diversity in the daily duties and in the amount of air they have to breathe, explains, we believe, the great discrepancy between the deaths from consumption of the two classes of Guards. The reason for the increased mortality of the Dragoon regiments over that of the Life Guards is not so easy to discover. As regards the Line regiments, being quartered mostly in country localities, they breathe on the whole a better atmosphere and have more exercise than the Foot Guards. That this is the reason of their lower rate of mortality would appear from the fact, that while the Guards were campaigning in Canada during the rebellion, enjoying the same pure air as the Line, and undergoing precisely the same fatigue and exposure, their relative rate of mortality was reversed, and the Foot Guards proved the more healthy of the two. The latter portion of the Crimean campaign

showed the same result.

When the high rate of mortality was first made known in the Times,' military authorities imputed it chiefly to the destructive nature of the night duties. The evidence given before the Commissioners, however, entirely negatives this explanation. There are three classes of men whose night duties

are

more severe than those of the Foot Guards-firemen, the police, and sailors; yet, strange to say, all three enjoy a high state of health. The London fireman undergoes, perhaps, more wear and tear than the rest. His duties call him sometimes to several fires in a night, and when not out he is waiting in readiness. Whilst on service he is liable to great varieties of temperature, and to a good deal of wet; one minute he is scorching in the midst of the fire, the next half-drowned by the water. Nevertheless, he suffers a mortality of only seven per thousand. The metropolitan police are on duty ten consecutive hours in all weather, yet their mortality is less than nine per thousand. The comparison between them and the Foot Guards is the closest that could be made, as the unmarried men all live in sectionhouses (or barracks), are clothed in a uniform, and fed in messes, Yet the mortality is just half that of the line regiments, and less than half the mortality of the Foot Guards! The sailor on the home-station, who is worse lodged than either, and is subject to constant nightwork of a very exposed character, shows a still more favourable result. It is clear therefore that the nightwork will not account for the frightful inroads made by disease in the ranks of the soldier. Nor need we go much further than the barracks to know the main causes of all this suffering and death. In London, as we have said, no more than 331 cubic feet of air was meted out to her Majesty's Foot Guards, and in Dover Castle it was reduced to 147 feet per man,

or

or less than the quantity which brought about the jail fever which Howard discovered to be raging in the Cambridge Town Bridewell in 1774. The highest average space allotted to each man before 1847 was 447 cubic feet. Even this amount of air is rendered less pure by defective arrangements. Add to which the beds are placed only one foot apart, in defiance of the fact that a man may be suffocated in a crowd notwithstanding that he has all the sky above him. The state of the morning atmosphere is thus summed up by Serjeant Brown, in answer to the questions from one of the Commissioners :

'Have you often gone into the men's rooms in the morning before the windows were open?-Yes. In what state did you find the atmosphere?-In a very thick and nasty state, especially if I came in out of the air. If I went in out of my own room sometimes, I could not bear it till I had ordered the windows to be opened to make a draught. I have often retired to the passage and called to the orderly man to open the windows.'

In some cases the troops are lodged in the basement of buildings below the natural level of the soil, or in places where the storekeepers object to put their stores, in consequence of the damage that would result to them from the damp. A notable instance is given in evidence by Dr. T. E. Balfour :

'In 1845 the armoury was burnt down in the Tower, and a new barrack was erected on its site-certainly not before it was wanted, because the accommodation was very bad. The barrack was finished

in the beginning of 1849; fever was then prevailing among the men, and cholera threatening. The surgeon applied to have the new barracks given over for the use of the men, and he got two rooms; he remonstrated through his commanding officer with the authorities, when he was informed that he could not have more given over to him, as they were full of stores-blankets, I believe. On suggesting that the stores might be put into the old barracks, he was told that they were a great deal too damp to put stores into, and it was only in consequence of an energetic remonstrance on the part of the commanding officer, which I believe reached the Duke of Wellington, that a Board of officers was ordered to assemble, who recommended that the troops should be immediately moved into the new barracks.'

Now and then the crotchet of a colonel does a vast deal of mischief. Not many years since the cavalry at Knightsbridge were condemned to drink the water from the Serpentine, a reservoir of filth, which is now pronounced to be pestilential to the neighbourhood. The men objected to use this diluted sewage; but the commanding-officer had perfect faith in filters. Nevertheless, the water persisted in smelling bad, notwithstanding it looked clear-a mystery the Colonel's knowledge of chemistry

could

could not fathom; nor would he give in until a board had been called. The veterinary surgeon now began to complain that the coats of the horses were beginning to stare, and he wished that they should drink from the improved supply which was furnished to the men. The Colonel still had faith in his Serpentine water, and maintained that the horses would prefer it to the purer stream. A bucket of each was placed side by side in the barrack-yard, and a horse was brought in, which immediately settled the question by refusing the dirty water and plunging its muzzle into the clean. It is not many years since the troops stationed at the Tower were, in like manner, forced to drink the Thames water, taken from the most convenient which chanced to be the foulest spot in the whole river. A coarse filter did not suffice to protect them from the disease such supplies were sure to engender.

They manage these things better now in civil life. In the year 1848 the Society for Improving the Condition of the Working Classes opened their first model lodging-house. Their measure of the quantity of air necessary for the poor man was much greater than that settled three years later by the military authorities for the soldier. The mechanic and labourer were allowed 542 cubic feet; the soldier, under the most favourable conditions, breathed no more than from 400 to 500 cubic feet, a measure which fines off by degrees to the Black Hole allowance at Dover Castle, where the soldier was reduced to 131 cubic inches. Nor is this the only point in favour of the model lodging-house, of which there are several situated in the foulest portions of the metropolis, and which accommodate sometimes seven hundred inmates, or the full strength of many a regiment. Besides containing pure air, which, with a proper system of ventilation, costs nothing, but is of incalculable value to human life, the lodging-house, instead of being confined to one room, used for all purposes, is divided into the ordinary apartments of an inn; every inmate has his own dormitory; and there is a good coffee-room stored with papers and books, and supplied with hot water. In the kitchen below there are facilities for roasting, boiling, baking, and frying, and each man has his safe for provisions. Hot and cold baths are provided; and the whole building is heated by hot-water pipes, and well lighted by gas. If the soldier was treated like his brother of the chisel and the hammer, the mortality of the Guards would not be at the rate of 20·4, and that of the ordinary rank and file at the rate of 17.8 per thousand, whilst that of the mechanic is only 13.9 per thousand.

If we were to write volumes we could not deepen the impression these figures are calculated to convey of the importance to

health

T

health of sanitary science. It has been said that soldiers would not appreciate the benefits of a model lodging-house, and that, as the colonel asserted of the troop-horse, they prefer the dirty to the clean-crowding in a common room, to separate apartments. If this were true, it would be no reason for not teaching them better. If bad habits are congenial to them, they do not suffer less when the mischief is done; and if they were callous to the last, the interest of the nation still requires that lives which cost so much should not be recklessly thrown away. But experience refutes the supposition that soldiers have different notions of comfort from civilians. The Guards in the old part of the Wellington Barracks had on one occasion the temporary use, as a day-room, of an apartment 50 feet by 30, and, large as it was, it became inconveniently crowded. The Commissioners in their Report recommend that a minimum space of 600 feet be allotted to each man in his barrack and guard room, that an interval of at least three feet be maintained between each bed, and that a day-room should be provided. The barrack should at least be on a par with the workhouse.

The high rate of mortality in the army is not to be attributed to the bad arrangements of barracks alone; the important elements of exercise and food have to be considered, and in both the infantry are in an inferior position to the artisan.

Perhaps,' says Colonel Lindsay, 'no living individual suffers more than the soldier from ennui. He has no employment save the drill and its duties; these are of a most monotonous and uninteresting description, so much so that you cannot increase their amount without wearying and disgusting him. All he has to do is under restraint: he is not like a working man or an artisan; a working man will dig, and his mind is his own; an artisan is interested in the work on which he is engaged: but a soldier has to give you all his attention, and he has nothing to show for the work done. He gets up at six; there is no drill before breakfast; he makes up his bed and cleans up his things: he gets his breakfast at seven; he turns out for drill at half-past seven or eight; his drill may last half an hour. If it be guard-day there is no drill except for defaulters. The men for duty are paraded at ten o'clock; that finishes his day-drill altogether. There is evening parade, which takes half an hour, and then his time is his own until tattoo, which is at nine in winter and ten in summer. That is the day of a soldier not on guard or not belonging to a company which is out for Minié practice.'

Unless it be denied that the mind has any influence over the body, it cannot be doubted that the inaction to which the infantry soldier is subjected in barracks by the regulations of the service is most detrimental to his mental activity and bodily health. Vol. 105.-No. 209.

M

The

The actuary well knows that the affluent upper classes, although in every other respect placed in the best sanitary condition, are shorter lived than the agricultural labourer, for the simple reason that, having but little active duty to perform, they suffer from ennui, which begets dissipation. The soldier shares with the wealthy this cause of increased mortality without sharing in their other favourable conditions. Idle and ill-lodged, he naturally resorts to the public-house; and, having but little money to procure drink, he too often degrades himself by sponging upon the female admirers of red coats for the means. The annals of the police-courts are but too rife with the records of crimes and misdemeanors committed by the Foot-Guards from these causes. Mr. Jeffreys, a high authority, testifies that in India a large proportion of the men chafe and drink themselves to death, under modes of life so opposed to the habits of out-door labour in which they have been reared. The soldier is not so much in fault as the rule of the service which precludes him from making himself useful. The best-conducted troops are the Engineers, who work at their different trades. The evil does not stop with the mischief which the idle are sure to perpetrate. The active, self-reliant Englishman is notoriously the most dependent soldier in Europe. He can neither cook, bake, make his clothes, nor hut himself, like the Frenchman, the Sardinian, or even the Turk. Contractors follow him everywhere, excepting into the presence of the enemy; and when he most needs every necessary of life, he finds himself a helpless man. Mr. J. R. Martin, one of the commissioners, who has passed a life in high posts as a military surgeon in India, and who has done more for the sanitary condition of the soldier than any living person, holds it as a principle that in all climates the soldier should do for himself whatever he can perform without injury to his health, morals, or discipline; and, further, that he should be required to do whatever may be essential to his serviceable condition, in the event of a failure of the appointed appliances. Before the soldier can be held as fit to undertake his duties to the state, he must be made capable of maintaining everything which may be necessary to his personal care and comfort.' Does Aldershott or Shorncliffe fulfil even the majority of the conditions calculated to train the soldier for active service? Is he taught to build his own hut, to dig his own well, to make his own roads, to cook his own victuals, or to mend his own clothes? Aldershott in fact is not a camp at all, but a city of soldiers, built and maintained by contract;' the sum expended on the buildings alone for the years 1854 to 1856 being no less than

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