the aggregate amount of the pay of the Bengal army, it has been severely felt by the few upon whom it has fallen, and has created in all an alarm of uncertainty as to their future condition, which has, perhaps, produced more discontent than the measure itself."
But, though Lord Bentinck was not equally successful on the present occasion in exciting a mutiny as on the former, when his infliction of a turban cap on the Madras army occasioned the horrors of Vellore, the publication of his general order produced an immense excitement in the army of Bengal; and the Directors were speedily inundated with memorials upon memorials, the language of which must have made them feel rebuked in the presence of those injured servants to whose bravery in the field they were so deeply indebted for their mighty empire.
But Lord William Bentinck was doomed to be as unfortunate in his military reforms as in his military operations; for, shortly before he quitted India, he effected another, more calculated even than the former to excite discontent and disaffection: this was the abolition of corporeal punishment in the native army. Though the utter extermination of this reproach to humanity is a consummation devoutly to be wished, its partial removal on the present occasion was of all things most injudicious; for, having no power to abolish the punishment with regard to the King's troops, the slightest reflection might have suggested to any mind but his own the imprudence and inexpediency of abolishing it with regard to the remainder. When European and native troops are serving together, either in cantonment or the field, how galling must it be to the feelings of the former to find the latter exempt from a degrading punishment to which they themselves are still exposed! It is nothing less than establishing a moral superiority in the Sepoy over his European brother soldier, which the former would be otherwise as unwilling to arrogate to himself as the latter would be to submit to any such assumption. "If this
