or brevet rank still advancing. No fear need be entertained that the emoluments of such appointments, by which alone are fortunes now to be acquired in India, would not continue sufficiently inviting.. To fill them, men of intelligence will always be found: the difficulty is, to improve the prospects, and restore the efficiency and number of regimental officers, on whose exertions and influence over their men, the discipline, valour, and good affection of the native army, and with it the preservation of India, are dependent.

We have pointed, in the last place, to the utter want, in the existing system, of some arrangement which should induce or compel every individual to retire from the Company's service, when unfitted for it by age, ill-health, or other incapacity. Without some improvement in this respect, the mere increase of the effective numbers of officers on regimental establishments, would produce no good whatever. At present every officer, on completing five-and-twenty years' service, including three years' intermediate furlough, may retire if he chooses; but there is no compulsion upon him so to do: and Captain Badenach deprecates any departure from this plan of mere voluntary superannuation. We differ from him altogether. In the king's service, if an officer is found to be incapacitated by ill-health, years, or infirmity, he is placed by authority, without his choice being consulted, upon the retired list. In India such a practice is still more requisite; for, after long residence in that tropical country, the European powers, both of mind and body, decay far more rapidly than in our own temperate climate. The age at which a man becomes incapable of active service in India is variable, of course, according to difference of health, temperament, and character; and, generally speaking, an officer whose energies have been excited and kept in action, by elevation to the station and dignity of command, would be likely to continue efficient much longer than he who, without promotion, has dragged on a languid and spirit-broken existence, in the dull monotony of subaltern duty. For the mass of regimental officers in India, we should say that fortyfive is the very latest age at which they can be considered effective; and, as they have then generally completed the length of service to entitle them to full-pay retirement, they should be compelled by regulation to retire at that period, unless it should be certified, as an exception in any particular case by a commanding officer, that the individual, from good health and activity, is still fully capable of service. This plan would maintain efficiency in the whole establishment of regimental officers, and, what is of not less importance, secure a tolerable rapidity of promotion to those who should be actually serving.

But the retirement should be one of decent competence. That allotted to a captain is less than two hundred pounds a-year; and under the present system, few regimental officers attain a higher rank in twenty-five years. The consequence is, that they cannot afford to retire upon an income which, in England, and after the

luxury of Indian habits, would refuse them the comforts necessary to their condition, and reduce them to absolute penury; and, accordingly, Captain Badenach proves, that not five per cent. upon the total number of the Company's officers do accept their retirement. The remaining 95 per cent., after deducting those who fall by the casualties of service, remain in India to their last hour, for want of means to return home; and the majority of them only encumber the Company's army with valetudinarians of a premature old age. In every other army, some interval is placed between the term of a man's fitness for service, and that of his natural life; in the Company's army, officers are suffered, in the last stages of imbecility, still to cling to their appointments, until they drop into the grave. If a system of compulsory retirement were introduced -and of its necessity we are perfectly convinced-humanity and justice would equally demand the establishment of a decent compensation for long and faithful services, and, too often, for ruined health and constitution. The retired full pay of major, about 3007. per annum, is the least sum that should be named, in any case, as a moderate remuneration; and no old captain, whose conduct has been meritorious, should be superannuated after twenty-five years' service, without being at the same time thus promoted to a majority.

But the mere abstraction of the officers incapacitated by years would not, of itself, be enough to establish the efficiency of the Company's army. Some yet stronger measure would be necessary, to remove individuals unfitted for the service by various other circumstances: by natural supineness of character, constitutional or chronic ill-health, or general misconduct. Into the ranks of every army, a number of persons must gain admission, who prove themselves, upon experience, to be incapable or unworthy of discharging the duties of their station. Every military man is aware how frequently it is necessary, in the king's service, quietly to displace officers from their regiments, by allowing them to go on half-pay, or to sell their commissions, or gratuitously to resign them, without resorting to the public extremity of a court-martial. Since the commencement of the present century, some thousands even of officers must have been forcibly removed from active service in the king's army in this manner. Now the officers in the Company's army, however respectable in the mass, are certainly, in no degree, more so than those of the king's forces: and yet, it appears by Captain Badenach's calculations (table III. p. 37), that in the course of twenty-four years, only sirty-eight Company's officers have been removed from the service for misconduct. What does this prove, and whence does it proceed? Whence, but from a laxity of discipline, which notoriously allows, with impunity, total neglect of military duty, indifference to authority, immersion in debt, habitual intoxication, and, in a word, every species of irregularity and disorder, by which the worst members of the profession

can disgrace their worthier and honourable compeers. We put it to the candour of every Indian resident, if it be not equally notorious, that nothing is more difficult, or rather more impracticable, than to induce a court-martial of Company's officers to cashier an individual, even for the grossest violations of discipline, or of gentleman-like conduct.

We think that, if the Company's regiments were once placed upon an effective footing as to the number and age of officers, all this laxity of discipline and impunity for misconduct among them, might be soon made to disappear. Nothing has been of more utility in the king's army, than the system of half-yearly inspections, by generals of brigades or districts, at which every commanding officer of a regiment is required to make confidential reports of the mode in which the several members of his corps perform their duties and conduct themselves. This course of supervision imposes a most salutary restraint upon the whole body; nor is it easy under it for an unworthy or negligent character long to retain his place. The efficient application of the same system to the Indian army, would be most easy and beneficial: if every Sepoy regiment were regularly inspected by a general, we should never hear of such things as an officer of ten years' standing in India remaining ignorant of the language of his men, and, consequently, unable to learn their wants, or listen to their grievances! It is a frequent, and, we think, a just complaint with the Company's officers, that there are very few openings given to them for aspiring to high stations of command. In fact, very few of them are ever permitted to attain the rank of major-general. Now, there are certainly not nearly a sufficient number of general officers employed on the staff in India, for a proper surveillance over all portions of so immense and so scattered an army. Districts and stations should be more subdivided, and smaller in extent, and should each be commanded by a general of division; in each division brigadiers should be appointed, to preside over every five or six regiments; and the completion of such a chain of superintendence and responsibility, must be followed at once by a thousand corresponding and obvious advantages. Not the least of these would be the encouraging prospect-now almost extinct--to the emulation and ambition of the Company's officers, of rising to the station of generals on the staff, in judicious admixture with the general officers of the king's army.

Such, then, are our general opinions of the defects of the existing system in India, and of the manner in which they might wholly, or in part at least, be remedied. Perhaps we may be thought to have dwelt too much on minutiæ: but such details of arrangement are the essence of military discipline. Upon the completeness and efficiency of its body of officers, must depend the character of the Sepoy regiment. Unless well commanded and judiciously treated, no reliance can be placed upon the subordination of the native troops in their quarters, or upon their gallantry in the field. And

upon their fidelity and valour, it should never be forgotten, that the safety of our empire must mainly be poised. It is upon so precarious a tenure that we hold our dominion; and it is a fearful consideration, how easily, by apathy, or impolitic security, in the utter imperfection of our institutions, the splendid fabric of our grandeur may silently crumble to ruin, or suddenly be, shaken to its foundations. Burke, whose spirit of reflection rendered him one of the greatest among philosophical statesmen, and whose keen intelligence so often pierced into the futurity of politics, with prophetic judgment,-Burke was early led to watch the rapid growth of our young empire in the East with eager anxiety, and to predict, perhaps in anticipation of its gigantic consummation, and easy decay, that it was not impossible the fate of England might be decided in India. That which was dimly shadowed out to his penetrating vision, has now burst upon the gross understanding of the public mind of Europe. The mere popular rumour of our times, has thrown out a dangerous temptation for the most greedy and ambitious power of the world. The idea of an overland invasion of India, was among the magnificent dreams of Napoleon; and it may one day become the serious project of a Russian autocrat.

Of all the difficulties of such an enterprise, we are as sensible as any one can be: but that which is often talked of, may at last be attempted; and that which has been more than once effected in past ages, from Persia and Tartary, may be accomplished again from the same quarter. At least, it would be a mere delusion to close our eyes to the probability, that the epoch is not very remote when Russia will, in fact or effect, reduce the feeble and disorganised empire of Persia into complete subjugation to her rule or her dictation. It may now well behove us to consider, on what conditions we should, then, best hold the dominion of India, against a power at our gates, so formidable, so insatiable, and so insidious, in its policy, as Russia. The permanent establishment of our native army, on the most able and efficient system, must be the timely preparation for such a crisis: if its improvement be neglected until the moment of danger is actually arrived, the work of reform will be attempted too late.

Nor is the condition or amount of the native army the only necessary object of attention. The amount of British force requisite for overawing that army itself, for supporting the salutary impression of our power, upon the minds of the natives of India in general, and for preserving the undisturbed obedience of the peninsula, is much greater than that which we at present maintain in the country. How inadequate a body of twenty thousand British troops may prove to answer all the contingencies that can arise in our vast empire, was sufficiently shewn, as we before remarked, at the dangerous epoch of the Burmese war. If by possibility a Russian army, with a Persian or Tartar host of subject-allies in its train, should ever appear on the plains of Paniput, to set the empire of India a third time at issue on that fated field, the earliest alarm in

England, might arrive only when the hour for succour was past. A British regiment is not seasoned to the climate of India, or fit to take the field in that country, in less than two years after its departure from our shores. The first shock of encounter with an European invader, must be mainly repelled by the prowess of our own troops, before the Sepoy would meet his new and strange enemy with the confidence inspired by example. One decisive defeat, would suffice for the total overthrow of our empire; and without a nucleus of at least thirty or forty thousand British infantry, no Sepoy army could be safely committed in the struggle.

But, admitting the remoteness of such a contingency, no man can doubt that our present British force in India is deplorably inadequate for the purposes required of it. Forty thousand men could be as easily raised, and spared from the exuberance of our population, and the demands of our army in Europe, as twenty thousand. And even an augmentatian of ten thousand-of ten more regiments-to the present British strength in India, would be a most important addition.

To this, as to the other suggestions which we have ventured to advance, the objection of expense will of course be opposed by those interested and short sighted calculators, who measure every establishment by its present cost, rather than its ultimate prudence. But, we repeat, the question is not one of indifferent choice, but of pressing importance; not one of doubtful expediency, but of absolute, crying necessity. Is India to be maintained at all? Are our eastern possessions worth the cost of permanently preserving? If they be not, our present system may suffice as long as it may chance to endure: but if the maintenance of our possessions in Asia, is associated with our prosperity and grandeur in Europe; if, as we believe, the first ruinous shock which is suffered by our power in the east, will be felt with perilous violence in the most distant extremities of our western dominion; then is there an awful responsibility upon the rulers of our Indian affairs, how they admit the sordid consideration of a partial increase of annual expenditure, to weigh against the honour, the prosperity, and the safety, of the whole of this great and majestic empire.

Par M. le Comte

ART. VIII. Memoires ou Souvenirs et Anecdotes. de Segur, de l'Academie Françoise, pair de France. Tome 3. Paris: Emery. London: Colburn. 1827.

WHEN noticing the two former volumes of these memoires*, which promise to be almost as protracted as those of Madame Genlis, we had occasion to praise the general precision and occasional elegance of the style in which they were written. We were

*M. R., vol. ii., p. 484.