It was supposed, ten years since, that there must be nine separate departments in every Military General Hospital, and the officials bore titles accordingly; but there was such an odd confusion in their functions that every one of the nine was often seen doing the business of some other.  The medical officers were drawing corks and tasting wines and inspecting provisions, when they should have been by the bedside.  The purveyor was counting the soldiers’ money, and noting its amount, when he should have been marketing, or ordering the giving out of the provisions for the day.  The paymaster could scarcely find time to discharge the bills, so much was his day filled up with doing eternal sums about the stoppages in the pay of the patients.  There were thirteen kinds of stoppages in the army, three of which were for the sick in hospital:  the paymaster could never be quite certain that he had reckoned rightly with every man to the last penny; the men were never satisfied; and the confusion was endless.  The commissariat, the purveyor, and the paymaster were all kept waiting to get their books made up, while soldiers were working the sums,—­being called from their proper business to help about the daily task of the stoppages.  Why there should not be one uniform stoppage out of the pay of men in hospital no person of modern ideas could see; and the paymaster’s toils would have been lessened by more than one-half, if he had had to reckon the deduction from the patients’ pay at threepence or fourpence each, all round, instead of having to deal with thousands per day individually, under three kinds of charge upon the pay.

The commandant’s post was the hardest,—­he being supposed to control every province, and have every official under his orders, and yet being powerless in regard to two or three departments, the business of which he did not understand.  The officers of those departments went each his own way; and all unity of action in the establishment was lost.  This is enough to say of the old methods.

In the place of them, a far simpler system was proposed at the end of the war.  The eternal dispute as to whether the commandant should be military or medical, a soldier or a civilian, was set aside by the decision that he should be simply the ablest administrator that could be found, and be called the Governor, to avoid the military title.  Why there should be any military management of men who are sick as men, and not as soldiers, it is difficult to see; and when the patients are about to leave the hospital, a stated supervision from the adjutant-general’s department is all that can be required.  Thus is all the jealousy between military and medical authority got rid of.  The Governor’s authority must be supreme, like that of the commandant of a fortress, or the commander of a ship.  He will not want to meddle in the doctors’ professional business; and in all else he is to be paramount,—­being himself responsible to the War-Office.  The office, as thus declared, is equivalent to three of the nine old ones, namely, the Commandant, the Adjutant-General, and the Quartermaster-General.