hospitals and barracks, providing hospital tents, and generally with providing the clothing, shelter, means of transport, and in transporting the vast material needed for the operation of an army. The present agitation seems to have for its object the making the surgeon's and Medical Department independent of the quartermaster's and transportation department of the Army. Why? Is it supposed that the doctors and surgeons are more likely to be skillful business men, competent to purchase and contract for and transport to the army the thousands of vehicles needed for the transport of the sick and wounded and of the medical stores which are sent forward by tons after every engagement, than officers whose special duty and whose special training have been devoted to these things? Why not make the ordnance, the artillery, the infantry, the cavalry, the staff, the chaplains, all independent of the Quartermaster's Department? Will it be for the interest of the service, and will it conduce to economy, to bring all these different bodies into the marked to purchase wagons of as many different styles as there are departments, each to provide and transport it own vehicles, its own provisions, its own horses, mules, harness, forage, hay, corn, oats? What inextricable confusion in the movement and government of an t right to make a separate corps of officers and men to take charge of the transport of each of these corps, why do it for the Medical Department? Why multiply independent organizations in that already complicated machine-the Army? Unity is indispensable to military efficiency, and all efforts have been directed to secure simplicity and unity in the several branches of service. The cavalry should be under a single commanding head; the artillery should have its own; so the infantry, the commissariat, the transport, the Medical Department, each should have its single head with every army or detachment, to whom the orders of the commanding general can be addressed, and who should be responsible for the efficiency of that branch of the public service committed to his care. After an action the medical men are burdened with cares. The suffering inevitable in such cases appeals to the public sympathy, and, great as it is, it is painted in the strongest possible colors by the writers for the public press. Charitable people, men and women, fly to this scene of horror, and never having witnessed human suffering except surrounded by the comforts of home and friends, their imaginations are excited, and they see not the great and liberal provision made by the Government-not the immense stores of needful supplies, not the hundreds of vehicles expressly provided for moving the sick and the stores needed for them, not the hundreds of thousands of dollars" worth of hospital tents rested on the battle-field-but the solitary wound soldier, who, in attending to thousands, may have been overlooked, or many have straggled off unattended to some out of the way place, or the group collected by a surgeon under a tree or in a barn, and whom as yet the hospital store wagons has not reached, or whose wounds have not yet been dressed. Will the matter be improved by putting upon the doctor, in addition to his medical and surgical duties, those of bringing wagons, provision, hay, oats, and grain, and transporting them from Chicago or Maine to the battle- fields of Virginia?

You describe the drunken excesses of an ambulance driver. Would that man have been less likely to drink had he been hired by a surgeon? Is the quartermaster the only officer who, in the enormous demand for labor and for men, sometime shires a man who drinks? Ask the Surgeon-General how many surgeons head dismissed for