Each week found the Viceroy poring with a deeper anxiety and a graver face over the accounts. As he probed into their hollow places, he found one estimate after another break down beneath his scrutiny. His letters and papers during that summer disclose, scene by scene, and with a painful tension of personal {143} responsibility, the slowly developing drama of deficit; but throughout every line breathes a firm resolve that, cost him what it might in ease and popularity, he would establish and maintain equilibrium in the finances of India. Three months after the letter above quoted, he wrote to Sir Henry Durand: 'I have just received information which leads me to believe that in two items of revenue alone, we may look for a decrease of half a million in the first quarter of 1869-70. Now it is our clear duty to do all that we can to meet this. _I am determined not to have another deficit,_ even if it leads to the diminution of the Army, the reduction of Civil Establishments, and the stoppage of Public Works. The longer I look at the thing, the more I am convinced that our financial position is one of great weakness; and that our national safety absolutely requires that it should be dealt with at once, and in a very summary manner.' 'I should be sorry,' he wrote to the Duke of Argyll, 'to say how much I feel the hard lot that is now cast upon us, to recover the finances from a state of deficit. But unless we have a war, which God forbid, we will do it.' Lord Mayo mapped out for himself two distinct methods of dealing with the situation. In the first place, he resolved that the circumstances were so grave as to demand immediate measures for meeting the impending deficit without waiting to the end of the Financial Year. In the second place, he determined to attack the permanent causes which {144} had led to deficit, and to prevent their recurrence by a systematic readjustment of the finances.