Note 60 — Chapter V

It was the very costliness of these presents, and the lavish expenditure of the entire Mission, that gave the death-blow to the old system of diplomatic profusion. When the accounts of the Afghan and Persian Missions came before the Governor-General in Council, Lord Minto stood aghast at the enormous expenditure, and, in a stringent minute, recorded “his deliberate opinion, that the actual expenditure has far exceeded the necessity of the occasion—that the personal expenses of the envoys might have been limited with respect both to the nature and extent of the items composing them, and that the provision of articles for presents to an extent so enormous as that exhibited in the accounts of these Missions has been regulated by a principle of distribution unnecessarily profuse.”—[MS. Records.]