ou
could safely pitch your tents, or whether it would be best for your men
to sleep on the bare ground or on straw or on pine boughs? Yet, if you
inquire, you will find that all these questions and countless others are
definitely settled,--thanks in a great measure to the Sanitary
Commission, which has gladly given its ounce of prevention, that it may
spare its pound of cure.

If you imagine that the need of this work of prevention has ceased, you
are greatly mistaken. Only last summer, in the single month of June, the
Commission distributed, in the Army of the Potomac alone, over a hundred
tons of canned fruits and tomatoes, and not less than five thousand
barrels of pickles and fresh vegetables. It is hardly too much to say
that what the Commission did in this respect has gone far towards
enabling our gallant army to disappoint the hopes of the enemy, and to
hold, amid the deadly assaults of malaria, the vantage-ground which it
has won before Petersburg and Richmond. All through the spring and
summer, too, at Chattanooga, on the very soil which war had ploughed and
desolated, invalid soldiers have been cultivating hundreds of acres of
vegetables. And on the rugged sides of Missionary Ridge, and along the
sunny slopes of Central Tennessee, the same forethought has brought to
perfection, in many a deserted vineyard, the purple glory of the grape.
And this not merely to cure, but to prevent, to keep up the strength and
vigor of the brave men who have marched victoriously from the banks of
the Ohio to Atlanta.

Nor is it likely that the value of this office will cease so long as the
war lasts. In the future, as in the past, new conditions, new
exigencies, and new dangers will arise. And to the end the foresight
which guards will be as true a friend to the soldier as the kindness
which assuages his pains. Looking back, therefore, upon the whole field,
and speaking with a full understanding of the meaning of the language, I
am ready to affirm, that, if the Sanitary Commission had undertaken
nothing but the work of preventing sickness, and had accomplished
nothing in any other direction, the army and the country would have
received in that alone an ample return for all the money which has been
lavished.

* * * * *

I come now to the Special Relief Department. I should call this a sort
of philanthropic drag-net, differing from that mentioned in the Gospel
in that it seems to gather up nothi