CHAP. IX.
if he could, any fault iu either their facts or CHAP, their reasoning, (105)
And on the question of the road. The Board followed, and indeed reinforced the M'Neill and Tulloch Report which had dealt with the question of 'the road.'(106) There were thus altogether three tribunals which successively determined that (consistently with perseverance in the military operations) the road could not have been made by our troops; and the two last of those three tribunals determined besides, that the want of ' hands ' could not have been supplied by attempting to hire them. If this solemn tribunal had closed without showing where blame ought to rest, its conclusions, after three months of labour, must have seemed disappointing and lame. But no such miscarriage took place; for by this time, abundant testimony had not only brought the whole The now cleared and narrowed state of the controversy respecting the cause of the 'avertible' sufferings. controversy into a state ripe for judgment, but had also, as the Board conceived, traced up the main cause of the 'avertible' ills to a great State Department at Westminster.
The 'Sebastopol Committee' had laboured under the immense disadvantage of not being able to examine the generals of our Headquarter Staff, or even the one man whose teaching upon the question of supply was plainly beyond measure important — that is, Mr Filder, the Commissary-General; (107) but the tribunal sitting at Chelsea encountered no such obstacle. Supplied with the huge mass of testimony which the Sebastopol Committee had elicited, and the admirable elucidations resulting from Lord Sey
