The reform began in Liverpool, and the initiative was due to a philanthropist of that city, Mr. William Rathbone. He used to speak of Miss Nightingale as his "beloved Chief"; and she, when he died, sent a wreath inscribed "In remembrance and humblest love of one of God's best and greatest sons." His voluminous correspondence with her began in 1861 when he was desirous of introducing a system of District Nursing among the poor of Liverpool. There were no trained nurses anywhere to be had, and he consulted Miss Nightingale. She suggested to him that Liverpool had better train nurses for itself in its own principal hospital, the Royal Infirmary. Mr. Rathbone took up the idea, and built a Training School and Home for Nurses. This institution provided nurses both for the Royal Infirmary and for poor patients in their own homes. Miss Nightingale gave to all Mr. Rathbone's plans as close and constant consideration "as if she were going to be herself the matron."[75] The scheme was started in 1862, and it proved so great a success that Mr. Rathbone was encouraged to attempt an extension of his benevolent enterprise. The Workhouse Infirmary at Liverpool was believed to be better than most places of its kind; but there, as elsewhere, the nursing--if so it could be called--was done by able-bodied pauper women. Able-bodied women who enter workhouses are never among the mentally and morally efficient; and in a seaport like Liverpool they were of an especially low and vicious kind. The work of the nurses, selected from this unpromising material, "was superintended by a very small number of paid but untrained parish officers, who were in the habit, it was said, of wearing kid gloves in the wards to protect their hands. All night a policeman patrolled some of the wards to keep order, while others, in which the inmates were too sick or infirm to make disturbance, were locked up and left unvisited all night."[76] On Jan. 31, 1864, Mr. Rathbone wrote to Miss Nightingale, propounding a plan for introducing a staff of trained nurses and promising to guarantee the cost for a term of years if she would help with counsel and by finding a suitable Lady Superintendent. He asked for two letters--"one for influence," to be shown to the Vestry, the other for his private advice.[77] She and Dr. Sutherland drew up the required documents; she arranged that twelve "Nightingale Nurses" should be sent from St. Thomas's Hospital; and she selected a Lady Superintendent--a choice on which, as both she and Mr. Rathbone felt, everything would depend. The Vestry agreed in May to accept Mr. Rathbone's scheme, but many months passed before it was actually launched. "There has been as much diplomacy," wrote Miss Nightingale to the Mother of the Bermondsey Convent (Sept. 3, 1864), "and as many treaties, and as much of people working against each other, as if we had been going to occupy a kingdom instead of a Workhouse." The correspondence forms one of the bulkiest bundles among Miss