The Express.
London, England, 1865-09-21 00:00:00

/hue mixed and burkit,--thn whets pat impiesee,,
the roof est on, sad the tiles fitted
altogether and entirely by soldiers. Oampdrainage,
'kitchen construction, and every other sanitary
arrangement—to say nothing of road-making, •
feat of which they ere particularly proud—was all
, done by the men of the respective brigade& The
atableh for the Emperor's bones at the camp would
beer comparison with any building of the kind I
ever saw, either in England or France, aild
it was all the work of soldiers. So, also, in
the construction of many of the offices and
other edifices which are intended to be perma-
nent, the only workmen employed have been
soldiers. Government, as a matter of contie,
saves by thus giving work to the troops, for a sel-
-1 dier'a labour is paid less for than a regular artiaies.
But the men are only too glad co earn this swill
addition to their pay, and the public gains in tiro
ways--fint, by having government work donq mint
°helmet than it would otherwise be, and thei,
in the advent of troops to a Wen or gatriitio"
not raising the price of labour. Howe**,
so long as the system that prevails with UN of
moving troops as often as possible from one piarter
to another eontinues, our men will never be ablti to
do much, towards earning for themselves a shilling
beyond their regular pay.
Where this system of making- the men all gorsd
workmekraust tell to the advantage of the public
purse, is in the clothing of the troops. I men-
tioned in a previous letter that in 1862-6 S we mid
15,139,3791. for an army of 145,450 men .and
14,116 horses ; whereas the French for the saws
period paid 1.4,599,0001. for an army of 400,000
men, a reserve of 150,000 men, and 105,000 horses.
In other words, we pay more than half a million
sterling beyond what the French expend for a
fourth of their number of men and a seventh of their
number of horses. In what consists this immense,
this astounding difference 1 I find the answer at
every turn and in every part of the military ques-
tion to which lam now turning my mind. In a
former letter I said that the half-pay list, and the
immense number of unattached officers which we
have in eur army, must help not • little to swell
' these figures. But so does everything else. I
have by me an English Hussar jacket or tunic,
taken from the quarter-master's stores in one of our
crack, regiments. I have compared it with an
ordinary tunic of a private soldier in a French
infantry regiment of the line, and I declare that
of the two the latter is made of a little better
cloth—there is not much difference—but that the
sewing and putting together of the French garment
is infinitely better than that of the Pimlico-made
tunic. And as near as I can calculate, making
every allowance for the lace, &c., on the English
tunic, it must cost our government very nearly
three times what the French tunic costs the
Imperial government, when each garment is
delivered to the regiment. And in every article of
clothing his the same. Welive in a country,where
the best cloth in the world is manfactured, and yet
stop the first infantry soldier of a line regiment you
meet, and look at the cloth his tunic is made of. I
bave not one of these garments by me, I wish I
had, but the inferiority of its cloth to that of which
the French foot soldiers' clothing is made would
make any Englishman blush. Our cavalry corps
have the best cloth that is furnished to the army.