As however the facts relating to this subject are now embodied in a rather bulky Blue-Book containing a large amount of evidence from Miss Florence Nightingale, we propose to return to it for some further information next month. The 31st of January also must not be allowed to pass without a red letter to mark it as the day on which the Leviathan, the very biggest ship ever known or heard of in the world, took the first step towards showing that she was not likewise the biggest blunder ever made by naval architect. One last sacrifice of a humble coal-barge, which was ignominiously and incontinently scuttled for being in her way, was offered up to her as she was lowered from her cradles, and then the heroine of Millwall was positively afloat. Not only have three months, and we are afraid to say how many thousands of pounds, been devoted to her launch, but we are sorry to be obliged to add several lives-on one occasion by the breaking of certain portions of launching gear, and on another by the downfall of a scaffolding on which crowds of imprudent worshippers of Mr. Brunel's huge performance had climbed, in order to see over into the yard and watch her progress. Many foreigners came over to see the launch early in November, and were then under great uneasiness last they should be too late. It is to be hoped they did not find the time long. In the latter part of February intelligence was received from China that on the 23rd of December last English and French ships of war began to assemble in the Canton river opposite the city, with the purpose of bombarding it if the attempted negotiations with the Chinese Viceroy Yeh should fail. The river was so densely covered by the large house-like boats in which a considerable portion of the Chinese population pass nearly their whole lives, that at first only a very narrow channel of water was visible; but they moved slowly away from the impending danger, and retired unmolested into various creeks and canals, though many of the smaller boats, more intent on profit than patriotism, continued up to the last moment to paddle about among the hostile ships, and dispose of oranges and other acceptable articles of provision for the refreshment of the enemies about to attack their city. At length, on the morning of the 28th, a heavy fire was opened upon it, and 900 of the French troops and 4600 of the English landed, and almost immediately captured two forts. All night long rockets were fired into the devoted town, the houses of which were seen blazing in all directions; and when the mail left on the following day, it brought a brief note from the commanding officer stating that the city had been captured.* We must not pass without a word an incident that may hereafter be found to be of even higher import than it may now seem-namely the return of Dr. David Livingstone to the wilds of Africa, under far more favourable auspices than on his former journey, and carrying with him, with much material help, the fervent good wishes of all who desire the abolition of slavery, and the diffusion of genuine Christianity. It would be difficult to overrate the good effects that may be hoped for from a work so happily begun; but in this, as in other instances, we are reminded of one of the chief difficulties of recording events so near the period of their occurrence. The picture may indeed glow with a somewhat warmer colour than when the historian sits down to describe, not the living time of which he is himself a part, but men and things long since passed away; but it is not always easy to the contemporary to find the true focal distance from whence to make a correct estimate of their real importance. Many a great flaring impostor of an event that has attracted all eyes, and stunned all ears, has been speedily blown away into silence and eternal forgetfulness, while some still small voice, scarcely audible at the moment, will be found to have whispered of what, regarded in its great results, might be considered the event of the time. Lord Palmerston's Ministry has been defeated on the Foreign Refugees Bill by a majority of nineteen, and has resigned; Lord Derby being intrusted with the formation of a new cabinet. * Later despatches state that Commissioner Yeh was taken on the 5th of January, attempting to escape in the dress of a coolie. IX.-FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AND THE To the well-known services of Miss Nightingale in the East among our brave and suffering men, must be added another claim to the recognition of the country, and the gratitude of the soldier, in the clear and logical evidence she has placed before the Commission of Inquiry into the sanitary condition of the army-an inquiry which, in the horrible revelations it has brought to light, is engrossing much of the public attention, and which, showing as it does the removable nature of the causes decimating our home army, will, it is to be hoped, lead to that immediate and radical reform, which, though contrary to the Circumlocution Institutions and habits of the country, is here so imperatively called for as to warrant and demand the wholesome establishment of a precedent. The Blue Book in which we find " answers to written questions addressed to Miss Nightingale by the Commissioners," while it furnishes loathsome and sickening details of the causes of the high rate of mortality in the army, clearly demonstrates them all, with the one exception of intemperate and debauched habits, as arising from preventible causes, viz. crowded sleeping accommodation at night, producing so fetid an atmosphere, that a person entering from out of doors cannot breathe the polluted air till the window has been opened; many hours out of the twenty-four wholly unoccupied, in which, a prey to that Scourge of civilized humanity, ennui, the more active and energetic the man the more dissipated and debauched becomes the soldier; subjected to a diet of which fresh boiled beef from one year's end to the other, during the whole twenty-one years of service, is the staple, till the strongest stomach revolts from the very sight of it; exposed in his barracks to defective ventilation and drainage, the details of which are too offensive to place before the general reader; instead of wondering that the ordinary mortality in the army almost equals the extraordinary mortality among civilians in seasons of cholera and fever, it is rather matter for surprise, that, systematically exposed to influences known as the most deadly to which human VOL. I. G beings can be subjected, our soldiers should present the fine physical appearance they do. We pick the strongest, healthiest, men, men sound in wind and limb, from among our agricultural and artisan population, spend time, money, and science in manufacturing the raw clodhopper and slouching mechanic into the trim, wellknit, firm stepping soldier, and while this costly transformation is going on we hand him over in his hours of rest and leisure to the insidious attacks of preventible disease, and the no less insidious and more deadly temptations of idleness and ennui. The defective organization of the English army was as signally proved in the Crimea, as the heroic courage and devotion of the individual. They were English men and not English soldiers who saved our honour in the East. The French had an army, we had none; only bands of heroic men, who, whether led through ignorance or mistake to charge the enemy in face of certain death, or ordered out to starve and rot in the trenches, inadequately fed and clothed, gave their lives unquestioning; content to die for the honour of that country whose defective military organization, having exposed them to death and disease at home, offered them up in the fields of the East, victims, not so much to the chances of war, as to the evils of a pretentious and rotten system. The public has not forgotten the wholesale sacrifice of life in the Crimea to the requirements of an absurd and defective official routine, which no man had the heart or the courage to break through, though he saw before his eyes our gallant fellows perishing by hundreds for want of those very things known to be at hand, and only not available in the absence of a written order from the accredited officer, distant it might be miles, in the performance of one of his multifarious duties. Neither has the public forgotten the disorder which prevailed in the hospitals, when Florence Nightingale and her band of nurses and ladies started for Constantinople in the autumn of 1854. Never was the presence of woman more needed, never did it carry with it more blessing and healing. With that union of firmness and gentleness so characteristic of woman, united to skill and experience acquired in long years of study and observation,* Miss • At the commencement of Miss Nightingale's evidence we find the following questions and answers. We especially call the attention of our young female readers to them, as one proof more of the necessity there is for long and systematic training, if we would hope to excel in any department, or to be of use in our generation. "Have you, for several years, devoted attention to the organization of civil and military hospitals ?" Yes, for thirteen years." "What British and foreign hospitals have you visited ?" "I have visited all the hospitals in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, many county hospitals, some of the naval and military hospitals in England; all the hospitals in Paris, and studied with the sœurs de la charité;' the institution of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth, on the Rhine, where I was twice in training as a nurse; the hospitals at Berlin, and many others in Germany; at Lyons, Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Brussels; also the war hospitals of the French and Sardinians." Nightingale proceeded immediately to organise and arrange, stepping, it is said, more than once over those routine obstacles which had proved insurmountable to routine men, till order grew out of disorder, and gradually, cleanliness, comfort, and health, took the place of those frightful scenes which awaited her first arrival. "We had," says Miss Nightingale, “in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign, a mortality among the troops at the rate of 60 per cent. per annum, from disease alone,-a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the great plague in the population of London, and a higher ratio than the mortality in cholera to the attacks; that is to say, that there died out of the army in the Crimea an annual rate greater than ordinarily die in time of pestilence out of sick. We had, during the last six months of the war, a mortality among our sick not much more than that among our healthy Guards at home, and a mortality among our troops in the last five months two-thirds only of what it is among our troops at home." Thus, in the face of extraordinary causes of sickness, and under conditions of exposure and climate which would naturally be supposed less favourable to the health of the soldier than the conditions to which he is exposed at home, we have, upon undoubted testimony, "a mortality among the sick not much more than that among our healthy Guards at home, and a mortality among our troops in the last five months two-thirds only of what it is among our troops at home." Again we find:-" At home, the guards and infantry of the line suffer more from consumption and chest diseases than men in civil life, at the same ages, from all diseases put together. "The Guards suffer twice as much from fever-more from fever in some barracks than in others, and more from epidemics in epidemic years than civil life. There is no à priori reason for this." Such evidence as this needs no comment, nor is testimony wanting from officers of long standing as to the known defective sanitary condition of the army at home, but it was reserved for a civilian, Mr. Sydney Herbert, to move inquiry into the matter. Now what does this testimony on the part of these officers prove?-Either, that they were men whose moral courage was unequal to the moral responsibilities which rested upon them, or that, like the soldiers whose health and lives were at stake, they were themselves the victims, in another form, of a false system which admitted of no appeal. In the course of Miss Nightingale's evidence, as to the difficulties experienced in obtaining food, clothing, bedding, medical comforts, extra diets, &c., the question is put to her : "What appeared to be the cause of such difficulties?" Now note the reply:- 66 (3) The fear of being called a 'troublesome fellow,' which, to my positive knowledge, deterred medical officers from making repeated requisitions for articles which they knew to be necessary for their men, or for repairs, because they feared that such conduct would injure their prospects. This will be denied, but it is true for all that." We need not go to the army or the Crimea for corroboration of the fact of public duty being sacrificed to private selfishness. In one of our large metropolitan workhouses, a medical officer, to whom the unfortunate paupers are "farmed out," recently refused to supply a patient with medicine, on the ground that drugs would do no good; that all she wanted was wine and nourishing food. Why not then," said the poor sufferer, "order the wine?" "Because," was the answer, "if I order wine for my patients it will be thought that I want to save my drugs, and I shall run the chance of losing the appointment." Let us view social organization as we will, on the broad stage of the whole civilized world, or in detail, in the hospital and the workhouse, everywhere shall we behold apparently insoluble problems, insurmountable difficulties, ineradicable incongruities. Is this the irrevocable ordination of Providence, or do these problems in great part arise from man setting his face against nature, using but one of the two great forces she has created? Strange, that the necessity for the male and female element should be recognised in the government of the family, but ignored in the government of the world, that universal and comprehensive family, embracing rich and poor, sick and healthy, learned and ignorant, elements so opposed, that nothing short of the united forces of all humanity can hope to win its confidence, reach its sympathies, or alleviate its sufferings. Man alone has organised and organised, and failed and failed. All that the male intellect can suggest has been brought to bear directly and indirectly upon civilization, and with what result? Let America, with her millions of slaves, answer; let our dead on the shores of the Crimea answer; let the recent tragedies in our Indian possessions tell their tale; and, as these far-off echoes die away, let us listen to the voices of lamentation and woe that reach us from our workhouses, and prisons, and factories, that surge ever upwards from the pinched homes of our artisans, from the crowded streets of our cities. God has created two powers; man uses but one. Where political economy has failed, the economy of nature may succeed. Elizabeth Fry, Caroline Chisholm, and Florence Nightingale, are signal instances of what the introduction of the female element may achieve. Let the slow, logical intellect of the man be fertilised by the rapid intuitive perceptions of the woman; let the calculating male brain be tempered by the warm emotional faculties of the female; let his physical courage be refined and inspired by her moral courage, and the sterility which characterizes our social organization may perchance give place to fruitfulness and plenty unknown to the dream of the Utopian. What these noble self-sacrificing women have accomplished on a |