fortunate got appointed to the Civil Service,
or, failing this in consequence of incapacity
or misconduct at college, obtained cavalry
commissions; so numerous were the plucked
candidates for civil employ, who subsequently
turned up in those pretty uniforms of grey and
silver which have now faded like the light of
other days, and were well known as the
"Haileybury Irregulars." The next best thing
to the Civil Service was the Artillery, always
held in high honour in India, as it deserved to
be; and for those who would not, or could not,
aspire to this arm of the service, there was the
Native Infantry. In this manner were "the
families" distributed through the services; and
the fact that few besides the said families were
found on its rolls is still considered, as I have
said, by persons whose opinions are entitled to
respect, a benefit to England and to India, which
must be placed on the losing side of the latter-day
reforms. The natives, they say, believed in the
old families; their names were hailed as a
safeguard; a guarantee that the antiquas viâs would
still be preserved as standing ground; an
assurance that old rights would be maintained,
and—I am afraid I must add—that old wrongs
would not be interfered with. The latter is the
awkward point; granting it, the advocates of
the old system were probably in the right. But
what can be said for the permanency of a system
which relied upon so brittle a basis? It might
hold together for a time, but its breaking up was
inevitable. It would be nonsense to suppose
that there were no men out of the pale of "the
families" competent to administer the government.
The time came when this prejudice had
to be broken down. The principle of nomination
gave way to competition in the Civil Service
and in the scientific branches of the army, the
Artillery and the Engineers. In the Civil
Service the old names are not lost sight of.
The "Competition Wallahs" are not all new
men: they include members of some of the best
of the "old families," who have proved that
they can fight their way as well as gain it by
favour; but they also include others, whose
families were never before heard of, who
promise to be second to none in the race for
distinction.

The amalgamation of the old "Company's
army" with that of her Majesty has not, to say
the least, been a measure of unmixed benefit.
That it was a logical consequence of the accession
of the direct government of the Crown is not to
be denied. But there is no more reason why
things in India should be reduced to their
logical consequences than things at home, where
we are cheerful and prosperous in the midst of
anomalies which would drive a thoroughly
consistent man to despair. The absorption of
the Company's army into the army of the line
—which is the real effect of the measure, the
official term " amalgamation" being a misnomer
—deprives the country of a local force, far less
easy to create than to destroy. I here allude to
the European army, as far as the men are
concerned; but to the army, European and Native,
as far as the officers are concerned. The native
force is necessarily local, but the officers,
whether sent to native regiments or not, are all
on the same footing with the officers of the line,
except those who have been transferred to the
staff corps, and who are therefore no longer
eligible for regimental employ. The local
European army was (with the exception of the
additional regiments added to it a few years ago)
a force composed of a better class of men, for
the most part, than usually enlist in the line;
men tempted by larger pay, and greater
opportunities of promotion than exist at home, to
embark their fortunes in the East; and who had
sometimes good reasons for desiring to remain
where they would be known in their new position.
In the Artillery, in particular, there were
frequently men of good position, who had
exhausted their means, and offended their families,
and desired nothing better than an obscurity
which would be an obscurity at any rate, and
from which they would have a chance of emerging
into fame and fortune. Such men form
materials for an army, which no great general
has ever despised. The "Company's Europeans,"
moreover, were acclimatised men, not likely to
die off like rotten sheep the first bad season;
men who were prepared to make the country
their home; men who, by acquiring the native
language, in a greater or less degree, had gained
some knowledge of the character of the natives,
and who were therefore more likely to cultivate
them as allies than kick them as "niggers." They
did not, moreover, require to be brought home
every few years, and so saved an immense expense
to the State; the waste, not only of money but of
life, in the local army, being held, by the best
calculations, to be considerably less than among the
troops of the line serving in India. The greater
popularity of the old service over the new was
sufficiently shown by the "White Mutiny" of
1859, when the majority of the men of the local
force refused to serve on the new footing
proposed to them, and insisted upon having
their discharge.

The case of the officers was not so easily
disposed of. They could not take their own parts
exactly as the men had taken theirs; all they
could do was to contend for the retention of
their rights as to pay, promotion, &c., upon
which they entered the service, and these were
very handsomely guaranteed to them when the
amalgamation measure passed the House of
Commons. But the guarantee turned out mere
moonshine. There are at the present moment
many hundreds of officers of the old army
out of employ—the State paying them a very
large sum for doing nothing; but a very small
sum compared with what they would receive if
they were only allowed to earn it. This is more
or less the state of the juniors; the seniors have
for the most part complied with a very pressing
invitation to retire upon "bonuses," which
arrangement they loudly declare to mean nothing
more than a liberal measure of starvation. The
remains of the "Company's army," officers and
men, will soon disappear; and all we can hope