The piece by Miss Nightingale which attracted most attention was an article on "The People of India" in the _Nineteenth Century_ for October 1878. Sir James Knowles's magazine was then in the early days of its influence, and he gave the first place to this article, in which Miss Nightingale administered a wholesome shock to British complacency. "We do not care for the people of India," she exclaimed. "The saddest sight in the world" was to be seen in the British Empire; it was the condition of the Indian peasant. She gave pitiable facts and figures of Indian famines, and passed on to describe in more detail the evils of usury in the Bombay Deccan. "I cannot tell you," she wrote to a correspondent in the following year,[173] "the intense interest that I take in the subject: how to raise the indebted poor cultivators of India out of their wretched bondage of poverty, whether by _monts de piété_, by some National Bank, such as you propose, by some co-operative system, or by all or any of such means." Miss Nightingale's article was received as a kind of manifesto by those who sympathized with her point of view, and the publication brought a large accession to her Indian correspondence. In official circles it caused some flutter. "I have read your article," wrote a friend in the India Office (Aug. 8), "with the greatest interest and admiration. The official mind is much disturbed. I overheard a conversation between two magnates (not in the present Government) in which the article was described as a shriek, and the question was whether something could not be done to counteract the impression." Lord Northbrook, after reading the article, sent to Miss Nightingale an elaborate criticism, not traversing her case in all points, but pleading that she had exaggerated the shadows. With Lord Salisbury's successor at the India Office there was the following correspondence: