going to the trenches, and on guard, with their
feet on their boots instead of in them.” For
want of proper accommodation and right sense
of the necessity of making drainage to the
ground under a tent, men who had sat from
morning to night in the mud of the trenches lay
from night to morning heaped in the mud of
their tents. Out of facts like these, and the
fact that such a camp, when due observance of
all laws of health had been at last enforced,
became absolutely healthier than English
barracks, Lord Herbert gathered to himself a
new sense of work that must be done. A
colleague, ready to pass over the distresses of
the lower rank, whether of soldiers or civilians,
would tell him “the poor must be poor.”
“As if,” he exclaimed, “it being necessary
to have poor, it is necessary to have them
miserable!”

A penny from every man whose happiness he
has increased, if every such man could know his
benefactor, would almost build the convalescent
hospital, which, together with a portrait statue
in his native county town, it is resolved to raise
as a memorial of Sidney Herbert’s noble life.
The evidence to which we have referred on the
condition of the army gave the latest impulse to
his beneficent energies. He obtained four
commissions—one for considering the improvement
of barracks and hospitals; one for securing a
more distinct knowledge of vital truths by
reorganising the army medical statistics; one for
organising the army medical school at Chatham,
with its professor of hygiene; and the fourth
for securing such reform in the army medical
service as would make it efficient for the
prevention of disease in barracks and camps or in
the field. The soul of earnestness and steadfast
single-minded work in each of these commissions
was himself. He presided over each, and
gave himself up so wholly to the opportunities
they gave of doing a high duty, that he not only
attended all the meetings of the commission
upon soldiers’ barracks, and signed all their
reports up to the date of his becoming Minister
at War, but was active in personal inspection
of the barracks and hospitals. He worked
without flinching, heard the truth with his own
ears, saw the truth with his own eyes; and then
advised and directed changes which have
reduced the army mortality by about one-half,
and which save every year the lives of a
battalion of men!

He was giving up his own life to such work, and
he knew it. There was no other man with equal
power who had equal disregard of mere routine;
to whom the official shrug, the word of heedless
social badinage, the humour of the club,
suggested no easy prudential test, was no
discouragement. He did not live to please his
fellows, though, so delightful was his nature,
that there could be none among his fellows
whom he did not please. He lived to do the
highest manly duty that God gave to his right
hand. In the last years of his life, when the
advance of bodily disease was to be checked
only by rest and self-indulgence, the mass of
work that Lord Herbert saw to be done,
dependent for its execution too entirely upon his
persistent and determined toil, while having
lives of many other men dependent on it, seemed
to him too important to be laid aside. What he
might hope yet to do before he died, was worth
doing, although he gave up for it his own life in
the full maturity of manhood. It was by that
sacrifice of his own latter years that he was
enabled to save lives of other men by the battalion.
The singular freedom from sickness, or even
discomfort enjoyed by the troops in the recent
China expedition, was a matter of national
congratulation, when there were few who had
attention called to the man wasting in health, and
working his way down into the grave, by whose
beneficent industry those lives of our country-
men in the far East had been shielded and
preserved.

He had cared even to make wholesome and
acceptable the food of the common soldier, by
establishing a school of cookery at Aldershott.
He provided for the good nursing of the soldier
in sickness. Although he left his work unfinished
—to remain incomplete, we fear to think how
long, now that his earnestness no longer
predominates in council—he did in his time more
than any war minister who ever lived, in any
age or country, to deprive war of its worst
horrors, and to reduce its sacrifice of human life.
For it is not by sword or gun that the great
hosts perish in war; it is by famine and disease.
It has been calculated that it took in the
Peninsular war the shooting away of seven times
the weight of a man in lead for every one man
whom a bullet hit. Lord Herbert was cutting
through the thickest root of a great misery,
and would not drop the axe, though he was
dying while he strove. On the very day of
his death the first military hospital established
by him on the new system was opened at
Woolwich.

The only fit memorial of such a man is a good
work conceived in his own spirit. It is
proposed, therefore, that the Herbert Memorial
shall be a sea-side convalescent hospital, bearing
his name, and designed, after the manner of his
life, for the support and protection of the weak.
The period of slow recovery from sickness is one
of great trial and risk to many of the poor. In
the founding of such a Memorial Hospital, we
may celebrate worthily a good man’s name by a
good deed done in his honour. It is a
memorial to which many a poor man’s wife, who
might have been a widow but for Sidney
Herbert’s labour, will desire to bring her mite; to
which happy women in Australia, whom he
saved from wretchedness if not from sin, will
send their little offerings; to which the common
soldier, for whose well-being he gave his life,
will offer pence out of his pay. Of all
memorials it is one towards which offerings of pence
should be desired and honoured. Let the statue
of Lord Herbert in Salisbury be raised by his
private friends and by the County. But let the
Memorial Hospital—Thomas Pain, Esq.,
Laverstock Hall, Salisbury, is secretary to the fund—