“Another extraordinary fallacy is the dread of night air. What air can we breathe at night but night air? The choice is between pure night air from without and foul air from within. Most people prefer the latter.... Without cleanliness within and without your house, ventilation is comparatively useless.... And now, you think these things trifles, or at least exaggerated. But what you ‘think’ or what I ‘think’ matters little. Let us see what God thinks of them. God always justifies His ways. While we are thinking, He has been teaching. I have known cases of hospital pyæmia quite as severe in handsome private houses as in any of the worst hospitals, and from the same cause—viz., foul air. Yet nobody learnt the lesson. Nobody learnt _anything_ at all from it. They went on _thinking_—thinking that the sufferer had scratched his thumb, or that it was singular that ‘all the servants’ had ‘whitlows,’ or that something was ‘much about this year.’” If there had been any hope at first that Miss Nightingale might grow strong enough to stand visibly among those who were being trained as nurses by the fund raised in her honour, that hope was now past, and when the great new wing of St. Thomas’s was built—the finest building for its purpose in Europe—the outward reins of government had to be delivered over into the hands of another, though hers was throughout the directing hand. And the results of her work are written in big type upon the page of history. In India and America she is acclaimed as an adored benefactress, but what has she not done for our own country alone? To sum up even a few of the points on which I have touched: she initiated sick nursing among the poor, through her special appeal was built the Central Home for Nurses, she was the pioneer in the hygienic work of county councils, and, besides the great nursing school at St. Thomas’s, to her was largely due the reform of nursing in workhouses and infirmaries. And in 1890, with the £70,000 of the Women’s Jubilee Fund, the establishment of the Queen’s Nurses received its charter. In affairs of military nursing it is no exaggeration to say that she was consulted throughout the world. America came to her in the Civil War; South Africa owed much to her; India infinitely more; and so vital have been the reforms introduced by Lord Herbert and herself that even as early as 1880, when General Gordon was waging war in China during the Taiping Rebellion, the death-rate as compared with the Crimea was reduced from sixty per cent. to little more than three in every hundred yearly.[22] We have seen that, though she was so much more seriously broken in health than any one at first realized, that did not prevent her incessant work, though it did in the end make her life more or less a hidden life, spent within four walls, and chiefly on her bed.