mers and merchants and
students it was organizing the most efficient of armies. It was sending
its agents all over the world to buy guns and munitions of war. It was
tasking our factories to produce blankets and overcoats, knapsacks and
haversacks, wagons and tents, and all that goes to make up the
multifarious equipment of an army. It was peering into our dock-yards to
find steamers and sailing-vessels out of which to gather makeshift
navies, until it could find leisure to build stancher ships. Manifestly
the Government had no time for such a work. The existing Medical Bureau
was hardly equal to the task. Organized to take charge of an army of ten
thousand men, in the twinkling of an eye that army became five hundred
thousand. At the beginning of the war the medical staff must have been
very busy and very heavily burdened. With great hospitals to build, with
troops of willing, but young and inexperienced surgeons to train to a
knowledge of their duties and to send east and west and north and south,
with every department of medical science to be enlarged at once to the
proportions of the war, it had little leisure for excursions into fresh
fields of inquiry. That it brought order so quickly out of chaos, that
it was able to extemporize a good working system, is a sufficient
testimony to its general fidelity and efficiency. It was the Sanitary
Commission which undertook this special duty. It undertook to find out
some of the laws of health which apply to army life, and then to scatter
the knowledge of those laws broadcast.

Prevention, therefore, effort not so much to comfort and cure the sick
soldier as to keep him from being sick at all, was, in order of time,
properly the first work. And it is doubtful whether at the outset
anything more was contemplated. The memorial to the War Department in
May, 1861, says explicitly that the object of the Commission "is to
bring to bear upon the health, comfort, and _morale_ of our troops the
fullest and ripest teachings of sanitary science." How many of the
contributors to the funds of the Society are aware what an immense work
in this direction has been undertaken, and how much has been
accomplished to prevent sickness and the consequent depletion and
perhaps defeat of our armies? As I have already indicated, at the
commencement of the war we knew little or nothing about what was
necessary to keep men in military service well,--what food, what
clothing, what tents, what camps, wh