Commissariat of an Army
--
Gen. Scott.--A Washington letter to the Baltimore Sun says:
‘
It was not until late years (comparatively speaking) that the importance of an efficient
Quartermaster's Staff has been realized even by such a military nation as the
French.
The
English were first to excel in this respect, and their system has been adopted and made part and parcel of military instruction in
France.
Let the
Quartermaster General's and the
Commissary General's departments be administered with ability and honesty, and the hordes of speculators who essay to fatten upon spoliations of the treasury in times of war will be driven from their prey.
These sort of characters here and elsewhere are now seriously embarrassing
Gen. Scott, the
Cabinet and other superior officers, by urging a hot-haste sort of war policy, the object being to so precipitate matters that there shall be no time to invite proposals for the delivery of articles, to the end that contracts shall be given to the lowest bidders.
Thus if
Gen. Scott should be forced to advance into
Virginia, and be driven back, then the exigencies of the public service would be still greater than they now are, and there would then be no end to preying upon the public treasury.
There is no such exigency now as that leading articles of the
materiel of war shall not be furnished by lowest bidders.
Ex-President Pierce recently stated to a friend that the
personnel of the Austrian army in the
Italian campaign was the finest he had ever seen, but everything went wrong on account of the inefficiency of superior officers, and of the utter rottenness of all that related to the administration of the commissariat.
’
