in the ward; and the nurse went round to administer them with her own hand.  Where she was, there was order and quietness all day, and the orderlies were worth twice as much as before the women came.  Their manners were better; and they gave their minds more to their business.  The nurse found time to suit each patient who wished it with a book or a newspaper, when gifts of that sort arrived from England.  Kind visitors sat by the beds to write letters for the patients, undertaking to see the epistles forwarded to England.  When the invalids became able to rise for dinner, it was a turning-point in their case; and they were soon getting into the apartment where there were games and books and meetings of old comrades.  As I have said before, those who died at these hospitals were finally scarcely more than those who died in—­not the hospitals—­but the barracks of the Guards at home.

What were the changes in organization needed to produce such a regeneration as this?

They were such as must appear to Americans very simple and easy.  The wonder will be rather that they were necessary at last than that they should have been effected with any difficulty.  But Americans have never known what it is to have a standing army as a long-established and prominent national institution; and they can therefore hardly conceive of the strength of the class-spirit which grows up in the various departments of the military organization.  This jealousy, egotism, and stiffness of prejudice were much aggravated by the long peace, in which a great rusting of the apparatus of the system took place, without at all impairing the complacency of those who formed a part of it.  The old medical officers were incapable, pedantic, and jealous; and no proper relation had ever been established between them and the military authorities.  The imbecility of the system cost the lives of others than the soldiers who died in hospital.  Brave men arose, as in all such crises, to bear the consequences of other men’s mistakes, and the burden of exposing them; and several physicians and surgeons died, far from home, in the effort to ameliorate a system which they found unworkable.  The greatest benefactor in exhibiting evils and suggesting remedies, Dr. Alexander, lived to return home, and instigate reforms, and receive the honors which were his due; but he soon sank under the consequences of his labors.  So did Lord Herbert, the Secretary of War, to whom, in conjunction with Miss Nightingale, the British army, at home, in India, and everywhere, owes its redemption from special sickness and undue mortality.  In America the advantages may be enjoyed without tax or drawback.  The citizens are accustomed to organize themselves for action of all sorts; and no stiff-necked classes stand in the way of good management.  The difficulty in America must rather be to understand how anything so perverse as the management of British military hospitals ten years ago can have existed to so late a date.