Within the city the principle was laid down that all persons suffering from the plague must be brought into hospital. This involved two departments of labour; the first was to provide hospital accommodation, the second to enforce the handing over of the patients. To meet one of the manifold objections put forward by the population to the use of hospitals, a system was started by which each community should have its own building or camp. This disposed of many insuperable difficulties as to {169} the attendance on the sick, the preparation of food, etc.; and so much did this concession to their peculiar prejudices please the more enlightened communities, that their leaders came in person to the General and offered to run hospitals for their respective brotherhoods at their own expense. Such offers were willingly accepted, but control over these locations was rigidly maintained in the hands of the Committee. Indeed, so rapid was this demand for special accommodation for each sect, that-- "A scheme of hospital organisation was designed, a special equipment of staff, stores, furniture, and appliances being drawn on a ready basis, suitable to any pressing demands.... So that on an order being issued by the Committee for the institution of a hospital of any proportion, the District Medical Officer had merely to follow the orders laid down for a hospital of the size indicated.... Copies of the plan and equipment of a one-section hospital (twenty beds) was accordingly issued to the various executive departments of the Committee, and to all contractors, with directions to regulate the constructions of buildings and the supply of stores, medicines, and furniture accordingly."[4] [4] _Report_, p. 22. Within one month of its creation the Committee were running forty-three hospitals, of which fifteen were Government and twenty-eight were special private institutions such as have been described. In every detail of the internal management of these private {170} institutions the will of the Dictator prevailed. He was always a welcome visitor; he took the keenest interest in the symptoms as they developed in any exceptional cases, and he made sure that those peculiarly Christian principles should be upheld which decree that there should be no distinction of caste in any one "jamat," no difference made between high and low, rich and poor, and that all the sick should receive equal attention. But it was one thing to provide model buildings and the best of attendance, and another to persuade the relatives of the sick to bring in the patients. At the same time the segregation of the sick was the basis of the whole policy, and it was to secure this end that the house-to-house visitation was instituted.