in accordance
with their own ideas, and from which, they are easily persuaded, they
will obtain unlimited benefits.

A fruitful cause of dissatisfaction in our Native army, and one which
pressed more heavily upon it year by year, as our acquisitions of
territory in northern India became more extended, was the sepoy's
liability to service in distant parts of India, entailing upon him a
life amongst strangers differing from him in religion and in all their
customs, and far away from his home, his family, and his congenial
surroundings--a liability which he had never contemplated except in
the event of war, when extra pay, free rations and the possibility
of loot, would go far to counterbalance the disadvantages of
expatriation. Service in Burma, which entailed crossing the sea, and,
to the Hindu, consequent loss of caste, was especially distasteful. So
great an objection, indeed, had the sepoys to this so-called 'foreign
service,' and so difficult did it become to find troops to relieve the
regiments, in consequence of the bulk of the Bengal army not being
available for service beyond the sea, that the Court of Directors
sanctioned Lord Canning's proposal that, after the 1st September,
1856, 'no Native recruit shall be accepted who does not at the time of
his enlistment undertake to serve beyond the sea whether within
the territories of the Company or beyond them.' This order, though
absolutely necessary, caused the greatest dissatisfaction amongst
the Hindustani sepoys, who looked upon it as one of the measures
introduced by the _Sirkar_ for the forcible, or rather fraudulent,
conversion of all the Natives to Christianity.[6]

That the long-existing discontent and growing disloyalty in our
Native army might have been discovered sooner, and grappled with in a
sufficiently prompt and determined manner to put a stop to the Mutiny,
had the senior regimental and staff officers been younger, more
energetic, and intelligent, is an opinion to which I have always been
strongly inclined. Their excessive age, due to a strict system of
promotion by seniority which entailed the employment of Brigadiers of
seventy, Colonels of sixty, and Captains of fifty, must necessarily
have prevented them performing their military duties with the energy
and activity which are more the attributes of younger men, and must
have destroyed any enthusiasm about their regiments, in which there
was so little hope of advancement or of individual merit b