The supercession which the officers of the Indian army suffered by those of H.M.’s service; the slowness of promotion; the absence of any furlough regulations enabling them from time to time to visit their native country without giving up their profession; the want of a provision on which to retire, together with other disabilities, had engendered much discontent[36] in the army, and rendered it absolutely necessary that the defects in its constitution should be remedied, lest the whole machine should be rendered unfit for the duties required from it; and with this view, Lord Cornwallis prepared a plan on his voyage to England, and submitted it to the Home Government; previously, however, many representations had been made by the armies of the three presidencies, and they selected from their own officers in England agents to superintend their interests, and urge on H. M.’s ministers and the Court of Directors their claims to be placed on a liberal footing. Captain Burnett on this occasion represented the Bengal Artillery, and in the Committee combated the views of Lord Cornwallis and Mr. Dundas, of uniting the artillery of the three presidencies into one corps, and then incorporating it with the Royal Artillery. In the remarks on Lord Cornwallis’s propositions by Sir Henry Crosby (president of the Home Committee), we find that the Bengal Artillery officers declared that “an union of the army of the three presidencies promises no advantage to the service in general, nor any fair one to the respective officers of each presidency in particular: it would but render the officers less acquainted with the language, manners, religion, and customs of the natives of their respective corps (lascars), who, in Bengal and on the coasts of Coromandel and Malabar, are scarce less different from each other than all are from Europeans, and in the adjustment of individual rank would create, perhaps, insurmountable difficulties. “Every officer now in the Company’s service commenced his career at a particular presidency, and took, as was reasonable and inevitable, his chance of quick or slow promotion, according to the casualties of his own establishment. These casualties of natural death, of actual service, and of increased or diminished establishments, have made such an alteration in the general proportion of promotion, that he who went with General Goddard an old lieutenant to Bombay, would, in the event of an union of the three presidencies, find himself superseded by one whom he left a cadet on that establishment: the Bengal officers therefore could never agree, nor would the liberality of the officers of the other presidencies wish that all should be melted into one mass mutually interchangeable, without first equalizing the rank of the officers of each establishment by a reference to their original appointments as cadets; and the difficulties of such a reference, with its consequent effects, need not be pointed out.