Chapter V: April 28, 1876

MY DEAR FRIENDS,--Again another year has brought us together to rejoice at our successes, and, if to grieve over some disappointments, to try together to find out what it is that may have brought them about, and to correct it.

God seems to have given His favour to the manner in which you have been working.

Thanks to you, each and all of you, for the pains you have taken to carry out the work. I hope you feel how great have been the pains bestowed upon you.

You are not “grumblers” at all: you do try to justify the great care given you, the confidence placed in you, and, after you have left this Home, the freedom of action you enjoy--by that _intelligent_ obedience to rules and orders, to render which is alone worthy of the name of “Trained Nurse,” of God’s soldier. We shall be poor soldiers indeed, if we don’t _train_ ourselves for the battle. But if discipline is ever looked upon as interference, then freedom has become lawlessness, and we are no “Trained Nurses” at all.

The trained Englishwoman is the first Nurse in the world: _if_--IF she knows how to unite this intelligent obedience to commands with thoughtful and godly command of herself.

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“The greatest evils in life,” said one of the world’s highest statesmen, “have had their rise from something which was thought of too little importance to attend to.” How we Nurses can echo that!

“Immense, incalculable misery” is due to “the immoral thoughtlessness”--he calls thoughtlessness immoral--of women about little things. This is what our training is to counteract in us. Think nothing too small to be attended to in this way. Think everything too small of personal trouble or sensitiveness to be cared for in another way.

It is not knowledge only: it is practice we want. We only _know_ a thing if we can _do_ it. There is a famous Italian proverb which says: “So much”--and no more--“each knows as she does.”

What we did last year we may look upon not as a matter of conceit, but of encouragement. We must not fail this year, and we’ll not fail. We’ll keep up to the mark: nay more, we will press on to a higher mark. For our “calling” is a high one (the “little things,” remember: a high excellence in little things). And we must answer to the call ever more and more strenuously and ever more and more humbly too.

We live together: let us live for each other’s comfort. We are all working together: grasp the idea of this as a larger work than our own little pet hobbies, which are very narrow, our own little personal wishes, feelings, piques, or tempers. This is not individual work. A real Nurse sinks self. Remember we are not so many small selves, but members of a community.

“Little children, love one another.” To love, that is, to help one another, to strive together, to act together, to work for the same end, to bring to perfection the sisterly feeling of fellow-workers, without which nothing great is done, nothing good lasts. Might not St. John have been thinking of us Nurses in our Training Schools when he said that?

May God be with us all and we be _one_ in Him and in His _work_!

God speed us all!
Amen in our hearts.