among the confusion of regimental records, without
getting what we wanted. As to the method of proceeding, I may have
something to say farther on. Meantime, we must turn to the primary
object of the institution of the Military Hospital,--the cure of the
wounded and sick of the army.

In the case of active war, foreign or civil, the General Hospital is
usually an extemporized establishment, the building a makeshift, and
the arrangements such as the building will admit. In Spain, the British
obtained any houses they could get; and the soldiers were sometimes
crowded into half a dozen of them in one town. In the last war, the
great buildings at Scutari were engaged three months before they were
wanted for extensive use; so that there was plenty of time for making
them clean, airy, warm, and commodious, and for storing them with all
conveniences. This was not done; and the failure and its consequences
afford a lesson by which every people engaged in war should profit. A
mere outline of what was not done at Scutari may be an indication of
what should be done with all convenient speed elsewhere.

There was a catgut manufactory close at hand, which filled the
neighborhood with stench. Half a dozen dead dogs festered under the
windows in the sun; and a dead horse lay in the aqueduct for six weeks.
The drain-pipes within the building were obstructed and had burst,
spreading their contents over the floors and walls. The sloping boarded
divans in the wards, used for sleeping-places, were found, after the
building became crowded, to be a cover for a vast accumulation of dead
rats, old rags, and the dust of years. Like all large stone buildings in
the East, it was intolerably cold in winter, with its stagnant air,
its filthy damps, and its vaultings and chill floors. This wonderful
building was very grandly reported of to England, for its size and
capacity, its imposing character, and so forth; and the English
congratulated themselves on the luck of the wounded in having such a
hospital. Yet, in the next January, fourteen hundred and eighty were
carried out dead.

It appears that nobody knew how to go to work. Everybody writes to
somebody else to advise them to "observe"; and there are so many
assurances that everybody means to "observe," that there seems to have
been no leisure to effect anything. One thinks that this, that, or the
other should be attended to; and another states that the matter is
under consideration. It was so