[189] In continuation of the letter quoted above, p. 255.
Miss Nightingale, like all moral and social reformers, believed in the nobility of human nature. She had seen in the hospital wards at Scutari, and in the trenches before Sebastopol, the heroism of which the common soldier was capable. She refused to believe that the vices to which he was prone were inherent in his nature. "I have never been able to join," she wrote to Lady Verney from Scutari (March 1856), "in the popular cry about the recklessness, sensuality, and helplessness of the soldiers. On the contrary I should say (and perhaps few women have ever seen more of the manufacturing and agricultural classes of England than I have before I came out here) that I have never seen so teachable and helpful a class as the Army generally. Give them opportunity promptly and securely to send money home and they will use it. Give them schools and lectures and they will come to them. Give them books and games and amusements and they will leave off drinking. Give them suffering and they will bear it. Give them work and they will do it. I had rather have to do with the Army generally than with any other class I have ever attempted to serve." It was a common belief of the time that it was in the nature of the British soldier to be drunken. The same idea was entertained of the British nurse.[190] She utterly refused to believe it, and she set herself, in her determined and resourceful way, to put measures of reform into practice.
Miss Nightingale, as I have already explained (p. 215), had the ear of the Court, and she took an opportunity of laying her views before the Queen. The immediate sequel is told in a letter from Lord Granville to Lord Canning:--
_Dec._ 21 [1855]. In the Cabinet an interesting letter was read from Miss Nightingale thanking the Queen for a handsome present, and discussing the causes and remedies for the drunkenness in the army. Pam thought it excellent. Clarendon said it was full of real stuff, but Mars said it only showed that she knew nothing of the British soldier.[191]
[191] Lord Fitzmaurice's _Life of the Second Earl Granville_, vol. i. p. 133.
But Lord Panmure, though a believer in the original sin of the soldier, was moved none the less by the forces thus set in motion to sanction some useful measures of reform. Miss Nightingale, however, had not waited for official action. That was never her way. When she wanted a thing done, she showed on such scale as was possible to her how to do it.