ENGLISH WAR ADMINISTRATION. 31 soldiery would have to depend. The service chap became depressed. State parsimony, it is true, 1 did not blunt the professional skill, did not tire out the generous devotion of our army surgeons, but it weakened their self - confidence and authority, and to weaken their self-confidence and authority was to deprive them of that power of bold innovation which is hardly less needful than gunpowder at the beginning of a war. In departments not animated by political ambition, public servants are prone to imagine that they can measure the official authority really vested in one of their number, by seeing how Government labels him in the figures denoting his salary ; (^^) and, whether men applied that coarse test, or looked merely to the Government rules for distinguishing master from servant, they in either case saw ground for judging that, despite the ' mere importance ' of his duties, the Director- General of the Army and Ordnance Medical Departments could hardly be a poten- tate entitled to earnest attention. We shall see the result. We shall see the Director-General preparing early for the adoption of measures soon perceived to have been exactly those needed for the care of our stricken soldiery, yet — be- cause poorly armed with authority — striving always, or too often, in vain.(-^) In other ways, the parsimony of the State had prepared an evil time for our sick ami wounded troops. By not only stinting the re- muneration of its medical officers, but keeping their numbers so low as to have to refuse them
