can be avoided, and a prudent commander
usually fixes the hour for morning parade
as soon after dawn as possible. But there
are colonels who seem to take a pride in
setting climates, and the sane precautions
some climates necessitate, quite at nought,
and who insist on drilling and exercising
their regiments—tight-buttoned, stocked,
shakoed, and in heavy marching order—
beneath a sweltering vertical sun, under which
the very barrels of the firelocks grow hot.
It is hard to blame the carelessness of a poor
fellow who when dismissed, half dead with
heat and choked with thirst, from one of
these exhibitions of military stoicism, cools
his throat with three-part ripe grapes or a
cluster of oranges, even though cholera
clutches him within an hour; whether
colonels are rational or not, soldiers will be
imprudent; and it is a wise precaution to
guard them as much as possible from the
effects of a rashness which we cannot
absolutely prevent.

It must be taken as a rule that no man of
European stock and birth can long live in
India, labour in India, and not be the worse
for it. It is one thing to be a gentleman there,
to have plenty of servants at one's bidding, a
palki to travel in, an Arab horse to gallop at
dawn, a buggy to drive in the evening, iced
or nitre-chilled water, cool rooms, and a
punkah always going. It is one thing to have
all these advantages, and another to dwell in
barracks or lines, cleaning belts, polishing
gunlocks, mounting guard, or dabbling in pipeclay.
The morale of an army may remain perfect,
but its stamina cannot. Private soldiers
die fast, are invalided fast, and are sometimes
doing duty when they ought to be in hospital.
A regiment stationed in the plains requires
to be frequently renewed; and, to say nothing
of the holocaust of valuable lives sacrificed to
sun and swamp, this renewal is only to be
effected at an enormous expense. A British
soldier is a very costly importation. It has
been computed that above a hundred pounds
are expended on every recruit enlisted in
England by the time when, fit for duty, he
joins his battalion in Hindostan. Nor, as
the recruiting sergeants know well, are
recruits always to be procured as fast as they
are needed. There is not always the same
spur to voluntary enlistment that now exists.
Indignation, horror, a manly English wish to
punish wrong-doing and help our struggling
fellow countrymen, these motives are now
doing what a ten or a twenty pound bounty,
real or nominal, could never have done.
But recruits will not always be as plentiful,
unless the service be rendered more attractive
than at present.

To economise, therefore, the lives and
vigour of the European army in India
will become a proceeding of vital necessity,
and for this purpose nothing equals the
efficacy of hill stations. There were no hill
stations in Clive's time. When the greater
part of India was conquered, the English
conquerors were compelled to dwell in the
hot plains, amid swampy fields and decaying
vegetation. The mortality among the troops
was frightful, and the expense and difficulty
of keeping up a strong European force were
supposed to render such a step hopeless. It
was not until after the fall of Tippoo Sahib that
attention began to be directed to the
mountains of western India, and that it was
discovered that the Peninsula contained climates
varying from each other as much as the
temperature of Guinea varies from that of
the Tyrolese Alps. At last, however, sanatory
establishments were formed in lofty
situations—among the Western Ghauts, the
South Ghauts, and, later still, the Himalayas.
Other mountain ranges were also selected for
the same purpose, and the benefits of the hill
stations were soon acknowledged. Mortality
has been greatly diminished by the
practice of sending the convalescent to recruit
their health in mountain air, and among
natural productions which offer some faint
similarity to those of home. Not a few
soldiers are now doing their duty gallantly
at Delhi and Lucknow, who, but for the
benefit of hill air during convalescence,
would have perished in the plains long
ago; or, at best, would have come home to
England living skeletons, to be laid, after
a few months, in the burying-ground of Fort
Pitt.

Since the mutiny has rendered it clear,
even to the most bigoted partisan of the old
system, that sepoy supremacy must cease,
and a dominant force of Europeans be
permanently kept on foot in India, the value
of the hill stations may be much enhanced
by making them not only refuges for the sick,
but quarters for a large part of the army.
Most of these stations are beyond the ordinary
range of cholera, which in no country
ascends to very great heights. Fevers,
too, are rare there. The nurseries of fever
are swampy jungles and paddy fields; and the
hill stations are surrounded by neither. The
air, light and bracing, prevents lassitude, and
makes exertion agreeable. Of course, no one
could propose that all the British troops in
India shall be quartered exclusively among
the mountains, the plains being left denuded
of military protection. Nor should the care
of the hotter and less healthy portions of India
be left to such a force of native troops as it
may be necessary to maintain for police duties
of various kinds. A glance at the map will
show the impracticability of such a scheme.
There will always be great cities—hot-beds
of fanaticism—to keep in awe, savage tribes
to bridle, native courts and native robber-
armies to watch and check. Much of this
duty must be performed or facilitated by the
presence of strong bodies of Europeans;
therefore our countrymen must face, as before,
sunstroke, fever, and cholera, beside muddy
rivers and amid reeking vegetation. But