[104] Especially by Lord Stanmore in his _Memoir of Sidney Herbert_. He handles it, I think, with some needless asperity, and he might have mentioned Mr. Herbert's letter which is here quoted. Miss Nightingale had not written home in that sense at all, but Mr. Herbert had sent the nurses. That was what she meant when she said that he had "sacrificed his own written word." "Had I had the enormous folly," she wrote to Mr. Herbert (Dec. 15), "at the end of eleven days' experience, to require more women, would it not seem that you, as a statesman, should have said, 'Wait till you can see your way better.' But I made no such request." She was an expert, and did not wish to be inundated with amateurs. Moreover, everybody at Scutari knew, as she wrote, the terms of Mr. Herbert's letter to the newspapers, and the medical men knew that she had not asked for any more nurses. Yet here was a new party sent out; and, to make the encroachment on her domain the more marked, Miss Stanley had received instructions to, and reported herself to, not the Superintendent of the Nurses, but other officials. Miss Nightingale felt that her authority had been flouted, her position undermined. But personal considerations were not the cause of her vexation. It was not a case of "pique," as some people in England imagined. Mr. Herbert and she were engaged in making a new experiment. It was full of difficulties, and the only chance of success lay in the maintenance of undivided responsibility and clearly established authority. Miss Nightingale could not quietly have accepted the new situation without sacrificing the key of the position. Had she acquiesced, she would have admitted that Mr. Herbert might henceforth send out nurses without consulting her, and without placing them expressly under her orders. She would have left herself at the mercy of any well-meaning person in England who thought that this or that might be helpful to her. Her judgment would no longer have been the governing factor; while yet for any confusion or failure that might follow, she would be held responsible. Mr. Herbert thought, no doubt, that already the experiment had been a great success, as indeed it was, and he was eager to increase the scale of it. He might not unreasonably think that, as the number of the wounded increased, so should the number of female nurses be increased also. Mr. Osborne's remark, cited above (p. 183), must have confirmed him in such an opinion. But to Miss Nightingale on the spot the case wore a very different aspect. We must remember the severe mental strain of her position; the high pressure of work and emotion at which she was living, all the higher to one of her intensely sensitive conscientiousness; the continual failure (to her critical mind) of attempts to reform cruel abuses; the danger of real, acknowledged failure always present. In such a position, the arrival of a fresh batch of nurses, unexpected and unsolicited, must have seemed to