Anglo-Indians will be delighted to hear that Major-General George Balfour
has his K.C.B. at last. It has been given him for the smallest of the many services he has rendered to the Empire,— the aid he has afforded to Sir H. Storks, the Controller-in-Chief of the British Army, in reducing the expenditure on stores. It is believed that the two officers have succeeded without reducing efficiency in saving the country a million sterling a year, a service such as it is seldom granted to members of the permanent staff to perform. For the much greater service which he performed to India, that reorganization of military finance and military ex- penditure which saved the Empire from bankruptcy, and without which, as Lord Canning and his Council unanimously declared, financial equilibrium could not have been restored, General Balfour never received any acknowledgment whatever, not even the Indian Star which so many of his inferiors have obtained. He remonstrated about the Home Expenditure, as every other Indian financier has done—it wants even now a thorough over- haul by some bad-tempered outsider—and Sir Charles Wood left him out of every gazette. Decorations do not matter much, but the Anglo-Indians like to know that their men are appreciated at home, and will have a personal pleasure in the promotion of the
man whom they would unanimously elect their Chancellor of the Exchequer.
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