As regards the European troops, he believed that he had not one man too many in India. In a private letter to one of Her Majesty's Ministers, after urging his plan of retrenchment, he writes thus: 'One thing, I implore, may not be done, and that is the removal of a single British bayonet or sabre from India. We can, I believe, reduce our military expenditure by a million, without giving up one of the little white-faced men in red.' 'We are strongly impressed with the belief,' he wrote, in his public Despatch a few weeks later, 'that we have not one British soldier too many in this country. We should most strongly object to any reduction of their number, because we are convinced that such a step could not be taken without endangering and weakening authority, one of the mainstays of British rule.' Nevertheless, he proposed to reduce the charges for the European troops by half a million sterling. This, too, without decreasing the total rank and file by a man, or the pay of either officers or men by a shilling. He proved that a chief cause of the increased military expenditure, of which the Secretary of State so justly complained, arose from the fact that European regiments in India had gradually declined from their full {161} effective strength, so that a larger number of separate regiments were required to give an equal total of fighting men. He proposed, by strengthening each regiment, to keep the same total of fighting men, and to reduce the number of separate regiments. He would thus get rid of the costly organisation of eleven extra European regiments, and of the heavy drain on the Indian Treasury which the needless number of regimental headquarters involved. The rank and file would be slightly increased, the pay of officers and men would remain the same. The Indian military authorities believed that efficiency would not be lessened, while the abolition of the superfluous regimental headquarters and similar charges in the British cavalry and infantry alone would yield an annual saving of 297,220 pounds. A corresponding, but not quite identical, reform in the artillery would add a further saving of 271,542 pounds sterling a year. Total saving in European troops, 568,762 pounds.