Satire was not the only weapon which Miss Nightingale employed in order to get things done. Sometimes she appealed to the motive of rivalry. Was the Minister hanging back? Well, all she could say was that Sidney Herbert would have done the thing in a moment. There were difficulties in the way, were there? The subordinate officials were piling up what they were pleased to call "reasons" to the contrary, were they? Well, "on this day many years ago," she wrote (June 18, 1862), "the French guns kept coming up again and again to get us out of the yard at Hougomont, and we answered in strong language, often repeated, till we kept the ground that we had won. I never heard the French guns called reasons. And I advise you to answer in the same way, because there is no other way of answering. Lord de Grey's Minute is the gun which just has to be fired over again." And sometimes she resorted, as of old, to a little bullying. "I send you," she wrote (March 26, 1863), "my protest about the Medical School. Make what use of it you like. But, if we fail, I shall refer it to Lord Palmerston who, as you know, befriended us on a former occasion (after Hawes's death)"--a home thrust, this, as it was by a personal reference to Lord Palmerston that she had secured Captain Galton's appointment. There was one occasion when, for a wonder, the pressure to be prompt and decided came not from her, but from the War Office. The Governorship of the Woolwich Hospital fell vacant; she had been sent a list of names with a request to advise upon them, and she had not immediately replied. "I wrote," she explained (Feb. 11, 1863), "to various authorities the very moment your and Lord de Grey's letters were put into my hands. The answers cannot be long delayed. But what would you think of my opinion if I volunteered it about men whom I know only by name? Had you asked me about Lord William Paulet or Colonel Storks or Sir Richard Airey, I could have given you an opinion off-hand with the utmost want of modesty. The very moment I have any reliable information you shall have it. But it takes some time to make such an inquiry, or what would it be worth? And Woolwich, I suppose, is not on fire, or with the enemy at the gates?" But for some reason or other, the War Office was in a hurry, and the appointment was made before her inquiries were completed. Her conscientiousness thus lost her the chance of deciding a piece of patronage. Not, indeed, that she felt any loss in such a case. She was nothing of a jobber. She pulled wires, as I have told, in some special appointments where she believed that a high public cause was at stake; but she was never actuated by personal favouritism, or by the love of personal influence on behalf of individuals. For this very post, she had received fifty letters of application, she said, but she had taken no action upon them. Only once, she said on another occasion, had she solicited anything as a personal favour from the War Office. It was an