is in itself disgraceful.  There is no soldier, sir, that does not feel disgraced by being tied up to the halberts and flogged in the face of all his comrades and the crowd that may choose to come and look at him; the sepoys are all of the same respectable families as ourselves, and they all enter the service in the hope of rising in time to the same stations as ourselves, if they conduct themselves well; their families look forward with the same hope.  A man who has been tied up and flogged knows the disgrace that it will bring upon his family, and will sometimes rather die than return to it; indeed, as head of a family he could not be received at home.[9] But men do not feel disgraced in being flogged with a rattan at drill.  While at the drill they consider themselves, and are considered by us all, as in the relation of scholars to their schoolmasters.  Doing away with the rattan at drill had a very bad effect.  Young men were formerly, with the judicious use of the rattan, made fit to join the regiment at furthest in six months; but since the abolition of the rattan it takes twelve months to make them fit to be seen in the ranks.  There was much virtue in the rattan, and it should never have been given up.  We have all been flogged with the rattan at the drill, and never felt ourselves disgraced by it-we were shagirds (scholars), and the drill-sergeant, who had the rattan, was our ustad (schoolmaster); but when we left the drill, and took our station in the ranks as sepoys, the case was altered, and we should have felt disgraced by a flogging, whatever might have been the nature of the offence we committed.  The drill will never get on so well as it used to do, unless the rattan be called into use again; but we apprehend no evil from the abolition of corporal punishment afterwards.  People are apt to attribute to this abolition offences that have nothing to do with it; and for which ample punishments are still provided.  If a man fires at his officer, people are apt to say it is because flogging has been done away with; but a man who deliberately fires at his officer is prepared to undergo worse punishment than flogging.[10]

’Do you not think that the increase of pay with length of service to the sepoys will have a good effect in tending to give to regiments more active and intelligent native officers?  Old sepoys who are not so will now have less cause to complain if passed over, will they not?’

’If the sepoys thought that the increase of pay was given with this view, they would rather not have it at all.  To pass over men merely because they happen to have grown old, we consider very cruel and unjust.  They all enter the service young, and go on doing their duty till they become old, in the hope that they shall get promotion when it comes to their turn.  If they are disappointed, and young men, or greater favourites with their European officers, are put over their heads, they become heart-broken.  We all feel for them, and are always sorry to see