In some Hospitals the rules are inexplicit in assigning power to the Matron over all the women. But this apart. The Steward represents and wields the police of the Hospital. He progresses through the wards, he perceives, or the Head Nurse reports to him, something disorderly. He rectifies it (or not, as the case and the man may be). She thus, over and above her relation to the Matron, has to appeal to, and to account to, the Steward. This power of police and discipline, wielded by the Civil Authority of the Hospital, is of immense moment in regulating the good order of the Hospital; it acts in sundry important ways which need not be particularized. Now, in the case of Military Hospitals, there is one important simplification of the business, which need not be enlarged upon. All the patients are men. But there are two things which do not simplify the machinery of the Military Hospital. The attendants, in the plan proposed, are not (and cannot be) all Nurses, under the Matron; nor all Orderlies, under an Officer; there are Nurses under a Matron, and Orderlies under some Officer; and there is no Civil element. The Doctors both prescribe, and hitherto have governed. An Officer orders flogging, &c.; but the Doctors practically both prescribe, and hitherto have governed. And a Military Hospital must, and should ever remain, essentially different from a Civil Hospital; both different in discipline and detail, and altogether a rougher and ruder place. It should never for a moment be forgotten that the soldier is a very peculiar individual, old and stern as is his trade. A regiment, if one thinks _into_ it, is a curious thing. The Hospital which receives these men when ill and wounded, whether regimental or general, is, and ought to be, a place essentially different in many things from the great Civil Hospital. The moral standard of the patients of the Military Hospital, their readiness to obey, their good feeling to each other, are strikingly higher than in the Civil Hospital; but the soldier is what, amidst all his faults, he has been made by the habit and spirit of discipline, which has become an instinct and a second nature, and which ennobles his own. Relax discipline, and in proportion as you do so, there remains of the soldier a being with as much or more of the brute than the man. Discipline then being the pivot upon which the good order of all military things, Military Hospitals included, turns, it follows, that if you set down a few women (they should not be many) in a great Military Hospital, unless they can become effectually incorporated into the general spirit of discipline of the place, they will only injure themselves and the whole.