It was clear to Mr. Herbert that if Miss Nightingale were to be asked to undertake this work, she must be placed in an undisputed position of authority and supported by the Government. Everything depended on having a recognised head. To allow bands of lady nurses to start for the seat of war, each carrying out their pet and immature notions on hospital work, would have been futile and useless. To send them to Scutari and place them under the control of the authorities then in charge of the hospital, would have defeated the chief object of the plan, which was to reform and amend the existing order of nursing prevailing at the hospital. Neither was it likely that so shrewd and capable a woman as Miss Nightingale would consent to organise a new nursing system--for it practically amounted to that--unless she was guaranteed a position of undisputed authority. How necessary that was to the success of the enterprise after events fully proved. Fortunately, Sidney Herbert was a statesman in a position to influence his colleagues in the Government, and his recommendation of Miss Nightingale as a lady fully qualified to perform the task of Superintendent of Nurses for the Crimea was received with approval, and indeed with a sense of relief. Here was the woman whom distraught Ministers had been vainly looking for amidst the motley throng of the unfit. When things were so far arranged, Sidney Herbert addressed the following letter to his friend:-- _“October 15th, 1854._ “DEAR MISS NIGHTINGALE,-- “You will have seen in the papers that there is a great deficiency of nurses at the hospital of Scutari. The other alleged deficiencies--namely, of medical men, lint, sheets, etc.--must, if they ever existed, have been remedied ere this, as the number of medical officers with the army amounted to one to every ninety-five men in the whole force, being nearly double what we have ever had before; and thirty more surgeons went out there three weeks ago, and must by this time, therefore, be at Constantinople. A further supply went on Monday, and a fresh batch sail next week. As to medical stores, they have been sent out in profusion, by the ton weight--fifteen thousand pairs of sheets, medicine, wine, arrowroot in the same proportion; and the only way of accounting for the deficiency at Scutari, if it exists, is that the mass of the stores went to Varna, and had not been sent back when the army left for the Crimea, but four days would have remedied that.