155). In the following year Mr. Plowden wrote (May 22, 1869): "I forward a sketch of the Introductory Memorandum to the Sanitary volume. You will see that the greater part of it is copied verbatim from a memorandum of your own that Sir Bartle Frere handed over to me for this purpose." "I can never thank you sufficiently," wrote Sir Bartle himself (July 5), "for all the kind help you have given to Mr. Plowden's Annual, at the cost of an amount of trouble to yourself which I hardly like to think of. But I feel sure it will leave its mark on India." She took good care that it should at any rate have a chance of doing so. She had discovered that the 1868 Report, though sent to India in October of that year, had not been distributed in the several Presidencies till June 1869. She now saw to it that copies of the 1869 Report were sent separately to the various stations by book-post. She continued to contribute in one way or another to successive volumes[115]; and that for 1874 included a long and important paper by her. [115] See Bibliography A, Nos. 57, 62. VIII Ten years before Miss Nightingale had popularized the Report of her Royal Commission in a paper entitled "How People may Live and Not Die in India." The Paper was read to the Social Science Congress in 1863. In 1873 she was again requested to contribute a Paper to the Congress. She chose for her title "How some People have Lived, and Not Died in India." It was a summary in popular form of ten years' progress, and this was the Paper which the India Office reprinted in its Blue-book of 1874. Miss Nightingale glanced in rapid detail at the improvements in various parts of India; took occasion to give credit to particularly zealous officials; and noticed incidentally some of the common objections. One objection was that caste prejudice must ever be an insuperable obstacle to sanitary improvement. She gave "a curious and cheerful" instance to the contrary. Calcutta had "found the fabled virtues of the Ganges in the pure water-tap." When the water-supply was first introduced, the high-caste Hindoos still desired their water-carriers to bring them the _sacred_ water from the _river_; but these functionaries, finding it much easier to take the water from the new taps, just rubbed in a little (vulgar, not sacred) mud and presented it as Ganges water. When at last the healthy fraud was discovered, public opinion, founded on experience, had already gone too far to return to dirty water. And the new water-supply was, at public meetings, adjudged to be "theologically as well as physically safe." Then there was the objection of expense, but she analysed the result of sanitary improvements in statistics of the army. The death-rate had been brought down from 69 per 1000 to 18. Only 18 men died where 69 died before. A sum of £285,000 was the money saving on recruits in a single year.