ART. III.-HEALTH OF THE BRITISH ARMY AT HOME AND ABROAD.

Report of Commissioners on the Sanitary Condition of the Army. Parliamentary Proceedings. 1858.

Report of Commissioners on the Sanitary State of the Army in India. Parliamentary Proceedings. 1863.

Army Sanitary Administration, and its Reform under the late Lord Herbert. By Florence Nightingale. 1862.

Sanitary Condition of the Army. By the Right Hon. Sidney Herbert. 1859.

Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Vol. clxv., pp. 966 et seq.

1862.

Mortality of the British Army. Illustrated by Diagrams and Tables. Prepared by Miss Nightingale.

To a people whose civil rights are secure, whose political liberties have been long established and are now beyond the reach of imaginable danger, whose Government provides them peace and order, and among whom the administration of justice is prompt, efficient, and beyond suspicion, it would seem that scarcely any subject of public importance remains which concerns them more closely, or ought to interest them more vividly, than the condition of the army which defends their homes and is recruited from their ranks. It is the guardian of their national security; it is intrusted with the vindication of their national honour; their power and grandeur, the extension of their empire, the maintenance of their influence in the councils of the world, the protection of their citizens in distant lands, depend in the last resort upon its efficiency; they are taxed for its support, and taxed to such an extent that every man of property, and almost every consumer of ordinary commodities, actually feels the burden. Of an Englishman's annual contributions to the active expenditure of the State, about three-fifths go to the military and naval forces of the country. All classes are concerned: the army is recruited from the lower class; it is paid, clothed, and fed by the middle class; and it is officered from the higher class.

Again if there be any section of the community whom we are bound by every motive to care for with the greatest vigilance, on whose condition the best forethought, the keenest science, the most conscientious moral consideration, should be ceaselessly and anxiously brought to bear, it is the army. And this for three

special reasons. The soldier is a peculiarly valuable, a peculiarly costly, and a peculiarly helpless animal. If he be not courageous, stubborn, admirably disciplined, and thoroughly effective, he may be the cause of much turbulence and mischief at home, and our dearest and highest national concerns will suffer-nay, even our national position and security may be endangered. Of all our creations he is, when perfect, that in which the best result is produced out of the poorest materials. Most recruits are drawn from the class of whom all communities are ashamed and afraid. The finished first-rate British soldiers, into whom such recruits are often formed, are citizens of whom any community might be proud. The process is a costly one, so costly and so troublesome that the article, when produced, ought to be hoarded almost like a gem. A thoroughly trained and disciplined soldier, any thing like a veteran, takes many years to create, and costs about 100l. every year. He is worth all that and more when obtained and perfected; but if he dies or is squandered, the raw recruit who is to replace him is comparatively of the scantiest value. Then, again, of all classes there is none whose individuality is so completely merged and taken from him as the soldier. Every thing is ordered for him, every thing is done for him; he is allowed no will of his own; the place in which he is to sleep, the food he is to eat, the clothes he is to wear, the mode in which he is to employ every moment of time, are all regulated for him by absolute decree; he may not murmur, he may not remonstrate, he may not give an opinion, he is never taken into council; he is at the total and despotic disposal of another; he is literally and almost dreadfully at the mercy of the ignorance, caprice, injustice, temper, or want of consideration of his immediate superior. We need scarcely point out what a terrible weight of responsibility this absorbed and dictated existence imposes on those superiors, and how heavy is the sin of those who from selfishness, or thoughtlessness, or avoidable errors, or obstinate ignorance and wilfulness, or bad passions, or any other defect, either neglect their duties or abuse their powers. Those who have fellow-creatures so utterly and helplessly dependent upon them ought of all men to be most unselfish, most vigilant, most scrupulously considerate and just.

But this is not all. The life of the British soldier is an unnatural one, actually to a sad extent, necessarily perhaps to a great extent. At the age of the most imperious passions he is precluded from marrying save in rare exceptions; at the age of temptation he is thrown where temptations are rife, and where there is little or nothing to counteract them, among hundreds of others as weak, as ill-educated, and as tempted as himself; at a most impressible period of life he is removed from

domestic influences, and submitted to barrack influences; at the age of activity and mobility of mind he is subjected to a daily routine rife with the most dreary and killing ennui,— divided between tedious formalities and absolute inaction. Probably nothing could go far to counteract the evil effects of this unnatural life except war and work; but war comes seldom, and work our military authorities appear resolutely, and, as we believe, insanely and wickedly, to oppose.

"It must be remembered that an army is a body to which the state stands in peculiar relations. It is the instrument by which the state protects itself, and for this purpose of protecting the community the army-and the same remark applies to the navy-is placed in circumstances of life which are totally different from those of the rest of the community, and are quite exceptional and abnormal. There can be no doubt that the natural life of man is domestic; as a rule, every grown-up man in town and country has his wife and children about him. The army is cut off from this domestic state, and put into a wholly artificial form of life. We mould our instrument exactly according to our own uses, without reference to the wants within the instrument itself, the natural individual requirements of those whom we use as our instrument. There can be no doubt that we must have a standing army, and that an army cannot be a community living in a domestic manner. But this being the case, the state is certainly under peculiar obligations to these men, whom it thus uses as one great corporate tool. It places these men, entirely for its own convenience, in circumstances of the greatest peril to themselves-peril moral and physical. These men, who are no better than the rest of the community, and a certain proportion of them very wild and impulsive fellows, must either exert such a command over their passions as belongs to philosophers-we might almost say anchorites-or they fall into vice, and, with vice, into terrible disease. That is the alternative which the state puts before them. The alternative is undoubtedly a hard one, a very hard one; and the power which imposes it upon them is under an obligation, as a matter of common benevolence, to see that it does not work more mischievously than can be helped; that it does not produce a greater amount of disaster than by reasonable expedients it can be restricted to. The state has brought these men together, has placed them in this abnormal and eccentric condition, has made them its own instrument for one great purpose. Having made the life of these men, then, thus irregular and exceptional, and exposed them to peculiar danger, the state is especially bound to look after their health, to counteract the bad causes at work as much as it can, and to reduce the source of disease to the

smallest possible dimensions. We can hardly think of immense -physical evil, and of physical evil brought on to a large extent by our own arrangements, made in subservience to the neces sities of the community, but still our own arrangements, without feeling that we are bound to take all the precautions possible to modify this evil. Society at large must look after itself, its temptations are of its own raising, and it has no right to expect the state to look after it; but here is an exceptional body, a creature of state necessity. It has peculiar claims on the state. If remedial hospitals, then, devoted to the reception of an unfortunate class, can largely modify this danger and diminish the root of disease in the army and navy, there can be no serious objection to the state supporting such institutions in the quarters where they are wanted."

Well all subjects have their innings in England sooner or later. Sooner or later Englishmen always awake to their duties and responsibilities. And some years ago they did awakesome of them at least, and the late Sidney Herbert among the first to a sense of the condition of the soldier, to a perception of how much they owed him, and how little they had paid. A searching inquiry was instituted into the matter, especially in reference to his health and comfort, and the result was suffi ciently startling. Since then the matter has not slept, and the Blue Books just issued on the "Sanitary State of the Indian Army" are the last consequence of the public attention which was aroused some years ago. Before examining these, however, we wish to recall to the recollection of our readers the facts in reference to the mortality of the English army at home which came to light in 1859, and the practical effect which has followed those disclosures. The various publications we have placed at the head of this article give us ample materials for a very definite picture of the state of affairs; which is appalling enough.

The idea which naturally occurs to the uninformed mind, when the mortality of the army is mentioned, is that soldiers die because they are killed; that they are slain in battle or die of their wounds; and that it is their métier, a natural concomitant of their profession, thus to end their days. Nothing can be further from the truth. It has been stated by the sanitary reformers, with Mr. Chadwick at their head, that during all our Napoleonic wars, which lasted on and off for twenty years, we only lost 19,000 men upon the field; and the statement, startling as it is, was authenticated by reference to official documents, and, so far as we are aware, has never been contradicted. Sidney Herbert reminds us that of 405,000 French troops that crossed the Niemen to invade Russia in 1812, only

55,000 re-crossed it five months afterwards; and that of the balance of 350,000 lost, only 54,000 fell of killed and wounded at Borodino, and not more, it is believed, than 46,000 in minor actions. Miss Nightingale shows in carefully constructed tables that in the Crimean war, which lasted two and a quarter years, and included one of the most disastrous sieges and three of the hardest battles we have ever fought, the aggregate annual mortality among our troops reached 22.78 per cent-only 3 per cent of which came under the denomination of violent deaths. Lastly, it appears from the Report of the Royal Commission just published, that even our bloodiest wars in India seldom raised the average mortality more than from 70 to 84 per 1000, or in former days from 90 to 117. "Out of 9467 men dying among regiments in India prior to the mutiny, or sent out in 1857-58, only 586 were killed in action or died of wounds". scarcely more than 6 per cent. Our soldiers die of disease, and of preventible disease; and they die—or at least used to dieat a fearful rate-far faster than any other class of their countrymen. Yet they ought to be peculiarly healthy. They are all picked men, and are subjected to a rigorous medical examination. before they are borne upon the rolls; they have the best medical attendance gratis; and they are clothed, lodged, and fed at the cost of the nation, and with no sparing of expense, as our annual estimates testify. The following comparison, which we extract from Sidney Herbert's paper, gives the main facts:

Annual Deaths per 1000 of Men at the Soldiers' Ages.

The mean rate of mortality of the entire army was 17.5 per 1000. Thus the British troops-a body of men out of whom all diseased and ill-organised subjects have been carefully eliminated to begin with, and who enjoy the special supervision of the state-die twice as fast as average Englishmen, and more than twice as fast as policemen and other selected bodies; while