sion by which to rob the inventor of his rights. How few 'persons would be able like Mr. Muntz to devote 8000l. to the protection of their property! How many, if they were to venture perhaps their all, would like Mr. Heath surrender their life in the struggle! In short, it behoves the Legislature to consider if it cannot do more for the men who do so much for their country.

ART. VI.-1. Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Regulations affecting the Sanitary Condition of the Army, the Organization of Military Hospitals, and the Treatment of the Sick and Wounded; with Evidence and Appendix. London.

1857.

By

2. The Formation, Discipline, and Economy of Armies. Robert Jackson, M.D., Inspector-General of Army Hospitals. London, 1845.

3. The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions, including Practical Observations on the Nature and Treatment of the Diseases of Europeans on their Return from Tropical Climates. By James Ranald Martin, F.R.S. London, 1856. 4. The British Army in India: its Preservation by an appropriate Clothing, Housing, Locating, Recreative Employment, and Hopeful Encouragement of the Troops; with an Appendix on India. By Julius Jeffreys, F.R.S. London, 1858.

5. The Art of Travel, or Shifts and Contrivances available in Wild Countries. By Francis Galton, F.R.G.S. London, 1856.

IF

F the question had been asked a short time since what body of men presented the most healthy lives in her Majesty's dominions, the reply might reasonably have been her Majesty's Foot-Guards. Recruited, at the age of nineteen, principally from among the agricultural population, submitted to the critical examination of the inspecting surgeon, tried in wind and limb and tested at every point, the would-be soldier must be proved an athlete, or renounce for ever the hope of wearing her Majesty's uniform. Absorbed into the picked corps of the army; quartered either in metropolitan barracks or within a stone'sthrow of the palace of the Sovereign; clothed, fed, housed, and tended in sickness by the State; and only in the face of great emergencies required to brave the dangers of foreign service; the weak and incapable instantly weeded out from the ranks,-his does indeed seem to be a select life, with which no other among the labouring classes would appear to be comparable. As we see him on parade in all the pomp and panoply of war,

we

we view him with pride as worthy of that noble band that swept irresistibly before it the eagles of France, and, single-handed, at Inkermann, long kept the foe at bay, and saved two armies from destruction. Yet take the unhealthiest trades in England-the pallid tailor, as he sits at his board, or the miner who lives in the bowels of the earth-and it will be found that the percentage of deaths in their ranks is not nearly so great as in those of the magnificent Guards, pipeclayed and polished up to meet the eye of princes, but, alas! often little better than whited sepulchres. Such is the fact elicited by the labours of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the regulations affecting the sanitary condition of the army. If the 'most favoured' regiments furnish these disastrous results, it may be imagined that the condition of the rank and file, who take their turn in all climates, must be much worse; but, strange to say, the contrary is the fact. This is shown in the following table, which gives the number per thousand who die every year among the army at home and among the male civilians of England and Wales at army ages:

Population of England and Wales, at army ages :—

Town and country population

Country alone

One of the unhealthiest towns at army ages :

Manchester

9.2

7.7

According to Mr. Neison's calculation, the mortality of the Household Cavalry is 14, Dragoons, &c., 2, Line 2 1%, and Guards 3 times as great as the mortality of the agricultural labourers who are members of friendly societies. Well may the Commissioners, contemplating these returns, remark

That in war men should die from exposure, from fatigue, from insufficient supplies, is intelligible; or that the occupation of a town of 30,000 inhabitants by an army of 30,000 men, without any sanitary precaution, suddenly doubling the population to the area, and thereby halving the proportion of every accommodation, supplies, water, drainage, sewerage, &c. &c., should engender disease, is readily understood; but the problem submitted to us is to find the causes of a mortality more than double that of civil life among 60,000 men, scattered, in numbers seldom exceeding a thousand in one place, among a population of 28,000,000, in time of profound peace, in a country which is not only

the

the healthiest, but which possesses the greatest facility of communication and the greatest abundance of supply in Europe.'

6

In endeavouring to solve this extraordinary problem, the first question naturally asked is, Why the foot soldiers suffer a rate of mortality so much higher than the cavalry? They are recruited pretty much from the same source, and breathe apparently pretty much the same atmosphere; yet we find that the Foot Guards perish at nearly double the rate of the Life Guards. The causes of this difference are mainly, overcrowding and the want of due exercise and employment. The chief diseases of the soldier are fever and consumption; the latter, or the English Death,' as it is but too aptly termed, being the chief destroyer. The deaths by pulmonary disease amount in the cavalry to 7.3 per thousand, in the infantry of the line to 10-2, and in the Guards to 13.8; whilst of the entire number of deaths from all causes in the army, diseases of the lungs constitute in the cavalry 53.9 per cent., in the infantry of the line 57.277 per cent., and in the Foot Guards 67-683 per cent. We are strongly inclined to believe that some portion of this extraordinary mortality from pulmonary disease may be owing to the atmosphere of pipeclay in which the Foot Guards, and indeed the Horse Guards in a minor degree, live. In 1853, the year in which the mortality tables were made up, the former pipe-clayed their white trousers and fatigue jackets as well as their belts. Thus the fine dust must have been for ever entering their lungs, and Mr. Simon, in his recent Report affecting the health of special occupations, expressly states that the workers in potteries are among the most unhealthy artisans, in consequence of the clay-dust they are constantly inhaling in the course of their daily work affecting their respiratory organs.

It would appear that overcrowding is the chief cause of the disparity of the death-rate between the two classes of Guards. If we compare the extremes, we find that, whilst the FootGuards quartered in Portman Street barracks have only 331 cubic feet of air allotted to each man, the Horse-Guards at the Hyde Park barracks have 572 cubic feet; and if we take the whole force of Foot and Horse Guards, we find that in London the latter have the advantage of between one-fourth and one-fifth more air in their barracks. But there is another and very important difference in favour of the Horse Guard: his exercise is on the whole more varied than that of the Foot Guard. In the infantry, the drill only exercises the lower limbs and fixes the chest in one position; the grooming of a horse brings nearly every muscle into play, which tends to open and expand the chest. The broadsword exercise has the like effect. This diversity

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