Through her influence an assistant superintendent of the Nightingale training school had been appointed to whom was given the title of Home Sister. The duties of the Home Sister were varied, but among other things she was expected to supplement the lectures and bedside teaching and demonstration by regular classes. She was also to “encourage general reading, to arrange Bible classes, to give wider interests to the nurses,” in order, as Miss Nightingale said, to keep them above the mere scramble for a remunerative place. She regarded the influence of the Home Sister on the moral and spiritual side of the school as more important than her technical instruction. It is stated that the besetting sin of the Nightingale Nurses in those earlier days was self-sufficiency. “They knew,” says a writer, “that their training school was the first of its kind, and they were apt to give themselves airs.” This tendency in them was vigorously combated by Miss Nightingale. The picking and choosing of places or cases in order to select the one which afforded the prospects of an easy time, she especially condemned. “Our brains are pretty nearly useless,” she said, in one of her annual addresses to the nurses, “if we only think of what we want and should like ourselves; and not of what posts are wanting _us_, or what our posts are wanting _in_ us. What would you think of a soldier who, if he were put on duty in the honorable post of difficulty, as sentry, may be, in the face of the enemy (and we nurses are always in the face of the enemy, always in the life and death of our patients)--were to answer his commanding officer, ‘No, he had rather mount guard at the barracks or study musketry;’ or if he had to go as pioneer, or on a forlorn hope, were to say, ‘no that don’t suit my turn’.” It was her custom for some years to issue an annual address to the nurses of the Nightingale School, and for many years the authorities of the school insisted on every probationer studying the first of these addresses, issued in 1872, the year in which she began her closer supervision of the details of training. In these addresses she dwelt strongly on the ideals of nursing she had from the beginning--that it requires a strong sense of vocation or a special call; that it needs a religious basis; that it is an art; that there must be constant progress or stagnation; that the nurse should be extremely careful of her moral influence. She had no use for the woman who thought she was making a sacrifice in taking up nursing; nor for the woman who thought any kind of service which had to do with nursing was beneath her--neither had she any patience with the sentimental “ministering angel” type of nurse. “If we have not true religious feeling and purpose,” she said in one of her addresses, “hospital life, the highest of all things _with_ these becomes _without_ them, a mere routine and bustle and a very hardening routine and bustle.”