we to do who provided these troops with clothes, food, and furniture, which they can no longer afford to pay for?’ Company ke amal men kuchh rozgar nahin (’Under the Company’s dominion there is no employment’).  This is too true; we do the soldiers’ work with one-tenth of the soldiers that had before been employed in it over the territories we acquire, and turn the other nine-tenths adrift.  They all sink into the lowest class of religions mendicants, or retainers; or live among their friends as drones upon the land; while the manufacturing, trading, and commercial industry that provided them with the comforts, conveniences, and elegancies of life while they were in a higher grade of service is in its turn thrown out of employment; and the whole frame of society becomes, for a time, deranged by the local diminution in the demand for the services of men and the produce of their industry.

I say we do the soldiers’ work with one-tenth of the numbers that were formerly required for it.  I will mention an anecdote to illustrate this.  In the year 1816 I was marching with my regiment from the Nepal frontier, after the war, to Allahabad.  We encamped about four miles from a mud fort in the kingdom of Oudh, and heard the guns of the Amil, or chief of the district, playing all day upon this fort, from which his batteries were removed at least two miles.  He had three regiments of infantry, a corps or two of cavalry, and a good park of artillery; while the garrison consisted of only about two hundred stout Rajput landholders and cultivators, or yeomen.  In the evening, just as we had sat down to dinner, a messenger came to the commanding officer, Colonel Gregory, who was a member of the mess, from the said Amil, and begged permission to deliver his message in private.  I, as the senior staff officer, was requested to hear what he had to say.

‘What do you require from the commanding officer?’

‘I require the loan of the regiment.’

‘I know the commanding officer will not let you have the regiment.’

’If the Amil cannot get more, he will be glad to get two companies; and I have brought with me this bag of gold, containing some two or three hundred gold mohurs.’

I delivered the message to Colonel Gregory, before all the officers, who desired me to say that he could not spare a single man, as he had no authority to assist the Amil, and was merely marching through the country to his destination, I did so.  The man urged me to beg the commanding officer, if he could do no more, merely to halt the next day where he was, and lend the Amil the use of one of his drummers.

‘And what will you do with him?’

’Why, just before daylight, we will take him down near one of the gates of the fort, and make him beat his drum as hard as he can; and the people within, thinking the whole regiment is upon them, will make out as fast as possible at the opposite gate.’

‘And the bag of gold—­what is to become of that?’