I had great faith in the value of Camps of Exercise, and notwithstanding the difficulty of obtaining an annual grant to defray their cost, I managed each year, by taking advantage of the movement of troops in course of relief, to form small camps at the more important stations, and on one occasion was able to collect 9,000 men together in the neighbourhood of Bangalore, where the Commanders-in-Chief in India and of Bombay (Sir Donald Stewart and the Hon. Arthur Hardinge) were present—­the first and last time that the ‘three Chiefs’ in India met together at a Camp of Exercise.  The Sappers and Miners were a brilliant exception to the rest of the Madras Army, being indeed a most useful, efficient body of men, but as no increase to that branch was considered necessary, I obtained permission to convert two Infantry regiments into Pioneers on the model of the Pioneer Corps of the Bengal Army, which had always proved themselves so useful on service.  Promotion amongst the British officers was accelerated, recruits were not allowed to marry, or, if married, to have their wives with them, and many other minor changes were made which did much towards improving the efficiency of the Native portion of the Madras Army; and I hope I was able to increase the comfort and well-being of the British portion also by relaxing irksome and useless restrictions, and by impressing upon commanding officers the advisability of not punishing young soldiers with the extreme severity which had hitherto been considered necessary.

I had been unpleasantly struck by the frequent Courts-Martial on the younger soldiers, and by the disproportionate number of these lads to be met with in the military prisons.  Even when the prisoners happened to be of some length of service, I usually found that they had undergone previous imprisonments, and had been severely punished within a short time of their enlistment.  I urged that, in the first two or three years of a soldier’s service, every allowance should be made for youth and inexperience, and that during that time faults should, whenever practicable, be dealt with summarily, and not visited with the heavier punishment which a Court-Martial sentence necessarily carries with it, and I pointed out that this procedure might receive a wider application, and become a guiding principle in the treatment of soldiers generally.  I suggested that all men in possession of a good-conduct badge, or who had had no entry in their company defaulter sheets for one year, should be granted certain privileges, such as receiving the fullest indulgence in the grant of passes, consistent with the requirements of health, duty, and discipline, and being excused attendance at all roll-calls (including meals), except perhaps at tattoo.  I had often remarked that those corps in which indulgences were most freely given contained the largest number of well-behaved men, and I had been assured that such indulgences were seldom abused, and that, while they were greatly appreciated by those who received them, they acted as an incentive to less well conducted men to try and redeem their characters.