barrack or hospital. Refuse water is usually
conveyed into an adjacent cesspit, where, with all
other foul matter, it is expected to sink into
the earth. What will not disappear by soakage
men dip for and carry away in pails, skins, or
carts, and even women carry off in jars upon
their heads, to throw into some open ditch.

Drainage has not yet been introduced into
India. Feeble attempts made in Bombay and
Madras have simply been devices for the
concentration of a nuisance. At present, in fact, even
the cesspit is regarded as a luxury. "The
reports," says Miss Nightingale, "speak of
cesspits as if they were dressing-rooms." Thus at
Nuneerabad and Kolapore we are told that "to
each married man's quarter there is a bathing-room
with cesspit." The soil at Agra will not
imbibe the "fluid refuse" fast enough, for which
reason "raised paths are necessary between the
barracks." The earth is required to receive
into itself the whole filth of the barracks and
bazaars, and out of the ground thus polluted
the well water is taken.

In the bazaar at Nynee Tal, where men are
sent for their health, the stench is at times
overpowering. These bazaars grow up around every
Indian military station. They consist of huts and
houses in a huddled camp, and have a population
always large in proportion to that of the
European troops at the station. At Bangalore, there
is accommodation for about seventeen hundred
European and twenty-six hundred native troops.
But the native population within the cantonment
is a hundred and twenty-four thousand,
of whom three-fourths live in the bazaar close
to the European infantry barrack, and cover the
ground with filth. Of the bazaars at Cawnpore,
Sir Proby Cautley says: "To give the
commissioners an idea of the state of these bazaars, I
may mention that the natives build their huts
entirely of mud dug out of holes as near as
possible to the place where they build. In the
Cawnpore bazaar I came upon ponds full of
black mud and all sorts of filth, and the whole
place was utterly unventilated, which was a very
remarkable illustration of how ill-health was
produced, not only in the immediate neighbourhood,
but all round the place."

This practice of pond-making, as a receptacle
for refuse matter, is common, he says, to every
town bazaar in India. They dig the mud for
the huts close by, and do not fill in the hole
again. Such holes serve to receive all the filth
of the town, where it remains exposed to the
sun. As a bazaar becomes more populated it
becomes less ventilated, and in time a mortal
sore. The annual deaths at Cawnpore, chiefly
from fever, dysentery, diarrhœa, and cholera,
have been as high as ninety-one in a thousand,—
one man in eleven, or a very near approach to
literal decimation. The natives, says Dr. G. C.
Wallich, have in point of fact "no idea of taking
sanitary precautions. A man has no idea of
impurity as long as the water he defiles happens
to be Ganges water." During our cholera
epidemic of nine years ago, Southwark and
Lambeth were supplied by two water
companies: one giving comparatively pure water,
the other an impure water, containing sewage
matter from the Thames. In the same district,
among the population supplied with the better
water, the deaths by cholera were at the rate of
thirty-seven in ten thousand; among those
supplied with the bad water they were one hundred
and thirty in ten thousand, and Dr. R. D.
Thomson justly said in his report upon the
subject, "Therefore I conclude that there were
destroyed by the Southwark and Vauxhall
Company (whose water at the time was impure) two
thousand five hundred persons." What can we
expect but cholera among our troops in India?

There are few terrors in the Indian climate for
men who can live wholesomely. The least we can
desire, is, that the mortality among the English
soldiers in India shall be reduced to the same level
as that among English civilians in India—that
is to say, by more than one-half. The first
requirements at present wholly, or almost wholly
neglected, are efficient drainage and water-
supply at all the stations, with washing-basins,
baths, and wholesome drinking-fountains. The
bazaars also, at least where they surround the
cantonments, must be brought under sufficient
sanitary discipline. Then again in so simple a
matter as the construction of barracks, all the
expenditure has been of money, for there has
been none of wit.

In the first place, the site is chosen without
judgment. Sir Ranald Martin, who has written
a valuable work on the Influence of Tropical
Climates, says that in India stations have been
selected without care; that "no station he has
ever visited was exempt from malarious
influences; that the soils are damp, the situations
low and ill drained, the surface irregular, the
ground jungly, and some of the stations subject
to flooding." Some were in fact so deadly that
they have, after much suffering and loss, been
given up. More care has been taken of late
years, though Sir John Lawrence observes that
some are still very badly selected. But it is
quite as possible to build on an unhealthy site
in England as in India.

The site having been chosen, or not chosen,
the form of construction is the next question.
The common model is an extravagant enlargement
of the hut, with opposite doors protected
by verandahs. One or two people sleeping in a
small hut, according to the manner of the
native troops, can ensure to themselves almost
as good air within doors as without. Twenty
or thirty people in a hut, however lofty, find
ventilation difficult; accidents of draught affect
the course of the foul air; it may accumulate
at one end or over one group of beds.
But in an Indian barrack, eighty, a hundred,
two hundred, three hundred, six hundred, sleep
in a single barrack-room, with usually a fair
estimate of cubic feet per man, because the
rooms may be extravagantly high, but with a
floor space to each man of no more than eight
or nine feet square. Madras has two narrow
rooms, one above the other, in which sleep one
thousand and thirty men. One of the rooms, two