For instance, if an adequate medical service is to be built up for war there should be one officer to every 100 of enlisted men. Estimating that an army of at least 400,000 men would be required were we engaged with a first-class power--and what other would dare to engage with us?--this means 4,000 army surgeons. Of these at least one-fourth should be regular and experienced medical officers. In other words, there should be for such an army at least 1,000 medical officers in the regular service, and also at least 3,000 volunteer surgeons, professionally and physically equipped for such work. Should anyone object that this exceeds all the provisions of time past, the reply is ready and all sufficient, namely, that in time past all such provisions have been utterly inadequate; that the conditions of modern warfare have undergone an entire change, that a sick, wounded or disabled man is an encumbrance, and that it behooves us to prevent sickness, and to cure the disabled man as quickly as possible. Furthermore, advances in medicine and surgery have been so great that far more is now expected of the medical corps than ever before, and it is a duty which we owe to those who incur the dangers of fighting for us that we should care for them. We are, therefore, under the very highest moral obligation to give them our best, and enough of it. It must be a small inducement that we offer to men to fight our battles if we permit them to feel that they are not objects of our solicitude when sick or wounded. There is another feature which we cannot disregard. So long as army regulations require that a man educated in advanced science spend much of his valuable time in acting as bookkeeper or clerk, there will be less inducement to enter the service, and it will consequently not attract men of highest proficiency. That which is required of you is complicated and exacting. You must be good bookkeepers, good sanitarians, and equally good surgeons, physicians and even obstetricians. Above all, you are expected to be able to keep all the men under your supervision ready for the "firing line" at a moment's notice. You have received the highest compliment which the State can pay when you have been adjudged versatile and competent enough to fill all these rôles and do all these things. Moreover, as you gain promotion other things will be expected of you, even, I hope, the filling of the chairs in this modern Military Medical School. It is in a way the West Point of the medical corps, and it would seem as though there should not be the slightest difficulty in replenishing vacancies in its faculty by detail from your ranks. The collections and the literary labors of your corps constitute to-day treasures exceeded in value by but few if any in this, the Nation's Capital. The library, the museum and the archives of the medical department have been models from which all the nations of the earth have copied.