Prevention, therefore, effort not so much to comfort and cure the sick soldier as to keep him from being sick at all, was, in order of time, properly the first work. And it is doubtful whether at the outset anything more was contemplated. The memorial to the War Department in May, 1861, says explicitly that the object of the Commission "is to bring to bear upon the health, comfort, and _morale_ of our troops the fullest and ripest teachings of sanitary science." How many of the contributors to the funds of the Society are aware what an immense work in this direction has been undertaken, and how much has been accomplished to prevent sickness and the consequent depletion and perhaps defeat of our armies? As I have already indicated, at the commencement of the war we knew little or nothing about what was necessary to keep men in military service well,--what food, what clothing, what tents, what camps, what recreations, what everything, I may say. Now the Sanitary Commission has made searching inquiries touching every point of camp and soldier life,--gathering in facts from all quarters, and seeking to attain to some fixed sanitary principles. It has sent the most eminent medical men on tours of inspection to all our camps, who have put questions and given hints to the very men to whom they were of the most direct importance. As a result, we have a mass of facts, which, in the breadth of the field which they cover, in the number of vital questions which they settle, and in the fulness and accuracy of the testimony by which they are sustained, are worth more than all the sanitary statistics of all other nations put together.