Miss Nightingale had sent some of her correspondence on colonization to an old friend at the Colonial Office--Sir Frederick Rogers (Lord Blachford). "See what a thing," he replied (July 26, 1869), "is a bad conscience! You, conscious of a life spent in bullying harmless Government offices, think that I must read your (beautiful) handwriting with horror. Whereas I, conscious of rectitude, have sincere pleasure in receiving your assaults." This was a preface to an essay in which the Under-Secretary demonstrated, in the manner habitual to the Colonial Office in those days, the utter undesirability, impropriety, and impossibility of doing anything at all. Lord Houghton raised a conversation on the subject in the House of Lords, but confessed to Miss Nightingale that he was half-hearted, and nothing came of it. She formed a large heap of newspaper cuttings, collected facts from foreign countries, made many notes, and intended to follow up the suggestions, thrown out in her paper, into greater detail, and then perhaps to publish a book. She gave much time during 1869 to the subject, and in December Mr. Goschen, the President of the Poor Law Board, came to see her. They had a long discussion, and her note of it begins with an _aperçu_ of the Minister--a little severe, perhaps, but not undiscriminating. "He is a man of considerable mind, great power of getting up statistical information and political economy, but with no practical insight or strength of character. It is an awkward mind--like a pudding in lumps. He is like a man who has been senior wrangler and never anything afterwards." He seemed to Miss Nightingale to see so many objections to any course as to make him likely to do nothing; and his economic doctrines paid too little regard, she thought, to the actual facts. "You must sometimes trample on the toes of Political Economists," she said,[102] "just to make them feel whether they are standing on firm ground." That she was deeply interested in the whole subject is shown by a testamentary document, dated September 19, 1869, in which she earnestly begged Dr. Sutherland to edit and publish her further "Notes on Pauperism."[103] She lived in full possession of her faculties for at least a quarter of a century after this date, but she never put the Notes into printable shape. As I have said before, she lacked inclination to sustained literary composition. Besides, her hands were full of other things. [102] In a letter to Madame Mohl, March 26, 1869. [103] In the same document Dr. Sutherland is begged to do the like for her (1) _Notes on Lying-in Hospitals_ (published in 1871; see below, p. 196), and (2) "Paper on selling lands with houses in towns" (see above, p. 92). At a later time she sent the second batch of Pauperism Notes to Dr. Sutherland; but he was of opinion that they required complete rewriting. III