this board proved unequal to its duty, and that
the ambulance system, very neat upon paper,
very pretty in a time of peace, and equal,
no doubt, to time requirements of society as
it was in the old Peninsular days, thoroughly
broke down.

The fact is pointed out by a physician
resident at Constantinople, who was attached
to the medical service of both the English and
French army hospitals ; who saw the truth
concerning each, made searching inquiry, and
has published the result of it in what we
know to be, on the whole, a very trustworthy
book, or pamphlet, upon "England and France
before Sebastopol, looked at from a medical
point of view." He tells us, that in the months
of December, January, and February,
previous to the evacuation, when the English
camp was not less healthy than an English
country town, the daily average of sick treated
in the fourteen hospital divisions at Kamiesch
alone (which served for but a third of the
French army), exceeded fourteen thousand ;
and that during these three months, in
these divisions only, the aggregate loss by
deaths was at least eighteen thousand !
The medical staff was so unequal to the
duties with which it was overwhelmed, that
one surgeon was habitually called upon to
order medicine and food for about two
hundred cases in succession, and was bound
also to get through his round in about
two hours and a-half, because breakfast or
dinner could not be served until his work
was done.

The condition of French hospitals in the
latter days of the Crimean occupation was
even worse than that of the English
hospitals in the beginning of it. At Pera, the
number of sick was disproportionate to the
capacity of the hospital— there being double
the number of patients that there ever were
even of healthy soldiers in the place. They
were a prey, of course, to typhus. The
aspect of the patients brought to the mind
of an observer the fever that spread during
the days of Irish famine. The diet of the
sick private was meagre and insufficient,
while that at the officers' hospital consisted
of game, fish, oysters, turkey, pigeons, pastry
of all kinds, fruits, fresh and preserved, and
the finer kinds of wine.

Of the French hospital sheds for sick
soldiers at Gulhaneh, at the same period, we
are told that "the air was fetid, pungent,
loathsome, occasioning an instinctive impulse
to rush from its influence. To hear of the
daily rate of mortality" (from twenty to
thirty) "was not so shocking as it was to
observe the irremediable state of the living."
Of those who do not die, few only, under such
conditions, can recover. There is reason for
the assertion that, throughout the war, not
one in five received in the French hospitals
on the Bosphorus was sent back for service
in the Crimea.

We need not multiply these details.  Such
as we  have given, we have given for two
reasons. First, to put utterly aside all argument
to our discredit from comparison with
France, as to these matters of hygiène. Bad
as we are, and much as we desire to become
better, let us be just to ourselves, and understand
that we need not set up our neighbours
as a standard of perfection. The French
government returns—which, by the way, do
credit to the reputation France has for its
cookery — admit that the per-centage of
mortality in the French army of the East was
a trifle— but the merest trifle — higher than
that of the English. And the French government
returns quietly give themselves a
margin of twelve thousand nine hundred and
four men difference between outgoing and
incoming, for whose disappearance sundry
theories propose to account ; and they claim
to have had in the Crimea an effective
strength of one hundred and forty-six
thousand two hundred and forty men when the
war closed. But, when the allied armies were
paraded before General Luders, on the
conclusion of peace, the French Commander-in-
chief, with every effort, placed in review
order a force of, at the utmost, forty thousand
men. Say there were in all hospitals forty
thousand sick "effectives," add the twelve
thousand men at Eupatoria, leave a wide
margin for any possible addition, and there
must remain a missing force, which, with the
twelve thousand unaccountables, makes, at
the lowest calculation, fifty thousand men
beyond the recognised mortality, who once
have been alive in flesh and blood, but now
live only in ink and paper.

Even in ordinary times French hygiène is
less efficient than our own. Returns of a
more trustworthy kind show that the
mortality of infants—the best test of unwholesome
conditions of life—is in France decidedly
greater than in England. Hard work kills
more of us in middle life ; but, again, we have
more longevity. Our other reason for referring
to the French mortality in the Crimea during
the last months of the Russian war is, because
this mortality shows that the marvellous
improvement in the health of English soldiers
did not depend upon any accident of climate,
or on the mere cessation of siege-work.
Those advantages the army of France shared
with us. We had obeyed the conditions of
life ; but, they sank under the unwholesome
influences we had overcome. Our men were
even healthier than they would be in barrack
on an English heath ; there was less sickness
among them, than there is among the household
cavalry at home. The whole French
army was perishing, and, had not peace been
concluded, would have perished utterly.

And is all this to yield us nothing but a
bit of record? Never before was there so
conspicuous an evidence afforded of the
nature of those fevers and plagues which infest
our towns and villages, and of the readiness
with which they can be conquered, when we