DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CIVIL AND MILITARY LIFE. Military life, with the labors, exposures, and circumstances of war, differs widely from civil life. The social and domestic machinery of home spontaneously brings within the reach of families the things that are needful for their sustenance, comfortable for their enjoyment, and favorable to their health. But this self-acting machinery follows not the soldier through his campaigns. Everything he needs or enjoys is to be a matter of special thought, and obtained with a special effort and often with difficulty. Much that was very comfortable and salutary in civil life must be given up in the camp. The government is the purveyor for and the manager of the army; it undertakes to provide and care for, to sustain and nourish the men. But, with all its wisdom, power, and means, it is not equal to the thousand or thousands of housekeepers that cared and provided for these men when at home; and certainly it does not, and probably cannot, perform these domestic offices as well and as profitably for the soldiers as their natural providers did. Nevertheless, the Government is the sole provider for the army, and assumes the main responsibility of the physical condition of its members. Starting with the very common belief that the human body has an indefinite power of endurance, or, if it suffer from disease, or fall in death, it is from causes beyond man's control,--seeing, also, that it is impossible to carry the common means of sustaining life into the camp, Governments seem willing to try the experiment of requiring their men to do the hard work of war without a certain, full supply of sustenance. They expect from the army the largest expenditure of force, but sometimes give it the smallest means and poorest conditions of recuperating it. The business of war is not constant and permanent, like the pursuits of peace. It therefore comes to most managers as a new and unfamiliar work, to which they can bring little or no acquaintance from experience. They enter upon untried ground with imperfect knowledge of its responsibilities and dangers, and inadequate conceptions of the materials and powers with which they are to operate. They therefore make many and some very grave mistakes, every one of which, in its due proportion, is doubly paid for in drafts on the nation's treasury and on the soldiers' vital capital, neither of which is ever dishonored.