£200,000 for defences! and against whom? against the Americans. And who are the Americans? Your own kindred, a flourishing swaggering people, who are ready to make room for you at their own table, to give you a share of all they possess, of all their prosperity, and to guarantee you in all time to come against the risk of invasion, or the need of defences, if you will but speak the word! [Sidenote: Recommends gradual reduction of forces.] On the whole he was of opinion that the Government should quietly, and _sans phrase_, remove their troops altogether from some points, reduce them in others, and 'aim at the eventual substitution of a Major-General's command for that of a Lieutenant-General in Canada; but that nothing should be done hastily or _per saltum_, so as to alarm the Colonists with the idea that some new and strange principle was going to be applied to them.' You may if you please (he wrote) largely reduce the staff, and more moderately the men, leaving the remainder in the best barracks. I think you may do this without, in any material degree, increasing the tendency towards annexation; provided always that you make no noise about it.... But, I repeat it, you must not, unless you wish to drive the Colony away from you, impose new burdens upon the Colonists at this time.[7] The course thus sketched out he himself steadily pursued; and his last letters on the subject, written early in 1853 to the Duke of Newcastle, who had recently become Secretary for the Colonies, were occupied in recommending a continuance of the same quietly progressive policy: When I came here we had a Commander-in-Chief and two Major-Generals. We have now only one General on the Station, and the staff has undergone proportional diminution. If further reductions are to be made, let them be effected in the same quiet way without parade or the ostentatious adoption of new principles as applicable to the defence of colonies which are exposed, as Canada is by reason of their connection with Great Britain, to the hazard of assaults from organised powers.