With the return of Lord Palmerston to power in the summer of that year, Sidney Herbert again took office as Secretary for War. He now laboured more assiduously than ever in army reform, and in the furthering of those schemes which he had been compelled to abandon on the outbreak of hostilities. To his efforts were due the constitution of the militia, the reconstruction of the artillery system, the amalgamation of the Indian and the general forces, and the consolidation of what were then the “new” volunteers. At Aldershot he established instruction in barrack and hospital cookery, and in place of that peculiar method which required that the soldier should fit his foot to the boot, had the machinery of the boot-factory constructed to secure a variety of sizes to suit different feet, thereby adding to the comfort and marching power of the troops. Sidney Herbert began the overwhelming task of reorganising the War Office, but the strain of work unfortunately compelled him to retire from active official position, and in 1859 he accepted a peerage and entered the House of Lords as Baron Herbert of Lea. Lord Herbert still continued his efforts on behalf of bettering the condition of the soldier morally and physically, but his beneficent career was soon to be cut short. To the deep regret of all classes in the country Lord Herbert of Lea died on August 2nd, 1861, at Wilton House, Salisbury. Just before his death he had reformed the Hospital Corps, and the very day on which he died saw the opening of the General Hospital at Woolwich, which had been planned under his auspices as a model of what a military hospital should be. It was ultimately transformed into the present magnificent building, on which Queen Victoria fittingly bestowed the name of the Herbert Hospital. Next to his devoted widow and children there was no one who felt more keenly the loss of Lord Herbert of Lea than Florence Nightingale. To his inspiration and support she owed in great measure the success of her mission to the Eastern hospitals, and since her return she had laboured with him to promote the betterment of the soldier’s condition. How much the nation really owes to Miss Nightingale for her labours in the sanitary and educational reform of the army during the years 1857–60 in which, though a prisoner in her sick-room, she toiled with Lord Herbert, will not be known until the private records of that period are published. At the request of the War Office she drew up an exhaustive and confidential report on the working of the Army Medical Department in the Crimea, which materially assisted in the reorganisation of the medical branch of the service then taking place. In writing on “The Sanitary Condition of the Army” in _The Westminster Review_ for January, 1859, Lord Herbert frequently quotes the opinions of Miss Nightingale, based on her experiences of the defects of the military hospitals’ nursing system, and mentions her recommendations for reform.