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In accordance with these views, which have met the approval of many leading minds the country through, as being eminently practical and suggestive, the Sanitary Commission, long exercised for the future of our disabled soldiers, has undertaken to crystallize into forms of possible application the following plan for their equitable disposition. This plan is, as yet, but a framework, about which it is hoped that both public sentiment and legislation will unite to form a complete and all sufficient edifice. As now developed it is purely tentative, and in that sense incomplete. It is, in fact, only rudimentary. There are, and will be found, doubtless, many objections to it, and, perhaps, none could be presented that would exactly meet the views of all. Those, at least, who have read the very admirable reports of Mr. Stephen II. Perkins, on the European Pension Systems and Invalid Hospitals, (San. Comm., Doc. No. 67,) cannot have failed to perceive, nor refuse to admit, that there is nothing in those wise and, doubtless, well considered systems, which can be adopted here without thorough and radical alteration. They are designed to meet the wants of a different people from our own; are based upon a much lower scale of habitual personal expenditure; are conceived in a spirit of predominant caste privilege, and bear none of that impress of sympathy with the masses, which should be the over-shadowing element in the legislation of all Republican forms of government. We have, therefore, no precedents to guide us in elaborating this vast and multiform problem; no experience of the past to draw light from, or teach us the mode of its easiest and cheapest solution. It is a question which goes down to the very foundations of political economy -- addresses itself to that sense of justice and humanity which should govern the conduct of men in their civil as well as their social relations, and which, lastly, should be envisaged under a large and comprehensive estimate of our present wants, our possible capacities, our undeveloped resources, and that still expanding future which hangs, like an unfulfilled prophecy, over our country.

Learning mainly what to avoid in the legislation of other countries, we must begin a new order of things here, trusting to our young and expansive civilization, to the plastic character of our municipal institutions, and to the easy adaptation of the American mind to all new and possible exigencies for a practical experiment and realization of this great undertaking. The present is only a tentative effort to fathom that which has never before been fathomed in our country. It is a bold proposition in political economy, complex, it is true, in the elements from which it is framed, yet susceptible, it is believed, of great simplification in its practical applications. This might not be true everywhere, it might not even be true elsewhere; but the greater average intelligence with which common schools have ennobled the public mind of our country, and the greater intellectual activity developed and kept alive by the ceaseless attritions of the press, lead us to believe in the possibility of entirely developing and satisfactorily operating the ultimate conclusions which legislation shall arrive at, from the few desultory suggestions and glimmerings of remotely shadowed truths which are hereinafter enumerated.

PROPOSITION FIRST.

Every measure tending to fuse Invalids into a class with particular privileges or immunities, should be discountenanced. Nor should any such accumulations of them he encouraged in any locality, as would render them independent of public opinion, or segregate them from, friends or kindred.

Whatever may be the sense of gratitude experienced towards those who have risked life and health in defence of their country's honor, it is still to be remembered that, as citizens, they have burthens to bear, as well as privileges to enjoy, in common with all the rest. (2) These burthens are the true incentives to patriotism, for, in proportion as a man's interests are those of his country, will he exert himself to maintain both its social and moral character. To classify men arbitrarily, and to annex to them as part of such distinction any particular privileges or immunities, is to destroy the growth and the moral influence of the individual in the community. He becomes one only of a class with which he is completely incorporated; and as his daily bread depends upon his remaining in it, he loses all stimulus to individuality of exertion and self-independence, and thus is degraded by the very power which bestows upon him its benefactions. Exceptional classes are always in fact undesirable ones. They are anomalous features in social organization, having no points of resemblance to the elements about them. Even if they do not actively disturb the latter, they at least influence them negatively, and so silently undermine the framework into which they are introduced. The predominant characteristics of men are also intensified by the multiplication of those to whom any special traits of character belong, and as virtues are not the fruits most sedulously cultivated by masses, it is plain that their tendencies lie in an opposite direction. To meet and militate against this hereditary disposition in human nature, we must strenuously discourage the formation of large, exceptional communities. With the experience of ages and the records of history to support our conclusions, we should indeed be blind to the teachings of the world's life, did we seek any other form of social aggregation, than that which recognizes the family and its fireside as the corner-stone of the fabric. Yet, in the present instance, the family, or oikos, is not to be understood literally, or as confined to those exclusively related by consanguinity, but in a larger sense, of that patriarchal family, which, without always representing numbers, yet made those numbers small enough to be easily governed by one mind.