Page:The Earl of Mayo.djvu/168

150 But when he came to reductions in the European troops and in the Native army, he found that the questions involved were of a more complex character; and as his views on these points have been sometimes misunderstood, I shall endeavour to state them in his own words.

As regards the European troops, he believed that he had not one man too many in India. In a private letter to one of Her Majesty's Ministers, after urging his plan of retrenchment, he writes thus: 'One thing, I implore, may not be done, and that is the removal of a single British bayonet or sabre from India. We can, I believe, reduce our military expenditure by a million, without giving up one of the little white-faced men in red.' 'We are strongly impressed with the belief,' he wrote, in his public Despatch a few weeks later, 'that we have not one British soldier too many in this country. We should most strongly object to any reduction of their number, because we are convinced that such a step could not be taken without endangering and weakening authority, one of the mainstays of British rule.'

Nevertheless, he proposed to reduce the charges for the European troops by half a million sterling. This, too, without decreasing the total rank and file by a man, or the pay of either officers or men by a shilling. He proved that a chief cause of the increased military expenditure, of which the Secretary of State so justly complained, arose from the fact that European regiments in India had gradually declined from their full