good effect, as establishing what the Commander-in-Chief termed the "tranquillity of expectation" in place of open discontent. But it was manifest, from the reports received from the stations where troops of the late Company's European force were serving, that the feeling of dissatisfaction was general; and the Government, recognising how wide was the agitation, became convinced of the necessity of granting a discharge to every man who desired it. With a strange inconsistency the Indian Government, notwithstanding that the law-officers of the Crown had decided that the alternative claims of the soldiers were alike inadmissible, granted them their discharges, but obstinately refused to give a bounty on re-enlistment, a concession which nine out of ten men would have accepted contentedly. The outcome was a study in the art of "how not to do it." The Company's European troops took their discharges and came home almost in a body,--from the Bengal Presidency alone came seven thousand men--most of whom had been fairly acclimatised to the Indian climate. The recruiting sergeants in Charles Street re-enlisted them for the Queen's service as they landed or even when the transports were coming up the Thames; and the great majority of the men who had been John Company's soldiers were back in India as soldiers of the Queen among the first reliefs. The operation, involving as it did the cost of the double voyage and the enlistment money at home, was not a brilliant sample of economy. The simpler method would have been to give the men the two guineas per head bounty, which was all they asked to transform them from Company's into Queen's soldiers. The disaffection of the local European troops made a great impression on Lord Clyde, and he expressed himself to the Viceroy on the subject in the following terms: "I am irresistibly led to the conclusion that henceforth it will be dangerous to the State to maintain in India a local European army. I believe, as a consequence of this recent experience, that it will be unsafe to have any European forces which do not undergo the regular process of relief, and that this consideration must be held paramount to all others. We cannot afford to attend to any other considerations than those of discipline and loyalty, which may be constantly renovated by the periodical return to England of all the regiments in every branch of the service."