This is a tone of feeling which it is
clearly the interest of Government rather to foster than discourage,
and the order which militated so much against it has happily been
either rescinded or disregarded.
Three-fourths of the recruits of our Bengal native infantry are drawn
from the Rajput peasantry of the kingdom of Oudh, on the left bank of
the Ganges, where their affections have been linked to the soil for a
long series of generations.[14] The good feelings of the families
from which they are drawn continue through the whole period of their
service to exercise a salutary influence over their conduct as men
and as soldiers. Though they never take their families with them,
they visit them on furlough every two or three years, and always
return to them when the surgeon considers a change of air necessary
to their recovery from sickness. Their family circles are always
present to their imaginations; and the recollections of their last
visit, the hopes of the next, and the assurance that their conduct as
men and as soldiers in the interval will be reported to those circles
by their many comrades, who are annually returning on furlough to the
same parts of the country, tend to produce a general and uniform
propriety of conduct, that is hardly to be found among the soldiers
of any other army in the world, and which seems incomprehensible to
those unacquainted with its source--veneration for parents cherished
through life, and a never-impaired love of home, and of all the dear
objects by which it is constituted.
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