drinking to excess. How many surgeons, nurses, and stewards have been guilty of stealing and drinking the liquors provided for the sick. He will tell you a story which will fill you with horror. Yet how unjust it would be to give the public impression that it is because hired by the Medical Department that these things occur. As it is, the burden of complaint has been that ambulance drivers get drunk. They are hired by the quartermasters; therefore the Quartermaster's Department is in fault. Do you know how the train of ambulances which you saw and with which you find so much fault was fitted out? On a Saturday afternoon the Secretary of War informed me that General Pope had been successful and held the field of battle covered with thousands of wounded of both armies; that he desired to send out ambulances to assist in gathering up the wounded and volunteers to aid in this benevolent work. By 6 p. m. of that day 250 ambulances were collected and fitted out, most of them new and harnessed for the first time. The horses were as new as the ambulances. Both had just been received at this depot. The train, horses and drivers alike in a great measure raw and unbroken, were dispatched that evening toward the battle-field. I gave orders to fill the water kegs myself, but at the last moment was informed by the quartermaster that the kegs were new and dry, and therefore not tight, and that to fill the 500 kegs, which is a slow process, would detain the train some hours. It was growing dark, and concluding that the wounded men lying upon the field would suffer more by delaying the whole train far into the night than by the want of water in these kegs, which could be filled from some stream near the field by the volunteer attendants, several hundred in number, who accompanied the train, I permitted them to start unfilled. Bread and other food were sent with the train, and in the course of the night fifty army wagons in addition were dispatched from this depot loaded with hospital stores, and 150 with rations and forage. Thus, on a sudden call from the battle- field, in one afternoon and night, the quartermaster dispatched 450 vehicles, drawn by nearly 2,000 horses and mules, and accompanied by over 1,000 driver and attendants from this depot. Such a feat has seldom been performed by any nation. What is the result? Great good was done to the wounded by any nation. What is the result? Great good was done to the wounded and sick. The department has the satisfaction of knowing this, and that several thousand wounded men were brought into the hospitals about Washington and Alexandria; but a few of the drivers got scared and ran away, a few got drunk, being out all night exposed to a drenching storm, and upon the misconduct of those who fled, and of those who got drunk, the public, even the scientific press, has not ceased to ring the changes even to this day. What is accomplished goes for nothing. Every tale of suffering is tools as though it were from neglect of duty on the part of the Government that any suffering exists in the course of the war. When war can be carried on without suffering and without expense it will cease to be war.

You refer to the extraordinary statements of Doctor Coolidge, medical director, as to the conduct of some of these drivers getting drunk, &c. Nothing is said of the fact that they brought thousands of wounded safely off the field. The public reads such publications and thinks that all ambulance drivers get drunk, and that there is nothing done for the wounded. The great reason, as I understand the case, for the long suffering on the Manassas battle-field is that the enemy drove our army from them and captured the greater part of our ambulances with which that army was well supplied. They