causes the dysentery? Diseases of the liver
prevail; they are, when acute, so fatal, that the chance
of death is greater from one such attack than
from thirteen attacks of fever. But why is there
so much liver disease? As fatal as liver disease
is cholera, each causing about a tenth of all the
deaths. But whence the scourge of cholera?

The cost of an English soldier in India is a
little more than a hundred pounds a year, so
that the five thousand eight hundred and eighty
men who are always sick, cost five hundred and
eighty-eight thousand a year spent for no return,
of which—deducting the inevitable sickness—
some four hundred thousand is the cost of keeping
men in an avoidable state of inefficiency and
suffering. Of two thousand eight hundred and
seventy-six officers who died in India during
twenty years, and who would NOT have died
according to the rate of mortality in the home army,
only one hundred and twenty-two were killed in
the field or died of wounds. The common soldier's
chance of life is much worse than the officer's,
though both are exposed to precisely the same
Indian climate. Take an imaginary army of that
number of young men, all of the age of nineteen,
which at home would dwindle by the usual
average of deaths in eleven years to thirty
thousand four hundred and fifty-three men. Such an
army in India, dwindling according to the rate
of death in Indian officers, would sink in the
eleven years to twenty-four thousand six hundred
and ten, and if the men died as fast as English
common soldiers die in India, its number at the
end of eleven years would be only nineteen
thousand six hundred and seventeen. For, the officers
live in detached bungalows under wholesomer
conditions than those which have been hitherto
provided for the soldiers in their barracks. As
for the English civil servants in India, scattered
about in homes of their own, and furnished with
some little occupation for their minds;—while
the mortality in the army of India has for years
been sixty-nine in the thousand (the mortality
in England of men at the soldier's age being
not sixty-nine, but nine in a thousand), that in
the Indian civil service has not exceeded twenty
or thirty in the thousand. For ninety years only
one governor-general (Lord Cornwallis) died at
his post; and although the last two died in
harness, yet the fourteen who have held office—for
an average of six years each—since seventeen
'seventy-two, filled their expected number of years
by the English life-table. We are not, therefore,
to say, "Oh, the climate!" and look listlessly on
at the swift work of the gravediggers' spades
about the Indian barracks. In India, as
elsewhere, men sicken and perish more or less, in
proportion to the wholesomeness of the
conditions in which they are placed. And the simple
fact expressed beyond all question by the two
bulky blue-books which contain the evidence
collected by the commission on the sanitary
state of the Indian army, books closely printed
upon twelve pounds' weight of paper, is that
the very rudiments of sanitary knowledge have
not yet been applied to the construction of our
Indian army stations.

The whole body of stational reports was
submitted to Miss Nightingale for any comment
that might be suggested by her experience.
Her comment, which forms part of the blue-
book and has also been published separately, is,
that the diseases, and their causes, in the Indian
stations, are just those of ill-managed camps, and
that even the sites of stations have been often
chosen with as little regard to health, as has been
shown usually in the pitching of camps. With
her own rare earnest energy in speaking home
upon such matters, she extracts the bitter truth
from all the verbiage of the reporters,—that with
bad water supply, bad drainage, filthy surrounding
bazaars, want of ventilation, overcrowding in
barrack and sick-wards, ill-planned hospitals, a
daily government supply of raw spirits,
unintelligent supply of food, and a nearly total want
of occupation, it is rather a wonder that so
many soldiers live.

As to water-supply, the usual pipes are the
native men called bheesties, who draw it where
they like, and bring it on their backs in skins.
Sometimes the surface-drainage is gathered in
tanks; and when one has learnt how the
undrained earth is polluted, it seems hardly necessary
to look further for causes of dysentery
and cholera. Hyderabad says that no doubt its
water "swarms with animal life." Chunar's
water is "clear and sweet if allowed to settle
before it is drunk." Agra's is "laxative," and
"apt to disagree at first." Hazareebaugh's
tank-water, on standing, "copiously deposits,"
and contains "organic matter in considerable
quantity;" but "persons particular about the
quality of their drinking water," can obtain
their supply from "several good wells."
Asserghur thinks that its water "smells good."
The same tank is used for drinking and bathing;
but for drinking, the natives slightly "clear
away the surface." A well in the native infantry
lines at Secunderabad, contained a hundred and
nineteen grains of solid matter to the gallon.
At Bangalore, the Ulsoor tank, used for drinking,
is the outlet for the whole drainage of a filthy
bazaar, with a hundred and twenty-five thousand
inhabitants. The commander-in-chief says, "The
disgustingly filthy nature of the source from
which the water used at Bangalore is taken, has
been brought to notice scores of times by me
within the last four and a half years; but, as
usual, nothing has been done." Even the wells
are impure from sewage. They are open, and
''when they get dirty they are cleaned."

Arrangements for washing and bathing are no
better. Indian barracks and hospitals are so
expensive that every man costs thirteen pounds
for his proportion of the house-rent: a rate paid
by not many private families for all the domestic
comforts of high-rented London; and yet in
these costly barracks and hospitals the elementary
notion of a basin, or a bath, or a drain-pipe
to carry off used water, has hardly yet been
entertained. Only two stations in all India—
Madras and Wellington—have anything like
lavatories or baths, with proper laying on of
water and proper draining off, either in