Miss Nightingale had been "in office," as she called it, continuously since her departure for Scutari in October 1854. She had been closely employed, that is to say, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially, upon the administrative work of various Departments in matters pertaining to her special interests. With the advent of Mr. Gladstone to power in 1868, her work in this sort had much diminished. Her friend, Captain Galton, had gone from the War Office. She occasionally intervened in minor matters, as on one occasion when her friend, Mr. Lowe, agreed with Mr. Cardwell to accept her view about a certain pension to the widow of an officer, and there were other cases of the kind: as when she obtained an attentive hearing from Mr. Bruce (Home Secretary) for a memorandum which she submitted on the working of the Contagious Diseases Act. But her constant employment in connection with the War Office was over. She had argued with herself, in some meditations during 1871, whether she ought to make a bid, as it were, for "office" again. She could still exercise a certain official influence, she thought, if she chose to seek out Ministers and ask them to call upon her. But the political times were out of joint, she argued on the other side, so far as her special aptitudes were concerned. The strength of Mr. Gladstone's Government was thrown into political reform, not into administration; the administration of the departments, as she was not alone in thinking, was defective. There are many letters of this period in which she contrasts the days of Peel and Sidney Herbert with those of Gladstone or Disraeli. "But I must stop," she says in one of them, "or you will say that I am aping Southey who said, you know, that the last Ministry was so bad that nothing could be worse except the present; but Coleridge differed from him, for he thought the present Ministry so bad that nothing could be worse except the last."[129] At any rate what Miss Nightingale cared for and was fitted for, she said to herself, was only administration; in the years when she was "in office" she had not only written Reports, she had been able to organize the mechanism for carrying them out. Now that administration was going, as she thought, to the dogs, it was time for her to be out of office. That such was the lot appointed to her, was borne in by something that happened early in 1872. In February Lord Mayo was assassinated--a personal grief to Miss Nightingale and "a great blow," she said, to her cause; and Lord Northbrook was appointed to succeed him as Governor-General. Miss Nightingale was personally acquainted with Lord Northbrook, who had been a friend (as also for a time a colleague) of Sidney Herbert, but he left for India without coming to see her. "You have worked for eternity," wrote Mr. Jowett (April 3), to whom she had reported the new Viceroy's neglect; "why should you be troubled at the Governor-General not coming to see you (as he most certainly ought to