preserving and restoring the health, and of securing
the general comfort and efficiency of troops; to
the proper provision of cooks, nurses, and hospitals;
and to other objects of like nature."

The members of the Commission sat in
deliberation for three or four months after its
constitution, during which time they not only
laid broad foundations for its operations, but
entered into a great variety of special inquiries
and labours. The president and an associate
secretary set off to study with their own eyes
and wits the practical question as it would lie
before them among the troops gathering on the
Ohio and Mississippi; other commissioners went
to look at the state of the forces in the East;
and before the army of the Potomac fought its
first battle, a sound system of sanitary inspection
was commenced. Already, by the month of
July, the secretary was reporting, from results
of direct inquiry, upon the wants of the armies
in respect of encampments and camp drainage,
malaria, water, tents, sunstroke, personal
cleanliness, latrines, camp police, clothing, food, and
cooks. Regimental officers were having new
ideas of duty and responsibility drilled into
them. The disasters at Bull Run, on the
eighteenth and twenty-first of July, taught the
North that it had no feeble enemy to fight.
The people yielded volunteers, and looked to
the Sanitary Commission for the safety of those
young farmers, clerks, students, mechanics,
lawyers, doctors, who had gone out of so many
families from ways of peace into the battle-field.
Partly for this reason, and for many another
natural reason testifying to the soul of good
that is in things evil, the American people
has undoubtedly backed its sanitary commission
very heartily indeed, with good will and
substantial aid. In a single day, after Bull Run, a
large store-room in the Treasury Building at
Washington was crammed with offerings from
women for use of the wounded soldiers. So
began the work of relief that formed thenceforth
an important addition to the duties of the
Commission.

Though opposed at first by military martinets,
even these, or most of them, saw their mistake,
and found important allies in the labourers, who,
not only by formal resolution stated that " the
first sanitary law in camp and among soldiers is
military discipline," but, for the sake of the
health, comfort, and morality of the volunteers,
in other resolutions " implored" that " the
most thorough system of military discipline be
carried out with the officers and men of the
volunteer force," and declared that " all the
great defects, whether in the commissariat, or
in the police of camps, are radically due to the
absence of officers from their posts, and to the
laxity of discipline to which they are themselves
accustomed. The Commission resolved, also,
"that the soldiers themselves, in their painful
experience of want of leaders and protectors,
would heartily welcome a rigid discipline exerted
over their officers and themselves." In fact, no
military martinet can be more anxious than a
sanitary commissioner, who cares for the health
and general well-being of his army, to keep
everybody well up to his duty, and lay a whip
on that horse in the team which shirks his fair
share of the pulling.

Money flowed in, and the Commission was
soon able to humanise the military hospitals by
the addition of comforts. The first order was
for water-beds, and the next for a hundred small
tables for writing in bed, a hundred wire cradles
for protecting wounded limbs, thirty boxes of
dominoes, and thirty chess-boards. Great
attention was, at the same time, being paid to the
construction of hospitals, the state of particular
hospitals being investigated, and plans and
details prepared for the required improvements.
We have already told of the establishment of
the Soldiers' Rest at Washington, for shelter of
the sick and needy, and of similar "rests" and
"homes" elsewhere established for use of the
wayworn volunteer. Two thousand three
hundred soldiers are helped in them daily; men
gone astray, or by chance otherwise uncared for,
or discharged men waiting for their pay. Three
days is the average length of time for which a
man takes shelter in such a Soldiers' Rest or
Home. Schedules of inquiry, too, were issued
for systematic camp inspections, four hundred
of them were returned before the end of the
year, and the general secretary presented his
own careful deductions from the returns of
two hundred regiments whose sanitary history
and wants had been specially studied and
reported during the months of September and
October. So well was all such knowledge turned
to account, that in the midst of a severe
campaign one might find a full regiment with only
four men sick in general and regimental
hospitals a regiment that never neglected its camp
police and its camp-cooking, even when bivouacking.
Two men in every company of this regiment
had early been taught the art of preparing
the army rations.

While the first mass of the soldiers was
being thus leavened with the knowledge of
things needful to their health, the rigour of the
war produced fresh calls of men by the half
million; and by all the laws of licensed bungling,
the Sanitary Commission had a right to excuse
itself as over-taxed and to break down, but it
did not. It had a staff of fourteen well-qualified
physicians, each with a defined portion of
the army under his observation. Six other
gentlemen, with special acquirements, were
engaged on special duties. And of this score
of labourers several had withdrawn from well-
paid work to devote themselves for fewer
dollars to work only in the noblest sense more
profitable. Much importance is ascribed to
the indefinable influence of sanitary information,
given unobtrusively, upon the mind and
conduct of the regimental oflicers. A sensible
officer, who cared for the health of his men,
and had results to show, also excited emulation
in his neighbours, and a wholesome regiment
stationed near an ill-conditioned one would
make the contrast so apparent as to set reform
on foot where it was wanted. In a hundred