Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/425

CARE OF THE SICK AND WOUNDED. 381 resulted from what must be called State iin- chap. providence. Shame fell — not on this or that Government, but — rather on our mixed English polity, then convicted of failing — long failing — to provide due hospital succour for disabled troops, and only ceasing to fail when rein- forced by the sex which had always before been shut out from the province of executive government. If the medical officers shrank from usurping tiio untiring zeal of our the needed authority, they toiled with the most medical . J ' J officers. admirable zeal at the bedsides of the patients, doing this in too many instances at the sacrifice of life or health ; and if History could search out true merit amongst men unambitiously acting in the performance of special, fixed duties, she would nowhere find it more genuine than in those devoted servants of a fitful, negligent State. It was not on any power they were really exerting that the Lady -in -Chief encroached; and, indeed, far from hampering them in the performance of their duties, she augmented — immensely augmented — their means of effective action by doing all she could to take care that their orders should never be baffled by want of the needed supplies. Eequisitions, Eemon- Tiieirpowe. strances, Notes, Memoranda, Minutes, Letters, to ewe'*" Despatclies, all these hackneyed forms of ap- sti-engtt- peal might prove vain one after the other when auuiorftycft the Medical Officer tried them ; but, if only he in-cwefr could cause the obstructors to fear that perhaps he would bring down upon them the anger of the I-ady-in- Chief, he might hope to produce an