expended in putting him into the field a far more precarious investment that it would be were he kept under strict subjection to sanitary laws. The liability of soldiers to disease should be far less than it is. It would be so were they required to observe the laws of health. They and their officers, and the people, and the Government, have thus far too generally overlooked those laws. But the last twelve months have taught the Army and the people the immense importance of sanitary science in war. Our school has been costly, but it has already taught us much. For the last three months thousands and thousands of wan and wasted forms, brought north by railroad and on hospital transports, stricken by no rebel bullet, but by far deadlier enemies of the nation-malarial fever and camp dysentery-have been impressing on the people the lesson the Sanitary commission has been endeavoring to teach ever since the war began, viz, that our soldiers were in far greater danger from disease than from the violence of their enemies, and that we lose ten men uselessly by preventable disease for every man destroyed by the enemy. We have been learning rapidly during the past year. If we have learned anything, it has been that it was a mistake to keep the Regular Army and the Volunteer Army separate. Had the regulars been from the first intermingled with the volunteers they would have leaved the whole lump with their experience of camp police, discipline, subordination, and the panic to blush for. Our little Regular Army, diffused among the volunteers of last year, would within three months have brought them up to its own standard of discipline and efficiency.

As it is, the greatest efforts have been required to inspire officers and men with a sense of the nature and importance of sanitary laws, and with the practical application of hygienic principles to their tents, their camps, their persons, and their habits and food. In this work the Sanitary Commission, through its professional experts, has labored methodically and with marked success. But it cannot contemplate the needles renewal of this painful experience without warning Government that the loss of life by debility, disease, and immaturity-ten times that by our bloodiest battles-is wholly unnecessary; that of every ten men lost by Army during the past year nine have been needlessly wasted; that by proper medical inspection of recruits the material of disease can be reduced to the lowest possible sum; and then, by a proper distribution of the raw recruits among the regiments already formed, and of all new officers among existing regiments, we may at once communicate all that is most important in the sanitary experience of our veteran Army to the new levy of 300,000 men, and thus save them from 75 per cent. of the mortality to which they will otherwise be inevitably exposed.

From a sanitary point of view, the urgency of this policy is clear. If all the 300,000 men now to be recruited were recruited without a single new regiment being formed, it would save the country, sooner or later, thousands of lives and millions of dollars. We should get a far better class of men. They would have a thorough medical inspection, and every man would soon cease to be a rate recruit when absorbed into a veteran regiment. Thus all our year's costly experience would be saved, and the perils of ignorance, inexperience, and crudity be avoided.

This process, too, is that by which our present Army can be most rapidly re-enforce, since the men raised might be sent to the field as fast as they were collected, and digested into the body of the Army,