The Daily Dispatch: September 26, 1861., [Electronic resource]

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Healthy tents.

To the Editors of the Dispatch:--Are we ever to learn common sense ? Is it possible for officers to have common sense after they get their commissions? These thoughts come to us in reading your editorial of the 20th on the subject of ‘"tents;"’ and I write this because I have been a witness all summer of hundreds of dray loads of old-fashioned tents, made of cotton stuff as thin, so to speak, as tissue paper. As I write, another lot is on the way down Meeting street--two uprights and ride pole of pine, that will crack and split in a month; tent pins of similar wood, the heads of which will split off the first blow struck, and the first shower will go right through the canvas — perhaps on some brave fellow recovering from measles. Common sense tells even the Comanche Indian that the conical lodge with single pole is the best for sunshine and rain, for calms and storms; and the intidel Turk even puts his soldiers in a tent of similar shape. Both leave an opening at the top foreventilation.

We boast of our superiority in educated officers. I fear that a good many West Point diplomas are passi, and if some common sense does not soon enter into our military operations, the people will have to take this revolution in their own hands. It looks as if the ‘"old Washington, regime"’ has been transferred to Richmond. Common Sense.

Charleston, S. C., Sept. 21, 1861.