She goes on to tell of the good results taking place from the introduction of gymnastics for the men and cricket and other outdoor sports. “In short,” she adds in a pithy sentence, “work and all kinds of exercise cause sickly men to flourish.” Soldiers’ libraries were being established by Government, better cook-houses built, and the soldiers taught to cook. And so far she is glad to record that the soldiers’ habits had improved. “But the main causes of diseases in India--want of drainage, want of water supply for stations and towns--remain as before,” she ironically remarks, “in all their primitive perfection.” The death-rate of troops serving in India was the alarming one of sixty-nine per thousand per annum. “It takes something more than climate to account for this,” she writes. “All that the climate requires is that men shall adapt their social habits and customs to it, as, indeed, they must do to the requirements of every other climate under heaven. There is not a shadow of proof that India was created to be the grave of the British race.” Miss Nightingale then enumerates the simple rules for dress, diet, and exercise to be observed by soldiers serving in India. But though a man can regulate his personal habits, “he cannot,” she adds, “drain and sewer his own city, nor lay a water supply on to his own station, nor build his own barracks,” and she proceeds to urge that sanitary reform in India is still one of the most pressing questions for the Government. By wise measures the enormous death-rate of sixty-nine per thousand might be reduced to ten per thousand. “What a work, what a noble task for a Government--no ‘inglorious period of our dominion’ that,” she writes, “but a most glorious one!” Ten years later Miss Nightingale again returned to the “charge” and prepared a paper on “Life or Death in India,” which was read at the meeting of the National Association for the promotion of Social Science at Norwich in 1873, and afterwards published as a pamphlet with an appendix on “Life or Death by Irrigation.” In this paper Miss Nightingale pointed out the cheering fact that during the past ten years in which sanitary reforms had been progressing the death-rate of the army in India had been reduced from sixty-nine per thousand to eighteen per thousand--that is, eighteen men died where sixty-nine had died before. Still, she considered that this only sufficed to show the work that yet remained to be done, especially with regard to the drainage, water supply, and the irrigation of the country for commercial purposes, on account not only of the soldier, but to promote the health of the teeming millions of our fellow-subjects in India and their general prosperity.