2. That the East India Company will demur to keeping permanently so large an addition to the Queen’s army in India. The Company is empowered, it is true, to refuse to take any Queen’s troops whom it has not asked for, and to send back any it may no longer want. But the Company _has_ asked for the troops now sent at great inconvenience to the Home Government, and the commonest foresight will show that for at least three years to come this force cannot possibly be dispensed with--if at all. Should the time, however, arrive, the Government will simply have to reduce the additional battalions, and the officers will return to the half-pay list from which they were taken, the country having had the advantage of the saving in the meantime. But the Queen thinks it next to impossible that the European force could again be decreased in India. After the present fearful experience, the Company could only send back Queen’s regiments, in order to raise new European ones of their own. This they cannot do without the Queen’s sanction, and she must at once make her most solemn protest against such a measure. It would be dangerous and unconstitutional to allow private individuals to raise an army of Queen’s subjects larger than her own in any part of the British dominions. The force would be inferior to one continually renewed from the Mother Country, and would form no link in the general military system of England all over the globe of which the largest force will always be in India. The raising of new troops for the Company in England would most materially interfere with the recruiting of the Queen’s army, which meets already with such great difficulties. The Company could not complain that it was put to expense by the Home Government in having to keep so many more Queen’s regiments; for as it cannot be so insane as to wish to reform the old Bengal army of Sepoys, for every two of these regiments now disbanded and one of the Queen’s substituted it would save £4,000 (a regiment of Sepoys costing £27,000, and a Queen’s regiment £50,000). The ten battalions to be transferred to the Company for twenty Sepoy regiments disbanded would therefore save £40,000, instead of costing anything; but in reality the saving to the Company would be greater, because the half-pay and superannuation of the officers, and therefore the whole dead weight, would fall upon the Mother Country. The only motive, therefore, which could actuate the Company would be a palpable love of power and patronage to which the most sacred interests of the country ought not to be sacrificed. The present position of the Queen’s army is a pitiable one. The Queen has just seen, in the camp at Aldershot, regiments, which, after eighteen years’ foreign service in most trying climates, had come back to England to be sent out after seven months to the Crimea. Having passed through this destructive campaign, they have not been home for a year before they are to go to India for perhaps