singers and eunuchs, or allow them to take.  No man can take charge of any office without anticipating the income by large gratuities to them, and the average gratuity which a contractor for a year, of a district yielding three lacs of rupees a-year, is made to pay, before he leaves the capital to enter upon his charge, is estimated to be fifty thousand rupees:  this he exacts from the landholders as the first payment, for which they receive no credit in the public account.  All other offices are paid for in the same way.

18.  The King would change his minister to-morrow if the singers were to propose it; and they would propose it if they could get better terms or perquisites under any other.  No minister could hold office a week without their acquiescence.  Under such circumstances a change of ministers would be of little advantage to the country.

19.  The King will yield to the measure proposed only under the assurance, that if he did not, the Governor-General would be reduced to the necessity of having recourse to that which Lord Hardinge threatened in the 10th, 11th, and 12th paragraphs of his letter of October, 1847, and the Court of Directors, on the representation of Lord William Bentinck, sanctioned in 1831.  The Court was at that time so strongly impressed with the conviction that the threat would be carried into execution, that they prevailed upon the President to undertake a mission to the Home Government, with a view to enlarge the President’s powers of interference, in order to save them from the alternative.  This led to Mr. Maddock’s removal from the Presidency; all subsequent correspondence has tended to keep up the apprehension that the threatened measure would be had recourse to, and to stimulate sovereigns and ministers to exertion till the present reign.  The present King has, from the time he ascended the throne, manifested a determination to take no share whatever in the conduct of affairs; to spend the whole of his time among singers and eunuchs, and the women whom they provide for his amusement; and carefully to exclude from access, all who suffer from the maladministration of his servants, or who could and would tell him what was done by the one and suffered by the other.

20.  But it is not his minister and favourites alone who take advantage of this state of things to enrich themselves; corruption runs through all the public offices, and Maharaja Balkishen, the Dewan, or Chancellor of the Exchequer, is notoriously among the most corrupt of all, taking a large portion of the heavy balances due by contractors to get the rest remitted or misrepresented.  There is no Court in the capital, criminal, civil, or fiscal, in which the cases are not tampered with by Court favourites, and divided according to their wishes, unless the President has occasion to interfere in behalf of guaranteed pensioners, or officers and sepoys of our army.  On his appearance they commonly skulk away, like jackals from a dead carcase when the tiger appears; but the cases in which he can interfere are comparatively very few, and it is with the greatest delay and difficulty that he can get such cases decided at all.  A more lamentable state of affairs it is difficult to conceive.