “less of what you may gain than of what you may give.” Herself, she gave royally—gave her fortune, her life, her soul’s treasure. I read in a recent contemporary of high standing a review which ended with what seemed to me a very heathen sentence, which stamped itself on my memory by its arrogant narrowness. “Woman,” wrote the reviewer, “is always either frustrate or absorbed;” and there leaped to my heart the exclamation, “Here in Florence Nightingale is the answer; for in her we have one, known and read of all men, who was neither the one nor the other.” That there was supreme renunciation in her life, none who is born to womanhood can doubt; for where could there be any who would have been more superbly fitted for what she herself regarded as the natural lot of woman as wife and mother? But she, brilliant, beautiful, and worshipped, was called to a more difficult and lonely path, and if there was hidden suffering, it did but make her service of mankind the more untiring, her practical and keen-edged intellect the more active in good work, her tenderness to pain and humility of self-effacement the more beautiful and just.

It has been said, and said truly, that she did not suffer fools gladly, and she knew well how very human she was in this and in other ways, as far removed from a cold and statuesque faultlessness as are all ardent, swift, loving natures here on earth. But her words were words of wisdom when she wrote to one dear to her whom she playfully named “her Cape of Good Hope”: “Let us be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, but not for unrighteousness.”

The italics are mine, because in their warning they seem so singularly timely. And the entire sentence is completely in tune with that fine note with which she ends one of her delightful volumes on nursing—

“I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons): of the jargon, namely, about the ‘rights’ of women which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do; and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be ‘recalled to a sense of their duty as women,’ and because ‘this is women’s work,’ and ‘that is men’s,’ and ‘these are things which women should not do,’ which is all assertion and nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries. For what are they, both of them, the one just as much as the other, but listening to the ‘what people will say,’ to opinion, to the ‘voices from without’? And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without.

“You do not want the effect of your good things to be, ‘How wonderful for a woman!’ nor would you be deterred from good things by hearing it said, ‘Yes, but she ought not to have done this, because it is not suitable for a woman.’ But you want to do the thing that is good, whether it is ‘suitable for a woman,’ or not.

“It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.

“Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”