STATE BEFORE THE HURRICANE. 135 of complaint; and they even, indeed, went the chap length (like Brown and Cathcart at Inkerman) L_ of refusing to acknowledge a want. Dr Hall's approving report of our Bosphorus hospitals must apparently have owed its source partly to this soldierlike habit of mind, but also in part to a notion that ' war-time ' excused huge short- comings.(^^) Yet although, of course, the cam- paign was what caused our sick-lists to swell, this easy plea of ' war-time ' had no very evident bearing upon the transaction of business at Scutari, where people were as safe as in Kent from any hostile disturbance. On a peaceful shore reached by our shipping, with the use of mag- nificent buildings, with unbounded command of money, and the resources of a populous city, lying ready, and close at hand, there was nothing except the want of a clearly confided authority and the want of sufficing brain-power to prevent our Levantine hospitals from being made as good as any existing in Europe. For a long time, however, those wants, although not of the sort one calls ' physical,' were nevertheless grave enough to be obstacles forbidding improvement ; and indeed it is only too plain that the absence of official complaint proceeding from the right quarter would hinder the very beginning of attempts to reform what was wrong. The supply of things bitterly needed for the use of our hospitals was hampered, and for a long time prevented by a want of decisive authority in those to whom people looked for the making of the requisite purchases. The purveyors at
