Miss Nightingale's interest in the working classes led her in 1865 to draft a scheme which, in some aspects of it, forestalled ideas of a later generation of social reformers. Mr. Gladstone had recently passed an Act enabling a depositor's accumulations in the Post Office Savings Bank to be invested in the purchase either of an Annuity or an Insurance. It would be very advisable, she suggested, to add to these methods of saving facilities for the purchase of small freeholds. There was nothing that the working men more coveted than the ownership of a house or a piece of land. An extension of small ownership would satisfy a legitimate craving, increase the motives to thrift, and raise the social position and independence of the working classes. If the adoption of the scheme would necessitate the enfranchisement of leaseholds, so much the better. Such were Miss Nightingale's ideas, and under different forms and by different methods they have occupied the attention of social reformers to this day. She submitted her scheme to Mr. Villiers, President of the Poor Law Board, who seems to have been somewhat favourable to it. Then she tackled the Chancellor of the Exchequer, artfully suggesting that her scheme was merely, on the one hand, a slight development of his "most successful Savings Bank measures," and, on the other, an indirect means of meeting his earnest desire to extend the suffrage. But Mr. Gladstone was not to be cajoled. "It would not do," he told her, "for Government to become land-jobbers"--an opinion which has not been shared, it would seem, by some of Mr. Gladstone's successors. He had further suggested that the scheme should be submitted, in its legal aspects, to his friend Mr. Roundell Palmer, and Mr. Palmer, after reading it, opined that the law already gave adequate facilities for the purchase of freeholds by working men and others. Miss Nightingale then took other legal opinions with a view to meeting objections; but she presently gave up this addition to her schemes. "It was certainly," she said, "the wildest of ideas for me to undertake it just now when I can scarcely do what I have already undertaken." IV Though Miss Nightingale saw little of her friends or relations at this time, she constantly corresponded with them. There are many letters which tell of her grief at the death of her cousin, Miss Hilary Bonham Carter: "the golden bowl is broken," she wrote to Madame Mohl (Sept. 8, 1865), "and it was the very purest gold I have ever known." There are letters from many correspondents--Lady Augusta Bruce, for instance, and Mrs. William Cowper--which show how deeply they had been touched by Miss Nightingale's letters of condolence. Her own griefs left room for sympathy with those of others:--