The Calcutta Correspondent of the Times asserts that the Indian
Government, with all its enormous expenditure, could not place 30,000 troops in the field for a war in Afghanistan. The Native Army of Bengal is now officered from the Staff Corps, and that institution is so constructed that it now consists of 1,111 officers, of whom 370 are lieutenant-colonels, 191 majors, 341 captains, and 180 lieutenants, and could not, in the event of war, furnish subalterns enough to make the regiments efficient. The evil goes on increasing, until in a short time the whole corps will consist of nothing but field-officers, and "a lieutenant will become an extinct species." The efficiency of the Army has, in fact, been sacrificed to the claims of the officers to lose nothing by the Mutiny, and reform is now arrested by the immense expense of getting rid of the useless. It is reported that a thorough reform of the Native Army has been pressed by Lord Northbrook upon the India Office, but the moment it is sanctioned we shall have the House of Commons deciding, as they decided on Colonel Sykes's motion, that the officers' interests must be respected first of all. It will take a catastrophe, and a big one, to induce Parliament to give the Viceroy carte blanche, and thorough reform cannot be accomplished without it.
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