Drink.8. Unfortunately there is one disease-cause in the British Army quite beyond the influence of engineering works, for every man is his own disease-cause, and must be his own remedy.
And this is: drink.
The quart of porter and quarter of a pint of spirit per day are still procurable at the canteen, and as much more as the men like (and as will destroy them) at the bazaar—and will always send to the graveyard and invaliding depôt a large number of men every year, until they are made to understand their own interest, and are furnished with employment.[1]
Caution again.9. I might have ended here by repeating the caution with which I began: not to stay our hand, because the year 1871 gave a death-rate of only 18 per 1,000; but the experience of 1872, just coming in, justifies, unhappily, but too well, all the caution that can be used.
The disease death-rate of 1872, minus the superadded epidemic death-rate, was as low as that of 1871. But cholera intervened, and raised the death-rate materially in Bengal, though very little in Bombay and Madras.
- ↑ Is there no possibility of checking drunkenness by a system like that of 'equivalents' in the Navy? so that a man might drink his ration of spirits, or have its equivalent in coffee, beer, meat, &c., or in money.
Would it not pay Government to give men 5 per cent. compound interest on the price of drams so foregone, either paying in a lump on discharge, or, better still, giving an additional pension?
