When two companies of my regiment passed through Jubbulpore a few days after this conversation on their way from Sagar to Seoni, I rode out a mile or two to meet them.  They had not seen me for sixteen years, but almost all the native commissioned and non-commissioned officers were personally known to me.  They were all very glad to see me, and I rode along with them to their place of encampment, where I had ready a feast of sweetmeats.  They liked me as a young man, and are, I believe, proud of me as an old one.  Old and young spoke with evident delight of the rigid adherence on the part of the present commanding officer, Colonel Presgrave, to the good old rule of ‘hakk’ (right) in the recent promotions to the vacancies occasioned by the annual transfer to the invalid establishment.  We might, no doubt, have in every regiment a few smarter native officers by disregarding this rule than by adhering to it; but we should, in the diminution of the good feeling towards the European officers and the Government, lose a thousand times more than we gained.  They now go on from youth to old age, from the drill to the retired pension, happy and satisfied that there is no service on earth so good for them.[13] With admirable moral, but little or no literary education, the native officers of our regiments never dream of aspiring to anything more than is now held out to them, and the mass of the soldiers are inspired with devotion to the service, and every feeling with which we could wish to have them inspired, by the hope of becoming officers in time, if they discharge their duties faithfully and zealously.  Deprive the mass of this hope, give the commissions to an exclusive class of natives, or to a favoured few, chosen often, if not commonly, without reference to the feelings or qualifications we most want in our native officers, and our native army will soon cease to have the same feelings of devotion towards the Government, and of attachment and respect towards their European officers that they now have.  The young, ambitions, and aspiring native officers will soon try to teach the great mass that their interest and that of the European officers and European Government are by no means one and the same, as they have been hitherto led to suppose; and it is upon the good feeling of this great mass that we have to depend for support.  To secure this good feeling, we can well afford to sacrifice a little efficiency at the drill.  It was unwise in one of the commanders-in-chief to direct that no soldier in our Bengal native regiments should be promoted unless he could read and write-it was to prohibit the promotion of the best, and direct the promotion of the worst, soldiers in the ranks.  In India a military officer is rated as a gentleman by his birth, that is caste, and by his deportment in all his relations of life, not by his knowledge of books.