MR. OTWAYsaid, he would beg to ask the Secretary of State for India, What is the exact sum which it is proposed to pay to Captain Jervis, in consequence of the decision of the Simla Court Martial; whether any order for the payment of that sum has been given; and, if so, by whose authority; and, from what fund the money to be paid to Captain Jervis is to be taken? He also wished to ask whether the Subsistence Fund had not hitherto been entirely devoted to providing soldiers with subsistence money on the way from the place where they were dismissed from the service to the place of destination, and had not been devoted to any other purpose?
§ SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTEsaid, the sum proposed to be paid to Captain Jervis was £1,800. He did not agree that it was paid "in consequence of the decision of the Simla Court Martial;" it was a commutation of the subsistence sum 771 which would be paid to that officer upon his removal from the army. The order had been made by the authority of the Secretary of State for India in Council, and the fund out of which it would be paid was that of the general revenues of India. Subsistence allowance was made in all cases in which officers were removed from the service, either for misconduct or for other reasons. He held in his hand a paper containing a list of some subsistence allowances which had been granted, the substance of which he would state to the House, suppressing the names of the Gentlemen who had received them. One officer of the Bengal army had been removed from the service on account of a gross abuse of official authority, and he had received a pension of £292; a second had been removed from the same army for falsehood and fraud, and had received an allowance of £50; another had been removed for drunkenness, and received £30; a fourth had been removed for fraud, and received £35; a fifth had been removed for the same reason, and received £20; a sixth had been removed for drunkenness, and received £50; and a seventh had been removed for embezzlement of the public money, and received £50. He had thought it desirable, although the question hardly pointed in that direction, to mention those cases for the information of the House. It appeared that it had uniformly been the practice of the Indian Government to grant a subsistence allowance to officers removed from the service, although they had been removed for offences of the character he had described. When the question was put to him by the Secretary of State for War what the Indian Government would do in the event of Captain Jervis's removal from the service, he (Sir Stafford Northcote) being then new to office, had naturally inquired what the practice had been, and he had been informed that it had been uniform to grant allowances, more or less, to all officers, according to the circumstances of the case. When, therefore, Captain Jervis was removed, some allowance was of course to be made to him. He believed that the highest allowance to which he would be entitled under that practice was £127 a year; and when it was represented to the Indian Government by the Commander-in-Chief and the Secretary of State for War that an officer of the Royal Army under such circumstances would be allowed to sell his commission, and that the value of that 772 commission would be about £1,800, the Indian Government ascertained that that was rather less than the maximum pension which they could give, and they therefore stated that they would be ready to grant that amount. He was not responsible for the practice that prevailed, but it did not appear to him that Captain Jervis's was a case in which there should be any deviation from it.