The Rajput, the Brahman, and the proud Pathan who attains a commission, and deports himself like an officer, never thinks himself, or is thought by others, deficient in anything that constitutes the gentleman, because he happens not to be at the same time a clerk.  He has from his childhood been taught to consider the quill and the sword as two distinct professions, both useful and honourable when honourably pursued; and having chosen the sword, he thinks he does quite enough in learning how to use and support it through all grades, and ought not to be expected to encroach on the profession of the penman.  This is a tone of feeling which it is clearly the interest of Government rather to foster than discourage, and the order which militated so much against it has happily been either rescinded or disregarded.

Three-fourths of the recruits of our Bengal native infantry are drawn from the Rajput peasantry of the kingdom of Oudh, on the left bank of the Ganges, where their affections have been linked to the soil for a long series of generations.[14] The good feelings of the families from which they are drawn continue through the whole period of their service to exercise a salutary influence over their conduct as men and as soldiers.  Though they never take their families with them, they visit them on furlough every two or three years, and always return to them when the surgeon considers a change of air necessary to their recovery from sickness.  Their family circles are always present to their imaginations; and the recollections of their last visit, the hopes of the next, and the assurance that their conduct as men and as soldiers in the interval will be reported to those circles by their many comrades, who are annually returning on furlough to the same parts of the country, tend to produce a general and uniform propriety of conduct, that is hardly to be found among the soldiers of any other army in the world, and which seems incomprehensible to those unacquainted with its source—­veneration for parents cherished through life, and a never-impaired love of home, and of all the dear objects by which it is constituted.

Our Indian native army is perhaps the only entirely voluntary standing army that has been ever known, and it is, to all intents and purposes, entirely voluntary, and as such must be treated.[15] We can have no other native army in India, and without such an army we could not maintain our dominion a day.  Our best officers have always understood this quite well; and they have never tried to flog and harass men out of all that we find good in them for our purposes.  Any regiment in our service might lay down their arms and disperse to-morrow, without our having a chance of apprehending one deserter among them all.[16]

When Frederick the Great of Prussia reviewed his army of sixty thousand men in Pomerania, previous to his invasion of Silesia, he asked the Prince d’Anhalt, who accompanied him, what he most admired in the scene before him.