I am thinking most of the volunteer forces at this moment, for the obvious reason that their health is in greater danger than that of the professional soldier.  The regular troops live under a system which is always at work to feed, clothe, lodge, and entertain them:  whereas the volunteers are quitting one mode of life for another, all the circumstances of which had to be created at the shortest notice.  To them their first campaign must be very like what it was to British soldiers who had never seen war to be sent to Turkey first, and then to the Crimea, to live a new kind of life, and meet discomforts and dangers which they had never dreamed of.  I shall therefore select my details with a view to the volunteers and their friends in the first place.

The enthusiasm which started the volunteers of every Northern State on their new path of duty could hardly exceed that by which the British troops were escorted from their barrack-gates to the margin of the sea.  The war was universally approved (except by a clique of peace-men); and there was a universal confidence that the troops would do their duty well, though not one man in a thousand of them had ever seen war.  As they marched down to their ships, in the best mood, and with every appearance of health and spirit, nobody formed any conception of what would happen.  Parliament had fulfilled the wishes of the people by voting liberal sums for the due support of the troops; the Administration desired and ordered that everything should be done for the soldier’s welfare; and as far as orders and arrangements went, the scheme was thoroughly well intended and generous.  Who could anticipate, that, while the enemy never once gained a battle or obtained an advantage over British or French, two-thirds of that fine stout British force would perish in a few months?  Of the twenty-five thousand who went out, eighteen thousand were dead in a year; and the enemy was answerable for a very small proportion of those deaths.  Before me lie the returns of six months of those twelve, showing the fate of the troops for that time; and it furnishes the key to the whole story.

In those six months, the admissions into hospital in the Crimea (exclusive of the Santari Hospital) were 52,548.  The number shows that many must have entered the hospitals more than once, as well as that the place of the dead was supplied by new comers from England.  Of these, nearly fifty thousand were absolutely untouched by the Russians.  Only 3,806 of the whole number were wounded.  Even this is not the most striking circumstance.  It is more impressive that three-fourths of the sick suffered unnecessarily.  Seventy-five per cent. of them suffered from preventable diseases.  That is, the naturally sick were 12,563; while the needlessly sick were 36,179.  When we look at the deaths from this number, the case appears still more striking.  The deaths were 5,359; and of these scarcely more than the odd hundreds were from wounds,—­that