Note 6 — Invasion Panics.
Reading edition
Three or four of the Prince of Wales’s letters are given at length. They all prove “the first gentleman and scholar of his day” to have been a very illiterate and unscrupulous jobber. In one of them he proposed to the Governor-General to displace “a black, named Alii Cann,” who was chief criminal judge of Benares, in order that a youth, named Pellegrine Treves, the son of a notorious London money-lender, might be appointed to that office.
Lord Cornwallis replied, that Ali Ibrahim Khan, though a native, was one of the most able and respected public servants in India, and that it would be a most difficult and unpopular step to remove him; and that even if his post were vacant, the youth and inexperience of the money-lender’s son rendered him utterly ineligible for such an important trust. One of the causes of complaint which H. R. H. urged against his royal parent was, that he, also, was not intrusted with high military command.