The camps at Morristown, Valley Forge, and at the South, were scenes of great suffering, distress, and waste. The suffering was greater in crowded and stationary camps than when on the march. Special diseases like measles, then as ever since, prostrated great numbers who suddenly changed house for canvas shelter. In 1862, at one of the healthiest cantonments at the North, near Indianapolis, fully 1,400 were disabled for duty within four weeks after reporting for muster. A similar experience marked Camps Chase, Dennison, and Jackson, Ohio, and Camp Douglas, Illinois. That “three months” service in 1861 was exceptionally effective under existing conditions, and similar service in the war with Spain, in 1898, reads more like some fabulous tale than the faithful record of continuous victories by an improvised army, with a minimum sacrifice of life. (See Military Notes in Preface.) In the Revolutionary War, gardens and orchards, near camps, seriously endangered both discipline and health. Home luxuries from visiting friends became so injurious in their effects that Washington was compelled to deal sternly with this mistaken kindness. Besides all this, quartermasters and commissaries, ignorant of their duties, speculated upon public stores; and even surgeons embezzled supplies until some regiments had no medicines for immediate emergencies. (Page 123.) Derelictions from duty were not peculiar to Revolutionary times. Early in 1861, when haste was so urgent, and the North was not prepared to clothe promptly even seventy-five thousand men, the First and Second Ohio reached Harrisburg, en route for Washington, only to find that the uniforms contracted for and delivered were worthless. The Fifteenth Ohio, after a rain, found themselves at Grafton, W. Va., just after the battle of Philippi, with soleless shoes, glue having been used in their manufacture instead of pegs or thread. The Adjutant-General of that State, then inspecting Ohio troops, peremptorily forbade their moving until an entire refit could be supplied, and William Dennison, then Governor, sustained his action. The Continental Congress, during the war with Great Britain, tried to act as Commander-in-Chief, until in conscious impotence it surrendered military trusts to Washington, with the impressive Resolution, that “the very existence of civil liberty depends upon the right exercise of military powers,” and that “the vigorous, decisive conduct of these” is “impossible in distant, numerous and deliberative bodies.” (Page 148.) The Revolutionary War, therefore, illustrated every form of distemper which belongs to war in a republic, when its citizens are suddenly called to face camp and battle conditions without adequate training and preparation in advance. Jealousy of a standing army, greed for office and place, and incessant, selfish, or self-asserting antagonisms, were the chief burdens that grieved the soul and embarrassed the movements of Washington, the American Commander-in-Chief.