If you imagine that the need of this work of prevention has ceased, you are greatly mistaken. Only last summer, in the single month of June, the Commission distributed, in the Army of the Potomac alone, over a hundred tons of canned fruits and tomatoes, and not less than five thousand barrels of pickles and fresh vegetables. It is hardly too much to say that what the Commission did in this respect has gone far towards enabling our gallant army to disappoint the hopes of the enemy, and to hold, amid the deadly assaults of malaria, the vantage-ground which it has won before Petersburg and Richmond. All through the spring and summer, too, at Chattanooga, on the very soil which war had ploughed and desolated, invalid soldiers have been cultivating hundreds of acres of vegetables. And on the rugged sides of Missionary Ridge, and along the sunny slopes of Central Tennessee, the same forethought has brought to perfection, in many a deserted vineyard, the purple glory of the grape. And this not merely to cure, but to prevent, to keep up the strength and vigor of the brave men who have marched victoriously from the banks of the Ohio to Atlanta. Nor is it likely that the value of this office will cease so long as the war lasts. In the future, as in the past, new conditions, new exigencies, and new dangers will arise. And to the end the foresight which guards will be as true a friend to the soldier as the kindness which assuages his pains. Looking back, therefore, upon the whole field, and speaking with a full understanding of the meaning of the language, I am ready to affirm, that, if the Sanitary Commission had undertaken nothing but the work of preventing sickness, and had accomplished nothing in any other direction, the army and the country would have received in that alone an ample return for all the money which has been lavished. * * * * * I come now to the Special Relief Department. I should call this a sort of philanthropic drag-net, differing from that mentioned in the Gospel in that it seems to gather up nothing bad which needs to be thrown away. In other words, it appeared to me as though any and every kind of Sanitary good which ought to be done, and yet was not large enough or distinct enough to constitute a separate branch, was set down as Special Relief. The whole system of homes and lodges to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless comes directly under the head of Special Relief. The immense collection of back pay, bounties, pensions, and prize-money, which is made gratuitously by the Commission, is Special Relief. Visits to the hospitals are under the direction of this same department. And even the Directory and the vast work done at the front perhaps legitimately belong to it. We can readily conceive, therefore, that the Commission has no department which is larger or more important, or which covers so wide and diversified a field of activity. Let us survey that field a little closer.