barrack-gates to the margin of the sea.
The war was universally approved (except by a clique of peace-men); and
there was a universal confidence that the troops would do their duty
well, though not one man in a thousand of them had ever seen war. As
they marched down to their ships, in the best mood, and with every
appearance of health and spirit, nobody formed any conception of what
would happen. Parliament had fulfilled the wishes of the people
by voting liberal sums for the due support of the troops; the
Administration desired and ordered that everything should be done for
the soldier's welfare; and as far as orders and arrangements went, the
scheme was thoroughly well intended and generous. Who could anticipate,
that, while the enemy never once gained a battle or obtained an
advantage over British or French, two-thirds of that fine stout British
force would perish in a few months? Of the twenty-five thousand who went
out, eighteen thousand were dead in a year; and the enemy was answerable
for a very small proportion of those deaths. Before me lie the returns
of six months of those twelve, showing the fate of the troops for that
time; and it furnishes the key to the whole story.

In those six months, the admissions into hospital in the Crimea
(exclusive of the Santari Hospital) were 52,548. The number shows that
many must have entered the hospitals more than once, as well as that the
place of the dead was supplied by new comers from England. Of these,
nearly fifty thousand were absolutely untouched by the Russians. Only
3,806 of the whole number were wounded. Even this is not the most
striking circumstance. It is more impressive that three-fourths of the
sick suffered unnecessarily. Seventy-five per cent. of them suffered
from preventable diseases. That is, the naturally sick were 12,563;
while the needlessly sick were 36,179. When we look at the deaths from
this number, the case appears still more striking. The deaths were
5,359; and of these scarcely more than the odd hundreds were from
wounds,--that is, 373. Of the remainder, little more than one-tenth were
unavoidable deaths. The natural deaths, as we may call them, were only
521; while the preventable deaths were 4,465. Very different would have
been the spirit of the parting in England, if the soldiers' friends had
imagined that so small a number would fall by Russian gun or bayonet, or
by natural sickness, while the mortality from mismanagement would at one
s