The report of the Commission employed to examine into the
health of the Indian Army shows a most wretched state of affairs. Every regiment of 1,000 men loses by diseese a company every twenty months, or its entire strength in every seventeen years. The average of loss is 60 per 1,000, or eight times the English one, and India therefore costs us- some 6,000 men a year, on the most moderate estimate, by disease alone. The cause of this excessive mortality is not the climate, for civilians do not die so' but the neglect of the commonest sanitary precautions. The Commission resommend that the strategical points of the country should be finally fixed, that unhealthy stations should be avoided, and that one-third, of the army should be located in the hills in rotation. Let Government add to these recommendations orders refusing spirits till after dinner, and trebling the number of married, men per regiment, and the army in India will be as safe as- the army in England. At present, every man has a ration at eight o'clock, and meets the heat of the day with his veins all: swollen, and sexual disease fills the hospitals more rapidly than all other complaints put together.
Previous page
