ILLINOI

S

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

PRODUCTION NOTE
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign Library
Brittle Books Project, 2010.

THE

E

SEPOY

REBELLION.

REPRINTED FROM THE LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW,
No. XVII., FOR OCTOBER, 1857.

LONDON:

ADVERTISEMENT.
No. XVII. of the LoNDoN QUTARTELY REVIEW having been
speedily sold off, and considerable inquiry for the following Article
still existing, it is issued in a separate form.

toNnoiv:
1IIN TDn BY WILLIAM NICIIOLS,
33, LONDON WALL.

COPYRIGHT NOTIFICATION
In Public Domain.
Published prior to 1923.

This digital copy was made from the printed version held
by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
It was made in compliance with copyright law.
Prepared for the Brittle Books Project, Main Library,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
by
Northern Micrographics
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2010

THE SEPOY REBELLION.
FROM an early period of our connexion with the East Indies,
we have sustained periodical disasters in those countries. The
first of these, popularly called ' the Amboyna massacre,' was, comparatively speaking, upon so small a scale, that we can hardly
conceive how it should have excited so great a commotion in
this country as it did. In the year 1623, the Dutch, who were
the most vigorous of our early rivals in the East, seized upon
one Captain Towerson, and nine other Englishmen, and, after a
trial by torture, hanged them.
So greatly were the public
enraged, that the Dutch merchants resident in London had to
appeal to the Privy Council for protection; and a picture, commemorating the horrors of the scene, was exposed publicly by
the East India Company. More than a century later, the city
of Madras was wrested from us by the French, a treaty which
provided for its restoration violated, the Governor and other
authorities carried to Pondicherry, and marched bareheaded
through the French capital of the East. Just a hundred and
one years ago was perpetrated that outrage which, above all
others, has made a deep impression upon the popular memory
of England.
One hundred and forty-six Englishmen were
thrust, by a revengeful Nabob, into a dungeon eighteen feet
square, at Calcutta, and the next morning only twenty-three
remained alive.
o
These last two events together exercised an influence on our
history in the East which can never be computed. Among
those enraged by the capture and disgrace of Madras was a
young clerk, Robert Clive, who in his fury turned soldier; and
Sgained so much fame that, when the Black Hole tragedy
d
occurred, he was appointed avenger; in executing which office
he made himself the founder of a great empire. Several years
1. Parliamentary Paperson the Indian Mutiny.
2. Defects of the Indian Government. By SIR C. J. NAPIER.
3. Bengal: its Landed Tenure, and Police System.
Speech by the HoN. A. F.
KINNAIRD, M.P.

4. Crisis in India.
S

5. THEOBALD'S Tracts on India.

6. bacoitee in Excelsis.
7. The Muting of the Bengal Army.
Napier.

By One who has served under Sir Charles

A2

later, Hyder Ali suddenly appeared at the gates of Madras at
the head of an army, and dictated terms of peace; and shortly
after occulrred the entire destruction of a detachment of our
army under Colonel Baillie, by Tipu Sahib, Hyder's son. In
1806, the Sepoys in the Fort of Vellore, taking advantage of the
ceremonies connected with the marriage of a Princess,-one of
the daughters of Tipu, whose family were then imprisoned in
the Fort,-rose in the night, and poured a murderous fire
through the windows into the quarters of our European troops,
of whom two Colonels, thirteen other officers, and eighty-two
men fell, beside ninety-one wounded. In 1824, a regiment at
Barrackpore, being ordered to Chittagong, turned the Major
General off parade, and rushed to arms. Two European regiments were on the spot; some guns opened upon them at once,
and seventy fell. About the year 1834, a plot was discovered in
Bangalore for the murder of the whole of the European officers
and their families : the leading conspirators were blown from the
cannon's mouth. in 1842 occurred the greatest disaster of all,
-a sudden insurrection in the recently captured capital of
Affghanistan. The British Envoy was treacherously murdered,
thirteen thousand troops destroyed, and the small remnant of
the British force driven beyond the mountains.
Important as each of these occurrences was in its time, and
serious as they are when collectively viewed; when we remember
that they spread over so great a length of time, and over a series
of conquests and occupations seldom equalled, it must be admitted that, in proportion to the ordinary reverses of warfare,
they cannot be considered as forming a dark page in history.
In the future history of India, the crisis through which it is
now passing will undoubtedly occupy a much more prominent
place than any of the preceding; not because the actual loss
of life has hitherto been as great as in the Affghan war, or the
military reverses in the field borne any comparison with what
was sustained at the hands of Hyder-and others,-but because
that which had always been looked to as the greatest calamity
that could occur has come to pass, and the material foundation,
on which our power in India seemed to rest, has been blown from
under it. Besides, this outburst has been laid before the world
with more details of personal suffering and domestic calamity
than even wars on a grand scale usually expose to view.
Before proceeding to consider at length the mutiny, its
sources, and its consequences, we will ask our readers to follow
us in a cursory survey of the great country which it disturbs.

5
We stipulate that a map be laid down before the eye. Take
your stand at the southern extremity, on Cape Comorin, and
look northward. You are now only eight degrees from the
equator. On your right hand lies the district of Tinnivelly,
inhabited by a Tamul-speaking population, British subjects,
among whom exists a larger number of Protestant Christians
than in any other province of India. On your left is the little
state of Travancore, with a population of a million, under a
native Prince, among whose subjects also are a large number of
Christians, many thousands of them Protestants, many others
Syrians, the language being Malayalim. Proceeding northward,
you pass by the ancient and renowned city of Trichinopoly, one
of the hottest, but not unhealthiest, in the world, and presently
arrive at the Neilgherry Hills, rising to a height of nearly nine
thousand feet, covered at the top with plants of the temperate
zone, and inhabited by a large English community. This noble
chain stands across a considerable breadth of the peninsula,
from west to east, and then stretches two immense and widely
diverging arms away towards the north: the western arm, running
for hundreds of miles within a comparatively short distance of the
Indian Ocean, is called the Western Ghauts; the eastern, keeping not so close to the Bay of Bengal, is called the Eastern
Ghauts, which are on an average only half the height of the
Western. Enclosed between these two great mountain chains
lies an elevated region of table-land, some eight hundred miles
long, varying from five to one hundred in breadth, with a mild
climate, undulating surface, fertile soil, and vigorous population,
who produce silk, sugar, coffee, and cotton, besides all the common crops of the country.
On reaching this upland region, you find the Canarese
language, and are in the territory of Mysore; whence the
armies of Hyder and Tipu so long menaced our rising power.
The city of Seringapatam is decaying on the banks of the
Cauvery, wisely left to itself, instead of having its traditional
importance maintained, like Delhi. This country is nominally
the possession of a native Rajah, but really administered by our
own Government, and contains a population of at least three and a
half millions. Beyond this, still upon the table-lands, lie immense
tracts of British territory taken from Tipu and the Mahrattas;
then follow the dominions of the Nizam of Hydrabad, with ten
millions of population, whose language is Teloogoo: they are
frightfully misgoverned by their Mohammedan master; but we
are pledged to keep him on the throne, and do. West of his
territories lie those of Sattara, and east of them Nagpore, both

6
Mahratta states, lately absorbed into our own, through our
refusal to allow the adoption of heirs by the Kings. Along the
table-lands the whole of the waters flow from west to east, forming innumerable streams, and some grand rivers, such as the
Cauvery, the Krishna, and the Godavery. These, on passing
from the table-land, rush down the Ghauts, and water the strip
of territory lying between them and the sea, called the Payeen
Ghaut, or Mountain Foot. This includes Tanjore, which, with
its Rajah receiving £118,000 a year from our Government, lies
by the mouths of the Cauvery. North of this comes Pondicherry, still French; then the Carnatic, with its capital, Madras,
the head of an army of seventy thousand men; then the
Northern Circars, a hot and rich region, through which the
Krishna and Godavery, coming down from the Hydrabad and
Beyond, Orissa, where
Nagpore territories, reach the sea.
stands Juggernaut, leads to Bengal.
At the foot of the Western Ghauts runs another strip of territory, but not nearly so wide; for there the mountains, like the
chain of Lebanon on the Phoenician coast, generally come close
to the sea, sometimes right into it. On this tract lies the
province of Canara, the Portuguese possession of Goa, and
Bombay. This division of the peninsula into two distinct kinds
of territory, running along side by side, lowland and upland,
forming a country on two levels, the one from a thousand to
three thousand feet above the other, greatly enriches the otherwise profuse variety of natural products, and delightfully varies
the climate. In the Mountain Foot country the sheep have
hides like a calf, with no sign of wool; within a morning's walk,
above the Ghauts, they have fleeces. You sleep to-night where
nothing can be grown but what is tropical; you breakfast
after an early ride where Englishmen can rear strawberries,
apples, and potatoes.
At the northern limit of the table-land, you are in the
Bombay Presidency, in the midst of the ancient Mahratta territory, and of the Mahratta language; and now, passing from the
great plateau, on which you have been for seven or eight hundred miles, you come upon a central region of mountains, the
rivers of which run in the opposite direction from those of the
plateau, making, not for the Bay of Bengal, but for the Indian
Ocean. In this district lie many of the native states, of which
a considerable number still retain their identity, their Rajahs
supporting armies of their own, and administering their governments, but acknowledging the supreme authority of the British,
and unable to declare war or maintain diplomatic relations with

Of these the most powerful is
their neighbouring states.
Sindia, King of Gwalior, and of three and a half millions; whose
contingent, eight thousand four hundred strong, has joined the
mutineers, though he is himself reputed loyal, and promptly
sent aid to Delhi. The next in point of consideration is Holkar,
King of Indore, with perhaps a million subjects. He, too, is
loyal; but his troops have played the traitor. He maintains a
contingent of fourteen hundred men. A contingent means a
number of troops whom a native Rajah is, by treaty, bound to
maintain for the service of the supreme Government whenever
called for, in return for an engagement on its part to protect his
territories from all invaders. These states just named are
Mahratta ; and west of them lie those of the Rajpoots, a nobler
race, not fiercer, but prouder, and on the whole the finest of the
Hindu types. Round the chief states of these two divisions
are dozens of little ones, as numerous as in Germany, and as
insignificant.
Pursuing our northward course, as we emerge from the central
mountains, and arrive within about six hundred miles of the
Himalayas, all the streams begin to follow the direction of the
Ganges, and eventually join that great river. The system of
drainage of which it is the trunk, extends over the greatest
of all the natural divisions of India, covering a length of at
least twelve hundred miles, by a breadth of six hundred, called
the Plain of the Ganges, and including Bengal, Behar, Orissa,
Oude, Delhi, and minor countries; with a population greater
than that of France, Austria, and Prussia united, speaking
several distinct languages, the chief of which are the Bengalee
in the east, and the Hindui in the west. Bengal Proper is as
large as France, and as populous; flat, watery, steaming with
heat; inexhaustibly rich; and peopled by a cowardly, cringing
race, who speak the Bengalee, and never attempt soldiering.
Behar, further up the plain, lies on higher ground, with a finer
population; and here you leave the tropics, entering on the
temperate zone. Next comes Allahabad, a district, the capital
of which lies on a most sacred site, the junction of the two great
rivers, the Jumna and the Ganges. Before you reach the junction is the holiest of all Hindu sacred places, Benares, to reach
which a pilgrimage from any distance is cheerfully undertaken.
This is the lowest point at which a massacre has occurred, and is
about three hundred and seventy miles from Calcutta. O had
even that space been pierced by a railway!
Now we come into the thick of the disturbed districts. At

8
the junction, about seventy miles further on, lies the city of
Allahabad, where the treacherous 6th caressed their officers in
the forenoon, and slaughtered them at dinner time. Following
the Ganges, to the right you come upon Oude, the most famous
land of India in their old poems, one of its richest now; the
chief source whence our Sepoys for the Bengal army were
recruited, our latest annexation, and the bitter fountain of our
present troubles. On its frontier, watered by the Ganges, lies
Cawnpore, where the heroic Sir Hugh Wheeler fell; the victim
of Nena Sahib and Leadenhall Street, which would not forward
railways, of which one hundred miles more would have brought
Neill and Havelock in time, on the jackals that tore up our
noble countrymen. A little to the right lies the capital, Lucknow, a centre of indescribable depravity, where Sir Henry
Lawrence first taught the feeble folk at Calcutta how to deal
with the mutiny; where he maintained the glory of English
valour; and where he, the greatest man in India, worth ten
thousand men, fell, sacrificed for want of roads to reach and
support him. Turning from Oude to the left, you are in the
Doab, that is, the Delta formed by the two rivers Jumna and
Ganges, where Havelock has burned Bithoor, the den of Nena
Sahib. Proceeding upwards, you come upon Agra, the seat of
Government for the North West Provinces, before which five
hundred English troops attacked ten thousand well armed and
disciplined mutineers. Ninety miles further to the north-west
lies Delhi, where the splendours of the Mogul formerly dazzled
eyes, accustomed only to the paler pomp of Europe; where now
a new Emperor is in deadly struggle with the power which
spared and protected his fathers, and liberally pensioned him.
Above the district of Delhi lies Sirhind, or Head-of-India, in
which the waters begin to turn, leaving the Plain of the Ganges,
on which lie all the great countries we have just traversed, and
running for the Indus. The system of drainage whereof that
river is the trunk, forms the last of the great natural divisions of India, the Plain of the Indus. It includes the celebrated countries of the Punjab, Cachmere, and Scinde; and
between it and the central region of mountains spreads out a
great sandy desert.
. Any one who will clearly fix in his mind the three
leading physical features of India,-in the south the tableland, with its two fringes of mountain-foot territory ; on the
north and north-east the great Plain of the Ganges, skirting the
Himalayas, and bending downward to the Bay of Bengal; on

9
the west the Plain of the Indus, with its border of sandy desert,
-will easily carry in his memory the outline of the country,
and can insert the central mountain tract without trouble.
From the flats of Bengal, a constant progress of vigour in the
population attends your advance, west and north. In Oude
and its surrounding countries you are among a soldierly race,
who do not, as the Hindus of the seaboard, live alone on rice,
but eat a great deal of wheat. Here also is the Holy Land of
the Brahmin, where that caste forms not a small class of the
Hindu community, as elsewhere, but an immense proportion
of it. According to Lord Metcalfe, all these tribes ' detest'
Bengal, and have horrid ideas of all to the east of it. Yet here
almost exclusively our Bengal authorities sought for Sepoys.
Beyond this, through Delhi and Sirhind, you advance amid a
progressively improving climate and race, till you reach the
Punjab, and thence to Cachmere, where you are in the latitude
Since
not of the Indian Ocean, but of the Mediterranean.
Oude was annexed, it may be said that no native states remain,
either in the Plain of the Indus or that of the Ganges, except
on the southern borders of the latter, where lie Gwalior and
Bundlecund, and a few little ones on the borders of the
The native Rajahs still reigning, great and
Sutledge, &c.
number in all two hundred; and their armies are four
little,
hundred thousand men. Among those who are deposed and
pensioned, and who have no armies, the King of Delhi, at
present set up against us, had, from the East India Company,
£150,000 a year; the Nawab of Calcutta, £160,000; of Madras,
£116,000; the families of Hyder and Tipu, £63,000; the
Peishwa, or hereditary head of the Mahrattas, £80,000; and
smaller Princes proportionate sums, amounting in all to about
£1,500,000 a year.
As to the population inhabiting Hindustan, it is only now
that the English mind is beginning to open to any conception
The ease with which we have attained
of its magnitude.
supreme dominion in India, and the smallness of the armies
which sufficed for its military occupation, together with the
slowness of any people to conceive of masses of mankind greater
than those with which they are familiar, have combined to
maintain a popular impression respecting India far below the
truth. It is only of recent years that our best writers and
statesmen have spoken of it as containing anything like the
amount of population now ascertained to exist; but by degrees
the public estimate has been rising, and also that of careful and
inquiring writers. At the time that the first number of this

10
journal appeared, (four years ago,) the public returns had
brought up the population to a hundred and fifty millions;
and we then stated our belief that it was very little short of two
hundred millions. The papers lately laid before Parliament
make it a hundred and eighty millions; and we have no doubt
that the further researches of a few years will as easily discover
the additional twenty, as those of a few past ones have discovered the thirty now added. It is easy to write of a population of two hundred millions, but extremely difficult to bring
any mind to support the weight of the fact that, when we speak
of India, we are speaking of one in every six human beings
on the face of the earth. Yet unless this be kept in sight,
confusion of ideas is constantly arising from the notion
that all Hindus are one people, with one set of characteristics;
whereas they are one to us only in the same way as all
Europeans are one to them. The Mahratta and the Bengalee
are more distinguished, by opposite traits of character, and by
language, than the Englishman and the Frenchman.
The
Rohilla and the Tamulian are as different from each other as
Swede and Neapolitan. One man in India lives as far north as
our European fellow-subjects at Malta, and another as far south
as Sierra Leone; one is within eight degrees of the equator,
another seven hundred miles inside the temperate zone. Nova
Scotia is not further west of Ireland than is Scinde of Assam:
only the way between the latter two lies not over a waste of
water, but through a world of population.
It may be taken as a general rule, that on the seaboard the
population answer to the prevalent idea in this country, of
Hindoo feebleness and effeminacy, these characteristics reaching
their highest degree in damp, hot, featureless Bengal. It is from
the coast population that nearly all the specimens of Hindus who
appear in England, sweeping crossings, or speckling the neighbourhood of our docks, are drawn; but these differ widely from the
natives of the higher lands, whether of the southern plateau, the
central mountains, or the North West Provinces. The Mahrattas
of the table-land are a small, ungainly, but vigorous and enterprising race, who, before they were tamed by our arms, swept the
country terribly, sparing no human interest, and rejoicing chiefly
in plunder. In the central district and the hills are tribes called
Bheels, Ghonds, and others, who are small, ill-favoured, and
savage. The Rajpoots, who inhabit the sandy desert and tracts
lying immediately to the east of it, are a tall, grave, soldierly, and
romantic people, capable of all the crimes and virtues of semibarbarous highland clans, tracing the line of their Chiefs to their

11
sun and moon, maintaining much feudal and heraldic state,
and murdering their female children, when not afraid of our
authorities. The tract called the Doab, that is, the district
between the Jumna and the Ganges, is inhabited chiefly by the
Jats, another warlike race; and to the west of this lie the Sikhs,
who are men of noble physical proportions and great military
capabilities.
In the romantic vale of Cachmere, the people
approach again more to the feeble type of the Bengalee than
the bolder races on which they border.
Throughout every region of India, the Mohammedans are
to be found as a distinct people, everywhere speaking the Hindustani, which is therefore the only language useful in all
parts of the country. Not that every one understands it,
but that in every important village some Mohammedans will
be found whose domestic tongue it is. The proportion they
bear to the whole population is variously estimated at from one
in seven to one in fifteen, and sixteen millions, or about half
the population of France, is not an unusual guess-for, after
all, it is but a guess-as to the total number of Mohammedans
in India. While they retained supremacy in the country, the
Court language was Persian, which continued to be used by our
authorities until the day of Lord William Bentinek, who had
the sense to replace it by English. It was as much a foreign
language as our own, the language of fiercer conquerors, and
more severe masters; therefore it was odious to the Hindu, and
the use of it a homage to the power of the Mohammedans.
The .two greatest Mohammedan states remaining in India are
Oude, which has scarcely yet disappeared, and Hydrabad,
which holds together by British support alone.
It may be taken for granted that all the Mohammedans in
India are incurably disaffected to the British Government. They
look upon the country as the spoil of their fathers' valour, upon
themselves as wronged by a hateful infidel force; and when they
are not plotting for our overthrow, it is simply because no
feasible movement can then be undertaken. Their habitual
state of feeling is, that they will
'Spoil the spoiler as they may,
And from the robber rend the prey.'

The first striking division, then, of the native population is
one that pervades the whole country,-a division by religion into
Hindu and Mussulman; or, to be more accurate, into Hindu,
Mussulman, and Sikh; for the last deny and accept respectively

12
many of the principles of both the other religions, and form a
sect which, on the whole, is different from both, and in some
respects intolerant. In the days of Runjeet Singh, Islam was
not free of the Punjab.
After the division by religions, we come upon another, equally
prominent in late occurrences,-the division by caste. The
whole of the people of India are divided into High-caste, Lowcaste, and Out-caste. It is important to bear the three-fold character of this division in mind; for, in nearly all popular speaking
and writing about India, the last division is totally forgotten,
or confounded with the second; but it is highly desirable to
keep in view that the caste system excludes an immense proportion of the whole people of India from every social privilege.
The High-caste are Brahmins, the priestly caste, any one of whom
would be dishonoured for life by dining with our gracious Queen;
and the Rajpoots, who claim to be of the ancient King and
soldier caste, to any private in whose ranks the same distinction
would be not less ruinous. Below these two castes, the great
body of the Hindu population are Low-caste, of the tribe that
is called Sudra, excluded from any social admixture with either
of the two High-castes, but themselves maintaining an equal
exclusiveness with regard to the Out-castes, and to other
divisions of caste people. Into how many castes the Sudras
are divided, no one can say; for every craft is a distinct caste,
from the washerman to the jeweller. None of these can eat,
reside, or intermarry with the other. In the Low-castes whole
nations are included, as for instance the Mahrattas; and, indeed,
most of the remaining Hindu Princes, if not all, are of this
caste.
At a moment when the question of caste is threatening the
whole fabric of our Indian Empire, it is desirable that every
man in England should have a clear idea of what it really is;
and we have been much surprised, that in the great amount
of writing that has taken place, no one seems to have raised
the simple question, 'WHAT

IS CASTE ?'

It is taught in the

sacred books of the Hindus that caste is a distinction grounded
upon the creation of different orders of men, imbued with
different proportions of goodness and badness, who have transmitted their original nature to the present generations. The following account gives us briefly the substance of their doctrines
on this point :'" Formerly," as the sage Parasara teaches, "when the truthmeditating Brumha was desirous of creating the world, there sprang

13
from his mouth beings especially endowed with the quality of goodness;
others sprang from his breast pervaded by the quality of foulness;
others from his thighs, in whom foulness and darkness prevailed; and
others from his feet, in whom the quality of darkness predominated.
These were in succession beings of the several castes, Bramhans,
Kshetriyas, Vaisyas, and Shudras, produced from the mouth, the
breast, the thighs, and the feet of Brumha." The popular account
describes the Kshetriva as born from the creator's arm. These castes
have thus distinct origins, and natures equally distinct. They repel
the doctrine, that " God made of one blood all men to dwell upon the
face of the earth ;" and, in opposition to it, maintain that the different castes of men have natures as dissimilar as the different castes
of grain, fruit, or animals. Caste is their word for species. Wheat,
rice, and Indian corn are different castes of grain; mangoes, bananas,
and tamarinds, different castes of fruit; tigers, camels, and elephants,
different castes of animals; and Bramhans, Kshetriyas, Vaisyas, and
Shudras, different castes of men. "You may say, if you please,"
they will observe, " that Bramhans and Shudras are both men. They
are both men, if you will, just as a horse ard an ass are both animals;
but as you never can make an ass of a horse, nor a horse of an ass, so
you can never make a Bramhan of a Shudra, nor a Shudra of a
Bramhan." The idea that the Out-castes are sprung from the same
stock as the rest of mankind is scouted with disgust.
'Into these four divisions, then, is society parted; each being a
separate commonwealth, with its own heads, its own prejudices, its
own pursuits, and its own laws. The various castes may not eat together, may not intermarry, may not reside in the same house, and may
not assume each other's professions. Thus they are really wider apart
than if separated by national distinctions, or even than races alien in
blood and complexion. Again, the calling is transmitted from father
to son, and it passes on through indefinite generations. The design
of this was doubtless to secure perfection in the various departments
of trade. Whether it has done this or not, it has certainly established professional genealogies. "Old houses" and "ancient families"
are common things in India. Every tailor may confidently reckon
that his sires clipped and fitted since before the days of the Caesars,
and every barber can boast an ancestry of barbers who shaved in
remote antiquity : the weaver, too, the joiner, the potter, the washerman, and the blacksmith, may each pride himself that the line of his
fathers stretches up through long centuries.' Arthur's .Mission to the
.Mysore, p. 381, &c.
It might be expected that the Brahmins, who, according to
this account of creation, are beings 'especially endowed with
the quality of goodness,' would take high rank. Accordingly,
we find the great Hindu authority, Menu, speaking thus :
'Whatever exists in the universe is all, in effect, though not in
form, the wealth of the Bramhan, since the Bramhan is entitled to all
by his primogeniture and eminence of birth. The Bramhan eats but
his own food, wears but his own apparel, and bestows but his own
alms. Through the benevolence of the Bramhan, indeed, other
mortals enjoy life.'

14
So entirely different is the distinction created by caste from
any distinction of rank as existing in other nations, that a man
of lower caste cannot even be admitted to the dignity of domestic
service in the house of his higher caste neighbour. Not one
Brahmin or Rajpoot soldier in the whole of the Bengal army
could have allowed his English General to cook a dish of curry
for him, or to offer him a cup of tea, without thereby polluting
himself irrecoverably, All his food must be prepared by the
hands of persons of his own caste. This absurd institution has
been adopted by the Mussulmans, although contrary to their
own religion; so that, instead of discountenancing the Hindu
nonsense, they set up a rival caste, and affect to be as strict and
punctilious as their idolatrous neighbours. Hence arises the
enormity of the blunder with regard to the greased cartridges,
which, by some almost incredible inattention to the habits of
the people, was an affront exactly prepared to frighten and
wound both Hindu and Mussulman alike. A Brahmin will
shriek with terror if a drop of pure water from a glass in the
hand of a European fall upon him by accident; and how any
Government, having even heard of India, not to say knowing it,
could allow the issue of the greased cartridges to such men, is
one of those marvels of human folly, in presence of which it is
impossible to be angry, it looks so like judicial blindness. The
best illustration we have seen, to convey to the minds of those
who are not practically acquainted with the horror which the
caste feeling inspires against any article of food supposed to be
impure, is given by a writer who says, that the effect of asking
Brahmins and Rajpoots to bite the cartridges, greased with fat
either of swine or cows, or perhaps of both, was much the same
as would be that of asking Roman Catholic soldiers to offer
some public insult to the consecrated wafer.
The Hindu can conceive of no calamity comparable to the
loss of caste; and hence, to a great extent, arises what is very
often alleged as their reproach,-want of patriotism.
For,
in fact, all the feelings of attachment to a particular form of
Government, or dynasty, or nationality, or freedom, are in the
Hindu concentrated upon that which is to him the embodiment
of all his family traditions and privileges, of his personal
station, and religious hopes,-his caste. Governments may
change, and nationalities be overthrown, but his position remains
little altered: infringe, however, the regulations of his caste,
and at once he is dislocated from society, and hopeless for the
life to come. Hence, while he will look upon changes in the

15
nation with comparative indifference, he will resent any affront
to the caste with ungovernable fury.
A change of religion does not necessarily involve a departure
from caste; for many native Christians endeavour to combine
caste with Christianity, and in the earlier stages of Protestant
Missions this tendency was so far conceded to, that, in Tanjore, caste ran as high among the Christians as among the
heathen, until the abuse brought down its own destruction.
The Romish Missionaries adopt it. Loss of caste is most
ordinarily and speedily brought about by eating or tasting
anything that has been prepared by unclean hands; and
hence among the Out-castes in India are to be ranked, first
of all, the native Pariahs; secondly, the Mussulmans, whose
affected caste the Brahmin cannot acknowledge; and, thirdly,
the Europeans, who are Out-caste by a double title,-first,
because they are of an unclean race; secondly, because their
food is universally cooked by Pariahs. This last fact alone
places the European at an infinite distance from decency,
according to the code of caste; and either he must consent to
have all his food cooked in England, and eat it there, or else
meet Brahmins on the plain ground that their caste is a local
distinction founded on untruth, and pushed to absurdity, which
he is prepared to respect, so far as never to offer or invite them
to anything offensive, but against which every meal he eats is a
practical protest.
No barrier has ever been raised between man and man so
impassable as caste. The Frank and the western Mohammedan grow friends over a meal; the European and the South
Sea Islander warm at table; even the Chinese can entertain
strangers; but two men may be neighbours for life, may
write in the same office or parade in the same company for
twenty years, and never dare to break bread together, though
equals in fortune, employment, and ability. Loss of caste is also
caused by the omission of established rites, neglecting to sacrifice to ancestors, or drunkenness. Of the effect of loss of caste,
the following correct account is given by the Abb6 Dubois:'He' (who has lost caste) 'is a man as it were dead to the world.
He is no longer in the society of men. By losing his caste, the
Hindu is bereft of friends and relations, and often of wife and children,
who will rather forsake him than share in his miserable lot. No one
dares to eat with him, or even to pour him out a drop of water. If
he has marriageable daughters, they are shunned; no other girls can
be approached by his sons. Wherever he appears, he is scorned and
pointed at as an Out-caste. If he sinks under the grievous curse, his

16
body is suffered to rot on the place where he dies. Even if, in losing
his caste, he could descend into an inferior one, the evil would be less;
but he has no such resource. A Shudra, little scrupulous as he is
about honour or delicacy, would scorn to give his daughter in marriage even to a Bramhan thus degraded. If he cannot re-establish
himself in his own caste, he must sink into the infamous tribe of the
Pariah, or mix with persons whose caste is equivocal.'
One part of the operation of the caste system which is of the
first importance, and which seems to have received no notice
whatever in the present agitation, is the formation of a large
section of the people universally diffused, who, being Out-castes,
are degraded below all social rights. What proportion these
may bear to the whole population, we are not prepared to say.
The Abbe Dubois, who is generally considered an authority,
states that they are one in five. We imagine that this is too
high an estimate, and perhaps one in ten would be nearer the
truth. But, even in this proportion, the Indian Out.castes
would be twenty millions of human beings, or more than the
population of all England. Outside the walls of every village in
India may be seen a miserable kraal of huts, inhabited by a
hopeless race, who are borne down for generation after generation to a state of the extremest degradation. The following
extract will give an idea of the condition of these people
'The Out-caste may not live in the common street; and in some
parts of the extreme south, he may not even walk the street where
the Bramhans reside. He is forbidden the house of all the castes;
but in some districts may enter that part where the cattle are lodged,
and may even show his head and one foot inside the door of the
family apartment. To touch him, to enter his house, to drink water
he had drawn, to eat food he had cooked, to use a vessel he had
touched, to sit down beside him, to ride in the same vehicle, or even
to give him a drink of water, would be unlawful for a man of caste.
He would take a proposal for anything of the kind as a mortal affront.
The condition of an American or West Indian slave is worse than
theirs only in one respect,-compulsory labour. But the slave may
tread the same floor as his master, without polluting the whole house;
he may enter the room where he sits, touch the dish he uses, sleep
under the same roof, and prepare the food he eats. He is not made
to feel that his step defiles a room; that his touch infects the purest
wares; and that he carries in his own body, no matter how clean, a
cursed incurable filthiness which fills with disgust all who have proper
human sentiments. He has at least the privilege of a domestic
animal. Above all, he may possibly die free; his children may be
intelligent and respectable. But the Out-caste has no hopes; no
manumission can change his birth; he must bear his curse down to
the grave; he must bequeath it to his children, who will bequeath it
in turn, and from generation to generation on it must go, nor can any
power arrest it, except one, of which he knows not. Nothing can

17
elevate the Out-caste, till the Gospel has taught his neighbours to own
his rights. Every Englishman would ten thousand times prefer
being a slave, permitted some semblance of intercourse with the rest
of mankind, and having a possibility of ransom, with the glorious
prospect of leaving his children free, to being an Out-caste, driven to
live beyond the village wall, hunted from every door, scorned by the
most base, loathed by the most vile, and knowing that this malediction awaits his little ones.
' The living of this hapless race is precarious : sometimes employed
as scavengers, sometimes as horse-keepers, porters, or messengers; for
the most part labouring in the fields for three-halfpence or twopence a
day; often selling themselves for a term to a farmer, or reduced to a
kind of slavery as payment of debt, they never venture to hope for
aught but poverty and shame. When labour fails, charity lends no
substitute; for, though I find in the sacred books directions for alms
to Out-castes, I never heard of such a thing taking place. The Out.
caste sees costly entertainments for beggars; but not one of these
beggars would admit him to the honour of washing his dish, or dine
in a room that his presence stained. Thus they are driven to eat all
disgusting things : no sooner does a beast die, be the disease what it
may, than a crowd of these hungry beings surround the carrion,-and
even for carrion they have generally to pay. Crows, rats, snakes,
reptiles, almost everything, is pressed into the service of destitute
nature, and drunkenness follows to crown their shame and woe.
' It is said that, on one part of the Malabar coast, a section of Outcastes is so abhorred, that they are not allowed to erect houses, only
an open shed supported on four bamboos; and that they may not
approach a caste person nearer than a hundred yards, but must give
notice of their approach by a loud cry. To prevent the danger of
contact, they are forbidden the highway.'-fission to the .Mysore,
p. 415, &c.
Few Englishmen have thought, that under our own sceptre
some twenty millions of human beings were living in a degradation like this; and it will be well if one of the effects of the
attention now excited as to the caste system, be to work into
the heart of Englishmen a feeling of the unparalleled oppression
which it entails. The benefits already conferred on the unhappy
Out-castes by English rule are incalculable. Admitted into
European families as domestic servants, they are at once raised
into a new position; received by Missionaries into schools, they
are proved to have the mental qualities of man. In the early
days of our rule in India, they were admitted to our armies, and
General Briggs has ably shown that, when that was the case,
our native levies were perfectly trustworthy and efficient. An
able writer in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1853, when
none of the nervous anxiety of the present moment disturbed
discussion, as to the best organization of our Sepoy army, said
that in the early times the native officers 'not unfrequently

18
filled their ranks with Pariahs and persons of the lowest caste.
Nor did the slightest inconvenience arise from this. Off duty,
the Brahmin and the Rajpoot could not come into contact with
the Sudra, far less touch the Pariah, or eat food which he had
dressed; on duty, they rubbed shoulders freely, and were
honestly attached to one another.' But then the native officers
had real rank, and power over their troops; and the native army
was, as General Briggs points out, composed of two classes,gentlemen, and those of the lowest grades. But, just as the
caste prejudice had before our day infected the Mohammedans,
so in time it infected British officers also. 'The Sepoys,' says
General Briggs, ' who fought the battles of Clive and Coote, who
contributed to the humiliation of Tipu, and who gained laurels
under Sir Arthur Wellesley, were of a mixed class. The
infantry was composed of Pariahs, Pullars, and other low cultivators of the Carnatic, of the Northern Circars, and some few
Mohammedans.
The cavalry were wholly Mohammedans.'
But, in the lapse of years, these men were either dismissed, or
gradually dropped out of the army, and only men of caste
enlisted. The same profound student of India relates how an
old Rajpoot, a Subahdar, alluding to the Out-castes, whom England was now treating, not in her own spirit, but in that of the
Brahmins, said, 'The day will come when you will confess how
much higher qualities they possess as soldiers than the Mohammedans.' That day came long ago to men of insight, such as
.Sir Charles James Napier; but never came, until their comrades
were massacred and their wives dishonoured, to the common
run of routine officers; and even at the time when the fearful
storm under which we are now shuddering, was gathering over
our heads, the Commander-in-Chief of Bombay was silly enough
to issue a General Order, enforcing the exclusion from the army
hereafter of recruits from the Out-castes, he being resolved, of
course, to make his own army as respectable, in point of caste,
as that of Bengal. Owing to this miserable un-English policy,
while the influence of our rule in the main has been to open up
some hopes of amelioration to the down-trodden millions of the
Out-castes, we have been gradually made the tools of Brahminical cunning, in excluding them from the honourable employment of soldiers, and so leaving arms in the hands chiefly of the
two classes of men who, beyond all others, are our enemies, the
Mohammedans and the High-castes, who must be averse to any
Government not founded on their respective systems.

19
In reasoning upon the cause of the present outbreak, it is
not uncommon to confound two things which are very distinct:
disaffection, which may be chronic, and co-exist with a long
course of obedience; and mutiny, which is an inflammatory
action, founded upon the other, but itself brought about by
some active and irritating cause. It is too generally assumed
that for the whole matter some one must be to blame; whereas
it may be that the only blame lies in furnishing the irritating
cause where a state of disaffection existed. That this latter
does constantly exist among the native Princes, the Brahmins,
and the Mohammedans, no one can doubt; and in all three
classes, universally, or nearly so, though exceptions may be
found. Each of these classes believes in its traditional right
to dominion, and is therefore disinclined to obey any foreign
power.
But many of the Brahmins have not yet ceased
to know how much the English are preferable to the Mussulmans whom they supplanted; and many of the native Princes
are aware that they are more secure under the protection of the
British power, than their forefathers were, when trusting only
to their own forces. To the Mohammedans, however, although
even here there may be exceptions, the English are detestable on
the double ground of being Christians and conquerors; through
whom they themselves, from being the ruling class, have become at
once a minority of the population and a subjugated race. Brahminism inspires a contempt for all who are not included within
the sacred limits of caste; and can ill brook the dominion of
any power that does not worship the order of the 'gods of the
earth,' as the Brahmins delight to be called. Yet it is not, as a
system of religion, persecuting and intolerant, and is opposed
only to the English Government as it must be to any not
organized on its own principles. The Mohammedans, on the
other hand, have a more intolerant creed, a keener sense of the
degradation of being conquered, and a more energetic character.
Both parties are cunning enough to hatch great conspiracies,
and neither had courage or military power to present a front to
the British Government, unless they could gain the Sepoys;
and therefore every hope of a far-sighted conspirator must have
turned upon the possibility of uniting the two classes, of which
our native troops are composed, in resistance to their European
masters. The existence of plots with this object ought not to
be taken, in itself, as any proof of misgovernment on the part
of the East India Company, or any demonstration that we have
oppressed the people. The antipathy of race and religion, with
B2

20
ambition, is sufficient to account for all this. Were a general
disaffection manifest among the people, and hatred to our
Government shown by the traders and agriculturists of the
country, it might be taken as approaching to a proof of wrongs
inflicted; although even then the doubt would remain, how far
it arose simply from national feeling.
There can be no doubt that the natural disaffection of all the
three classes we have just alluded to has been abated under the
British Government,
than could easily have been conceived possible; and at the same time it is manifest that those
classes of the community-for instance, the traders and the
peasantry-who had none of the ambition of governing, and
were chiefly influenced by the desire of well-being, have
been, on the whole, so far sensible of the benefits of English
rule, that national animosity has been conquered by a sense
of self-interest; and even in the present time of our peril, many
of them have manifested a desire for our success. The domestic
servants, also, attached to European families, drawn as they
almost universally are from the Out-castes, have in the main
acted well, although to them the temptation of plunder must
have been inviting in the highest degree. But the feelings
of self-interest which our Government has engaged on its
behalf, in the case of large numbers of the people, could
not be appealed to in Mussulmans and Brahmins, any more
than in the native Princes. / All these must see, that whatever might be the fate of individuals of their own body,
the inevitable tendency of British rule was, to elevate the
whole mass of the people to equal chances of employment and
consideration with themselves, and to merge all traditional
claims to eminence in the vulgar qualifications of energy or
merit. Many reason as if great pains ought to have been taken
to make these classes feel, that there was nothing in our ascendancy unfriendly to their aspirations. It is very certain that
they ought to be treated so as to leave no ground to suspect
underhand designs against their caste, or any idea of coercing
their consciences, or of offering gratuitous affronts to their
scruples. But, on the other hand, it is perfectly useless to
attempt to administer government, by the agency of Englishmen and Christians, on principles that will assure Brahmins
and Mohammedans that their influeAce is to be eternal. Therefore, whatever prejudices have been raised by their seeing that
their old prophecies, foretelling a system from the west which
should supplant theirs, are in course of fulfilment in the rule of

"more

21
the British, must be encountered as the inseparable inconvenience of dealing with a people who have to pass through the
stage of elevation from an old and jealous superstition.
We are not, however, to be understood as arguing that no
disaffection, resulting from real fault on the part of our own
Government, has existed in India. It is not a little significant,
that at the very time when the mutineers, unknown to us, were
wreaking their vengeance upon our countrymen and countrywomen, the House of Commons was discussing the motion of
Mr. Kinnaird, founded on a memorial from the missionary
body in Bengal, in which serious grievances suffered by the
people were set forth, and much consequent disaffection on their
part was affirmed to exist. The House has seldom argued a
question affecting India with more intelligence than was displayed in that debate, and we would especially recommend the
published speech of Mr. Kinnaird to the consideration of our
readers. The mode in which the Bengal Government replied
to the representations of the Missionaries was very characteristic.
Mr. Halliday, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, insists from
his own knowledge that the disaffection spoken of does not exist,
and we dare say that he believes he knows as much about the
matter as the Missionaries; but for any one who has lived really
among the people of India, nothing is more difficult to conceive
than how the civil servants of the Company can ever gain much
information on the real condition of things. They are surrounded by so much state, exercise so much authority, are beset
by so many native officials, who represent all things as they
please, and, when they do come into personal contact with the
peasantry, shed down upon them such an amount of awe, that
they would do very wisely to use the eyes and ears of any
European residing in the country, without power and without
retinue, knowing the language, and accustomed to hear the
people speak their minds. A Missionary, living at a country
station, would hear a great deal more of the real feeling of the
peasantry in one week, than a dignitary at Calcutta would in a
lifetime. Even Mr. Theobald, who, in the pamphlets named at
the head of this paper3 shows perfect mastery of all points
affecting the relations of the British residents and the Government, shows also complete ignorance of the feelings of the
people respecting the zemindars, or middlemen; such ignorance
as is inevitable in mere residents in English settlements, and,
above all, in one of the Presidencies. We feel as strongly as he
does the necessity of giving Englishmen an easy and permanent

22
tenure of land in India; and wish him all success in his able
endeavours to that end. But it is impossible to put upon paper
the intensity of hatred which we have seen invariably manifested
by Hindus toward all systems of native middlemen. These
wretches extort and torture, browbeat and deceive, under pretext of our authority, and, it must be admitted, under the shield
of our power, till the curses of the people fall not only upon
them, but equally upon us. We do not sanction the individual
acts of wrong, or of torture; but we founded, and pledged ourselves to perpetuate, the system whence these unavoidably
spring; and what has been practised on our countrymen and
countrywomen helps us to conceive what is, in our name,
though without our knowledge, often practised on our native
subjects. No promise to an individual can override the general
principles of justice; and while every zemindar who will administer on principles consistent with uprightness ought to be
sacredly respected, every one who uses British authority to
sanction native cruelties or extortions ought to be instantly
struck down.
Among the causes most generally assigned for an increase of
disaffection of late, one of the most prominent has been Lord
Dalhousie's policy of annexation. This acted upon the native
Princes by denying their right of adoption where no real heir
existed, and on the Mohammedans by sweeping away one of
their few remaining great states, Oude. We are inclined to
think that in these measures Lord Dalhousie was perfectly
justified. We can see no reason upon earth why we are to perpetuate misrule over millions of men, for the sake of gratifying
a Hindu Prince, whom we have protected in a shadowy sovereignty, with the feeling that he will have some one to sacrifice to him when he is dead. Yet it is not to be denied that
the cases of Sattara and Nagpore have aggrieved the native
Princes seriously, and stimulated the conspiracies which they
have always been carrying on. Oude was a different and more
complex case, and we expect will prove to have been the real
cause of the present crisis. Whenever such measures are
justified, our Government must be prepared to lay its account
with the disaffection which will ensue; for the rule of proceeding cannot be to avoid everything that will annoy native Princes,
Brahmins, and Mussulmans, but everything contrary to justice
or injurious to the people; and in the long run the disaffection
of classes, excited by measures founded on a true English policy,
will be far less detrimental to our rule than would be injuries

23
to the population at large by a temporizing and half-Hindu
policy. Yet, whenever steps are taken which irritate--any
dangerous class, the Government are responsible for adopting
sufficient measures to forestall evil; and here we think Lord
Dalhousie pitifully failed: failed in foresight, insight, and practical safeguards.
Another of the alleged causes of disaffection is one which has
effectually played into the hands of the leaders of the conspiracy,
after the fall of Oude had set them to work. Rohilcund and
Oude have been, too exclusively, the recruiting ground for the
Bengal army; and the Government have set on foot scrutinies
into land titles there, by which many of the relations of the
Sepoys have been disturbed, and thus doubtless a feeling of personal bitterness has been carried into their ranks.
Among the causes of disaffection, we have been amused to
find a writer in a northern contemporary gravely alleging the
too great rapidity with which Government has proceeded in
matters of reform, alleging, of all things, in proof of his point,
the railways, and the system of governing new countries by
mixed Commissions of military men and civilians. The way in
which the writer manages to connect these matters with the
mutiny is, that both the one and the other, though good in
themselves, as he does allow, have drafted away a great many
officers from their regiments, to attend to the duties arising
from the construction of railways in one case, and the adminis.
tration of governments in the other. But more of the dangers
of our present position are due to the spirit which could invent
such an argument, than to all other causes put together. Four
years ago, we said in these pages, that the delay of the Government, in the construction of railways, was as ' politically foolish,
as it was unfaithful to the interests of the people;' and had a
railway been completed even from Calcutta to Delhi, the saving
in simple money within the last three months would have been
far more than the cost of its construction. Their slowness in
this particular has been a great crime against humanity in
general, and especially against the English nation and the
Hindu people, between whom they stood, the guardians of the
honour of the one, and the interests of the other. As to the
absurd apology that the construction of railways has taken
away officers from their regiments,-whose fault was that?
Plenty of gentlemen were to be found in England to officer both
the railways and the regiments, if the Government had called
for them. And if adopting a better system for governing new

24
countries has left regiments bare of officers, again we ask, Whose
fault was that ?
Another cause of disaffection frequently dwelt upon, is the
change made by Lord Hardinge with regard to the law of
inheritance; for, up to his time, our Government had administered the persecuting law of the Hindus, which deprives any
one who forsakes the religion of his forefathers of all hereditary
property. At last, however, an English prevailed over a Hindu
policy, and it was declared that British subjects should no longer
be persecuted for conscience' sake; but every man protected in
his right to worship God after his convictions; even though his
God was He whom our Queen addresses as OuR FATHER.

It

may be true that this change of the law irritated the Brahmins;
as to the population generally, we do not believe they cared the
least about it; and the petitions which were sent forward to
England were never heard of by any but a very small section
of the people, and were manifestly concocted by English lawyers.
But suppose that this change in our proceeding had given serious
offence, the question is, Was it right, or was it wrong ? In a moral
point of view, none will dispute; as a question of duty between
man and man, as a question of responsibility to the great Ruler,
we are right in refusing to administer, with English hands, the
old cruel laws which would bind every man on the fair plains
of India to the altars of obscene idols, or in default cast him out
homeless.
But, though morally right, many will say, it was politically
unwise. Yet we venture to think that only they who look
merely at the moment and at the surface will go thus far. One
first point in political wisdom is, that the governing class shall
maintain self-respect. No momentary quiet they may gain by
prostrating themselves before those they rule, can in the issue
be of value. Only in so far as they stand high on their own
honour, can they have permanent repose; and for any Governors
to administer judicial persecution against their own subjects,
for embracing their own religion, is a folly in politics, as it is a
crime in morals, which we believe was-never heard of, until that
strangest of all mongrel creatures, the English Hindu, began to
mutter and mumble about the respect to be paid to the prejudices of a multitude. If any man dares to propose in the
British Senate that the authority of England shall ever again
be exerted to persecute a native of any clime under heaven for
avowing himself a disciple of Christ, we believe there are men
there able to deal with him as to the political fatuity of his

'25
course, and others who will show honest English astonishment
at his moral degradation. The British power was never created to
bind Brahminical chains, and enslave consciences by the million.
Another alleged cause of disaffection is our 'tampering'
with the Hindu law of marriage ; and, from what has been said
by Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Whiteside, and other gentlemen more
eloquent than informed, it might be supposed that the English
in India had undertaken to compel Hindus to marry widows, or
to compel widows themselves again to join in marriage, or had
inflicted some other grievous wrong upon human society. Now,
what is the extent to which we have actually gone? Simply
that of permitting a poor widow to be reckoned in the ordinary
ranks of marriageable women, instead of being, as she has been
hitherto, under the accursed stroke of Hindu law, a blasted and
hated thing. We do not know that we felt any indignation on
reading Mr. Disraeli's attacks upon the measure, for any obliquity
in that gentleman's moral perception is not wont to ruffle us;
but that Mr. Whiteside, a man of feeling, of generosity, and
an Irishman, should lend himself on such a question to such
leading, did, we confess, excite both our astonishment and shame.
Time was when Irish eloquence shed gorgeous light on Indian
debates; but never did Edmund Burke kindle his fires to reweld a chain which Christian charity had broken. We expect
that Mr. Whiteside's own good feeling will promptly recall him
from so false a course, when he better understands the facts.
The following description of the condition of Hindu widows
was published years ago, when no such controversy as the present
could have been in contemplation :'The girl thus pompously married is always of immature age, and,
after the ceremony, remains in her father's house for a shorter or
longer term, as the case may be. When deemed fit to be united to
her husband, she is led to his residence, on which occasion ceremonies
are renewed, but on a much smaller scale. Though we should hold
the original ceremony only a betrothment, they hold it a marriage.
From that moment the man has all the rights of a husband, the girl all
the obligations of a wife; and should he die, though she may never
have left her father's roof, she is his widow; and his widow all her
days she must remain. The tahli is removed from her neck; then,
one by one, her articles of jewellery; her dress changed for a widow's
robe, and her rich black hair shaved, to be allowed to grow no more.
From that day she commences a life of shame. Her lot is not
regarded as an affliction to which all are liable, and which entitles the
sufferer to universal sympathy, but as a retribution for the vices of a
former birth. The gods hold her unworthy of the joys and honours
of marriage. The husband's relatives do not scruple to charge the
loss of their kinsman on her sins. Their religion teaches that the

26
only atonement she can make, the only path whereby she may escape
days of infamy and woe, is self-destruction. She ought to burn with
the clay of him whom she had never seen but at the wedding, or
under whom she had lived in bondage for years. The benign spirit of
Christianity has now averted this final stroke; but the life thus spared
is a life of sorrow and shame. The world scorns her; and the care of
her own family is to keep her steps so watched, her spirit so broken,
and her frame so weak, that she may not bring disgrace upon them.
Should their endeavours fail, her crime cannot make her condition much
more severe. With us, a widow's weeds are the signals of charity,
inviting commiseration and respect; in India, they are the brand of
justice, inspiring horror. No human being is more to be pitied than
a young Hindu widow. Then it is to be remembered, that this class
is far more numerous in India than amongst us; for, first, every man,
without exception, marries and may re-marry as often as he likes;
secondly, every bride is a young girl,-a child; thirdly, every female
once widowed continues a widow for life. From these three causes,
widows in India must be at least twice as numerous as in England;
and when it is remembered, that the population of India is seven-fold
that of the British Isles, it will be seen what a multitude of breasts
are pierced by Hinduism with continual sorrows.'-Mfiesion to the
-Mysore.
It may be stated, in addition to the above, that if the widow
have the honour to be of the Brahmin tribe, she is usually kept
on one meal a day, and is the drudge and butt of the family;
and being considered the unlucky cause of every disaster, her
presence is forbidden at any festivity.
Suppose, then, that
England had secured some ill-will from the Brahmins, by doing
the little that she could do towards the removal of this fearful
curse, that is, refusing to administer penalties upon any who
shall have the courage to raise themselves against it,-we ask, Is
she to grudge the trouble that may arise in consequence? They
are poor politicians who look to a measure like this as the root
of a deep.seated and active conspiracy; but if it were, if
refusing longer to stretch out our hand against the widows
were the real cause of all this blood, will England shrink from
the act, or stand by it? Will England prefer the favour of the
Brahmins, with participation of their cruelties, or their deadly
hatred, with clean hands?
Among the many questionable acts,
and worse, of the East India Company, on this at least they
may look back with some content in their day of fiery trouble.
Others, too, will find comfort in recalling a measure fraught
both with justice and charity; and many an English widow
and bereaved mother, thinking of husbands murdered and
daughters defiled, would feel a drop of sweetness mingling with
their gall, could they believe that the cup was raised to their

27
lips because we took it from those of the helpless. But, no, this
act of justice has cost no blood.
Another alleged cause of disaffection has been education and
missionary labours. We believe it is universally admitted,-at
least, we have not heard any one deny it,-that the class of
natives educated in Government Colleges, and there carefully
protected from all Christian teaching, are to a great extent infidel in creed and dangerous in politics. But, on the other
hand, we cannot, at this moment, recollect any pamphlet, or any
book, in which it is asserted that the pupils of missionary schools
have generally displayed those characteristics. On the contrary,
we are inclined to believe that were the English power to come
to its final struggle to-morrow, among its best and last native
friends would be no small number of these. It must be remembered, that in every case the education received at the hands of
the Missionaries has been sought by the natives themselves.
Their schools have always been more frequented than those of the
Government, or any others; and this simple fact is the one
practical answer to all the theory, which asserts that missionary
operations, in the way of education or otherwise, must create
disaffection.
That the Brahmins foresee that the effect of missionary
labours will be the overthrow of their own system is undoubted;
for in such a matter they have a truer instinct than the class of
English politicians who are their apologists, and who, while
they on the one hand charge the Missionaries with turning
India upside down, are continually affirming on the other that
they will never acquire influence. The Brahmins, on the contrary, know that they will; that the sermon, the book, the
school, are surely and irresistibly working their way into the
heart of the nation; and doubtless many of them would be
glad, on this as on every other account, to see the end of
British domination. But all the enemies of Missions,--and they
are many, bitter, and certainly free from scruples,-although
they have ventured on the largest assertions, in the highest
places, have yet failed to produce one authentic fact to prove
that the labours of the Missionaries, either in schools or otherwise, have involved the Government in conflict with the people.
The writer of one of the pamphlets at the head of this article,
signing himself 'Caubulee,' says, very naturally, that had the
question of the greased cartridges been submitted to a jury of
Missionaries, they would, to a man, have decided against any
such attack upon the prejudices of the people; for they know

28
what does and what does not irritate. Sir Charles J. Napier
never showed his insight into the native character more
clearly, than when he stated that they had no objection
whatever to theological discussions. What they feared was
'not conversion, but contamination.' Of this their traditions
of former conquerors gave them reason to be afraid. The
Mussulmans were in the habit of converting them wholesale by violence. Tales of a similar kind circulate in the villages of the south, to this day, regarding both the Portuguese
and the French; and nothing but a thorough knowledge of the
real spirit of Christianity will ever relieve the English, or any
foreign Government, from the continual suspicion of being ready,
by stratagem or force, to break the caste of the people. Every
native, however, whose intercourse with Missionaries, or other
decided and consistent Christians, has enabled him clearly to
discover the principles of our religion, feels certain that what we
seek is not ' contamination,' but ' conversion ;' and that it
would afford no pleasure whatever to us to see him deprived of
his caste by trick or violence.
Gentlemen inattentive to religious questions may confidently
state their opinions on one side, and we as confidently give ours
on the other; but facts are much more to the purpose than the
assertions of either.
Take two extremes of the Indian community,-the classes who
have been most brought into contact with Missionaries, and
those who have been the least. The latter are the Sepoys, and,
above all, the Sepoys of the Bengal army. No Missionary ever
dared to preach in their lines, or open a school among their
children; no Christian native dared to enlist with them. They
were studiously kept, by statesmen, from all means of knowing what Christianity really was; and the consequence is,
that they are so ignorant of its spirit and aims, as to be the
dupes of men who represent our Government as capable of
entering into a conspiracy, to break their caste by making
them eat hog's lard. Lord Ellenborough may be assured that
no native who had frequently held discussions with Missionaries,
would have been led away by ideas so derogatory to his Lordship,
and to other statesmen who have guided the destinies of India.
It may be worth noting, for those who have had a hand in
maintaining this state of ignorance as to Christianity among
the Sepoys, in order that they may at their leisure remember
it, that the scene of the one well-known conversion of a Sepoy
to Christianity, and of his consequent expulsion from the British

29
army, although he was a blameless, and even a meritorious,
native officer,-that the scene of this crime against our national
religion, against the rights of that poor man, of this reckless
servility to the Koran and caste, was no other than the very
city of Meerut, in which we have had so wretchedly to drink
the wormwood and the gall of caste and the Koran.
On the other hand, just as enmity to the English has broken
out in the classes least approached by Missionaries, and in
the countries least occupied by them, so, where their labours
are most extensive, and their converts most numerous, British
life is at this moment most sacred, and British authority
strongest. There have been no risings against the English in
Tinnivelly or Travancore in the south, none in Serampore or
Krishnagur in the north. In all the Madras Presidency, which
has had much more of missionary labour, and had it longer,
than any other part of the country, there has been no disaffection; and we will venture to assert, that in proportion as
the natives have been under missionary influence, so will they
be friendly and serviceable to the English. Even where the
mutiny has broken out, no special enmity has been directed
against those who are active Christians. Efforts are made
to hold up Colonel Wheeler as a cause of mutiny, because
he had been active in instructing and exhorting the natives.
So far as we understand his case, he did not act the part of a
good soldier in the day of trial, and therefore we will cheerfully
leave him to whatever military censure his demerits may call
for. But this much is plain, that when disaffection broke out
in his regiment, the Adjutant, whom no one charges with
preaching, was shot at and wounded, and the Colonel, who was
so zealous, was let alone. By the natives generally, that class
of civilians or officers who manfully identify themselves with the
religion they profess, venerate its institutions, and cherish its
spirit, are far more respected than those of equal rank and
talent who indulge in vices, which some fluent speakers are much
slower to drag to light, for public disapproval, than any occasional
example of Christian zeal. One hasty and haughty oath at a
native will leave a rankling wound totally different from the
feeling caused by kindly conversation on religion.
Is there any proof in the conduct of the Sepoys of a special
desire for the blood of the Missionaries? Even in the sacred
city of Benares they have escaped, while many an officer who,
poor fellow, was far enough from offence on the score of Christianity, has been laid low. Indeed, there the authorities have

30
sought the aid of the personal influence of a Missionary in
getting stores. Only at three stations have we yet heard of
Missionaries being killed, and that, we will venture to say,
not from special enmity to them, but because nothing European
was to be spared. No solitary Mission station has been, so far
as we know, attacked. Again, the native newspapers, in their
endeavours to prove a conspiracy against the caste of the people,
did not allege anything that the Missionaries did, but the action
of the authorities,-their mad action of thrusting unclean grease
on the lips of Brahmins and Mohammedans.
The attempt to lay the disaffection at the door of the Missionaries could have been foretold with absolute certainty by every
one acquainted with the history of India. We could beforehand have selected the men, and almost set down the very
phrases that would be used. It has been so from the beginning,
and it will be so until the dying day of the last of the race
whom we have called by the name of the 'English Hindu.'
What they were fifty years ago, they are to-day. Then, the
Vellore mutiny had no sooner occurred than they laid it to the
charge of the Missionaries; but the question was asked, Was
there a Missionary in Vellore ?-No. Was there one near
Vellore ?-No. Was there one in the whole Presidency of
Madras ?-Not a single English Missionary. Some Danes and
Germans were peaceably labouring at Tanjore and Tranquebar,
and a few Englishmen had landed a thousand miles off, in
Bengal; and this rare apparition of Christianity had so disordered the vision of the 'English Hindu,' that he believed
then, and believes to this day, that the Sepoys who murdered
their officers and their European comrades during the wedding
The
of Tipu's daughter, were fighting against Missionaries.
disaffection was one of race and religion, but mere disaffection
did not make mutiny. That arose from irritants administered by the Government itself. The Sepoys had been forbidden earrings, forbidden to put on the marks which distinguish one caste and religion from another, commanded to
trim their beards to a standard model, forced to wear black
leather stocks and ungainly European jackets, and, last of all,
their own beautiful turban was displaced for a horrid, ugly hat;
and, moreover, they were required to use a turnscrew made in
the form of a cross. They demurred to wear the hat, were
savagely dealt with, took their revenge; and men were sensible
enough to say that this was chargeable upon Missions. While
writing this, we have put the case to a native Prince now in

31
England; his reply may go for what it is worth. 'They pretend that the Government want to break caste, for the sake
of enraging the Sepoys: but their meaning is, "We want to
get the English out of the way, and have the country to
ourselves." '
This naturally leads us to look at what we have already
pointed out, as needing to be distinguished from disaffection,
which is chronic, and which pervades classes military and nonmilitary,-namely, the inflammatory action upon the minds of
the Sepoys which leads to mutiny. This always pre-supposes
some temporary excitement, something which, irritating the
habitual state of disaffection, brings it to a head. The outburst
in India has been, hitherto, a military mutiny. The Sepoys
have been certainly joined in several cases by such persons as
would hail any revolution that promised excitement and plunder; but, as a whole, they have not met with the support of
the trading and labouring classes of the country, whose interests
are most immediately involved in the character of the Government. It is therefore our duty to look specially to causes
affecting the Sepoys; and of these the number assigned by
various writers is legion.
We shall not attempt to enumerate
them all, much less to estimate their value; but some of the
most prominent we may indicate.
The "first, and most generally assigned, is the paucity of
officers on duty with their regiments. The public are weary of
hearing that every man of ability looked forward, as the best
reward of his talents, to be removed from his regiment and
appointed to some civil employment; and so far was this carried,
that in many cases none remained with the Sepoys but the
youngest or the most incompetent officers. The blame of this
state of things must rest on the Government alone. For them
or their advocates to turn and say that the demands for improve..
ment forced them to employ military men in civil positions, is
mere trifling. It was their duty to govern the country, and
train the army; and no consideration, but the miserable one of
money, could for a moment suggest the policy which they
pursued.
Like all public measures springing from parsimoniousness, it wreaks vengeance upon the heads of its authors, by
occasioning tenfold the expense which a wise liberality would
have dictated.
Another cause, not less generally assigned, and more bitterly
felt, than even the former, by officers of spirit and ability, is,
that the regimental authorities have been gradually deprived of

32
all power either to promote or to punish their own men, everything being held in the hands of a bureau authority, or moved
by mechanical system; so that the Colonel, instead of being a
potentate in the eyes of his men, as he ought to have been, was
only a better-paid mercenary, whose duty it was to go first into
action, because he had most pay. In all spheres of government,
it is hard to exaggerate the importance of committing a due
share of power to every one invested with responsibility ; but, in
dealing with a race like the Hindus, and especially when under
the peculiar conditions of mercenary soldiers, shortsightedness
could do nothing worse, than to denude officers at the head of
regiments, of anything necessary to make their will habitually
powerful over the men under their command.
If these two causes reflect upon the Government, another
points our attention to the officers. Much has been said about
the familiarity of officers with their men in old days, and the
gradual increase of distance and distrust between them in
modern times. It has been very broadly intimated, by more
than one, that when officers kept a kind of seraglio, like native
gentry, they were more fitted for sympathy with their men, than
now, when they have generally creditable Christian families.
On this latter point, we would simply say, that officers enough
of the old class remain. And we will engage that if all the
history of the past three months were known, it would not prove
that those who have by seduction dishonoured and broken the
caste of the female relations of the Sepoys, were one whit more
respected in the common onslaught than those who were irreproachable in their private character. Gentlemen who practise
loose living in India have little idea how well the natives know
it, and how heartily they despise them for it. Things which
they will even justify themselves in doing, they know ought not
to be done by Englishmen; and we have heard things said by
natives of men who are not afraid in public to fall foul of those
who have been 'too good,' which would make their ears tingle,
if they were translated into plain English.
Those who deplore the decrease of fellowship between officers
and men are right; but those who charge it upon an improvement in the character of the officers, are as wrong in point of
fact as in point of 'morals. A good man has the advantage in
any country under heaven; and where general respect, sympathy, and moral influence are the objects to be gained, virtue
must ever be power.
But we must not be understood as denying the fact, that the

33
officer is, as a rule, wofully isolated from his men. * Many are
so through simple ignorance of their language. It is not all who
have the brains, or the perseverance, to learn an Indian tongue
so well, that it becomes an easy medium of communication;
and nearly all the officers who do so are at once removed from
their regiments to other work. Many of those who remain
can just talk enough of the native language to get through
routine phrases which they must employ; but they are always
glad to confine conversation within the narrowest limits, and
thus are all their lifetime incapacitated for gaining the hearts
of their men. They meet on parade, but are strangers.
Beside this, it is not to be concealed that the habitual bearing
of Englishmen to natives is marked by a high degree of pride
Any traveller in Egypt or the East must be
and distance.
struck with the extent to which English residents there, as well
as natives, are impressed with the haughty and domineering
spirit of the 'Indians' whom they see constantly passing. They
think that these have all the ways, not only of a lordly, but of a
despotic race. We remember once seeing some Arabs laugh
with astonishment and pleasure, on being heartily thanked for
some service they had rendered; and when a native who spoke
English was asked why they laughed, '0,' he said, 'because
you thank them.' 'Then would not a Pacha thank them, if
they did anything for him?' ' Pacha thank them! He? No!
Turk like Englishman in India.' And this idea of the 'Englishman in India' is far too correct. He is too much of the
'Turk.' Persons who have not observed the bearing of the
English abroad, are often surprised that all nations speak of us
as the most domineering and insolent of people. We award this
distinction to the Americans, and they conscientiously return it
to us. And both they and we are right. No two nations under
the sky are half so overbearing, or half so insolent, as the English
and the Americans. Others are more cruel, more tyrannical,
more unjust, more revengeful; but far more willing to admit
foreigners to companionable and equal relations. The Englishman or the American walks through the world, the moment he
leaves his own soil, feeling, and unconsciously showing at every
turn that he feels, everybody he meets with to be beneath him,
not personally, but simply because he is not English or not
American, as the case may be. Even among our neighbours in
Paris the complaint is often heard, that our English there
behave as if the place belonged to them; and there are towns
on the Continent that the French have burned and sacked more
c

34
than once,~vhere they have committed every atrocity of which
men are capable, and yet, on account of their companionable
ways, they are more welcome as individuals than the English,
who have never done anything but good to the people, and yet
by their whole bearing make them feel that they look down
upon every man of them. If this is the case when Englishmen
are side by side with Europeans, on terms of neighbourhood,
how much more is it likely to be so, when they are placed
beside the feeble Hindu, in a position of undisputed authority
and power! Many a respectable native is left to stand before a
European, looking meek and contented all the while, though his
heart is gnawing within him. Many a one hears rude sharp
words which outrage his ideas of self-respect, when his cowardly
nature will not allow even a look to betray the mortification
that he feels; and in every day's intercourse much is done, by
these miserable faults in manners, to obliterate the good impressions of honour, justice, and truth, even where these virtues are
maintained. ' You do not rob us,' said a native to Sir Charles
Forbes, ' but you make us stand behind your chair.'
The organization of the native army itself, in the Bengal
Presidency, has been much pointed to, and with reason, as
highly favourable to a chronic state of disaffection, and to the
designs of any who wished to promote actual mutiny. Recruited,
as we have already stated, chiefly in the most renowned seats
of Brahminism, and, to a very great extent, from territories
that, until the other day, were under the Mohammedan dominion of Oude, they have had everything, in the local traditions and caste ties of the men, that was unfriendly to the
English power. It is computed that a regiment of a thousand strong, on the average, contained about two hundred
Mohammedans and eight hundred Hindus; that, of the latter,
six hundred were High-caste, Brahmins or Rajpoots, and about
two hundred Low-caste; no Out-castes or native Christians being
in the army. Four hundred hereditary priests to a regiment!
say, two hundred more Rajpoots ! every one of them considering himself, as the name signifies, the son of a King; and two
hundred Mohammedans!
What should we think of the British
statesman who would attempt to govern Ireland by regiments of
Maynooth Priests ? And yet this appears to be the nearest
illustration that we have at hand, of the odd art of government
we have been attempting in Bengal. No laudation of Lord
Dalhousie-and we gladly give him credit for great qualities
and great services--can ever redeem him, in the eyes of impar-

35
tial men, from the fault of having refused to see the true working of this system; and the still greater fault of disgusting and
driving from India the man who did see it, and who would
have saved the Hindus and the English from what has now
occurred. Sir Charles J. Napier's period of command formed a
crisis of Indian history, and, had he been allowed to carry out
his views, a new era would have been inaugurated. His military
reforms were necessary to accompany Lord Dalhousie's great
political measures. The Governor-General opposed them; and,
though he is in weakness and retirement now, the truth must be
told, that to that opposition we owe the evils which have lately
arisen. Genius and Talent were, as they so often are in affairs
of Government, opposed: Genius with its insight and foresight,
reading thoughts and tendencies, till it read the future; Talent
priding itself in the idea of being practical, because it was carrying out now the views emitted by Genius fifty years ago; and,
as to the future, assuming that to-morrow is yesterday. Lord
Dalhousie was ably acting out the policy of the Marquis
of Wellesley; but he had no original genius-light. The other
read for himself; and ' practical men' some years hence, because
they are acting out Sir Charles's views, will be wonderfully wiser
in their own eyes than the next man of genius who shall arise,
and who will see when it is time to modify.
Taking all these causes put together, they tended to prepare
the Sepoys for any conspirators who might have the art to present them with an object, or use any cause of irritation given
them by oversight. It would appear that both of these had
occurred. The capture of Oude turned a wily and able minister
from preying on his own country, to plotting for the.
overthrow of the power that had cast him and his master
down. The King of Delhi was no inattentive listener to proposals emanating from this quarter. Agents were disseminated
among the Sepoys; they were often sympathized with, often
unsuccessful, but never betrayed. Doubtless they used every
argument to persuade the Hindus that the English meant to
treat them, as they would treat one another, or as Mussulmans
had often treated them,-to contaminate their caste by some violence or stratagem; a crime of which Sepoys might well believe
us capable, because they knew so little of what we were. Yet it
is doubtful whether all this would have ever succeeded in raising a
general mutiny,had not that event occurred which, we have already
said, was an act of such sheer madness, that it can only be set
down to judicial blindness permitted by the great Ruler of all.
c2

36
Every one knows that to Hindus and Mohammedans alike
the idea of tasting the flesh of a swine, in any form, is
horribly disgusting; and that no English regiment would
resent an order to diet them on snails or carrion, so much
as would these an attempt to make them eat pig. Again, of
all living things, the most sacred to the Hindu is the cow;
she is one of the divinities most generally worshipped. Among
the crimes on their catalogue, scarcely one ranks so high as
'cow murder.' In popular parlance, it is as great a crime to
kill one woman as seven children, and to kill one cow as twenty
women. Everything that comes from the cow is so sacred, that
one of the most meritorious acts of religion, one of the most
effectual towards attaining sanctification, is taking a mixture
composed of what are called 'the five products of the cow,'-the
uncleanest of them not being rejected. Even the tamest people
of a country village would be fired with rage at any attempt to
make them taste the flesh of a cow. It may then be imagined
what was the horror of a certain Brahmin Sepoy, when a
Lascar, a man of low caste, asked him to give him a drink of
water out of his pot. The Sepoy refused, on caste ground; the
touch of the Lascar would have polluted his pot for ever. The
Lascar jeered, and told him that he was every day touching
cartridges besmeared with cows' fat. The horror-struck Brahmin rushed to his comrades; and those who know the Hindu
will estimate the startling effect of this intelligence, as it passed
from man to man. Had the agents of the Oude conspirators
produced a thousand affidavits, that the Government had bad
designs, they would have weighed little with the Sepoys
in comparison with this astounding discovery. The blame
of issuing these cartridges is laid on Colonel Birch, the
Military Secretary for India. To have been the author of
such an enormous error, is a calamity that cannot well be
measured, and one which all must pity; but the man through
whose hands such a blow has been dealt to an honourable
Government and a prosperous empire, must be swept from
public life, and may be well content if his name be never heard
nor his form seen in public again.
The first act of insubordination shows that mysterious meanings were now instantly attached to our scientific preparations
for the good of the country. As the Sepoys no longer doubted
the designs of Government against them, the electric wires
became to them an evil instrument of their ruin; and, consequently, within a week from the time when the cartridge

37
abomination was brought to their knowledge, the first stroke
was struck on the 24th of January, by burning down the Telegraph Office at Barrackpore, sixteen miles from Calcutta. That
station was at this time occupied only by native troops, of whom
there were four regiments; and it is almost incredible, that at
the moment there was only one regiment of Europeans for a
distance of four hundred miles,-half of it in the fort at
Calcutta, and half seven miles off, at Dumdum. Night after
night acts of incendiarism occurred; at the same time, agents
of disaffection were making the most of the opportunity which the
Government had given them, and it was asleep. A whole month
was allowed to pass before any explanation was given ; and by
that time the Sepoys were fully satisfied that the design of contamination had been abandoned only because it was discovered.
The native post is said to have been filled with soldiers' letters,
conveying from the Sepoys to their comrades, all over the country, the terrible tidings of the Government conspiracy against
them; and at last, by the middle of February, General Hearsey
found it necessary to muster the troops at Barrackpore, and
harangue them. On the 24th of that month, a small guard
from a regiment quartered there reached Berhampore, a hundred
and twenty miles from Calcutta, and doubtless excited, with
their tales of the cows'-fat conspiracy, the men of the 19th
regiment. The next day the latter regiment was paraded, and
blank cartridges served out to them. The men, excited by the
tales they had heard from the capital, thought these were the
contaminated cartridges, although they were perfectly innocent,
and refused them, until threatened with courts-martial, when
they took them in gloomy silence; and in the night they rose
as one man, shouting defiance.
Colonel Mitchell marched
against them with the remaining forces, and called upon them
to give up their arms; but they would not even return to their
lines, until the artillery and cavalry which had been marched
against them were moved away. The Colonel yielded; and
thus in the first conflict the victory was with the mutineers.
Some years before Lord Dalhousie had first requested a regiment
to go to Burmah, and, when it refused, quietly submitted to the
affront ! In mentioning the word ' lines,' it may be as well to
explain that it means ten rows of huts, each row accommodating
a company, and the whole a regiment.
At this point we may pause to say, that from the past history
of Indian mutinies, nothing is easier than to deduce the conclusion, that Sepoys never break into resistance but when their

38
superiors cross them on one of the following grounds:
1. Pay. 2. Changes of costume. 3. Caste customs. 4. Going
abroad.
With the certainty of a law you may always trace
mutiny to one of these causes. Even one exception, to 'establish the rule,' or to give colour to the outcry about Missionaries,
cannot be found.
It was not until about the 4th of March that the news of this
outbreak reached Calcutta; and, on the morning of the 6th, a
steamer started for Rangoon. In the meantime, the regiments
in the neighbourhood of the metropolis at Barrackpore showed
increasing symptoms of disaffection; and reports of ill-feeling
manifested far away at Meerut and Lucknow also came to hand.
After fourteen days' absence, the steamer that had been dispatched to Rangoon returned with Her Majesty's 84th Regi.ment, which was at once placed at Chinsurah, eight miles from
Barrackpore; and the 19th Regiment, which had mutinied, was
ordered to march to that station. In the meantime, the 34th,
from which the men who excited them had come, committed
the first act of violence against any Englishman. The Adjutant
of the regiment, Lieutenant Baugh, heard that a Sepoy was
traversing the lines, calling upon his comrades to rise. He
rode immediately to the parade-ground. Mungul Pandy,for this was the Sepoy's name,-hiding himself behind a cannon which was near, took deliberate aim, and fired at the
officer. The horse was wounded, and came to the ground with
his rider. The officer, snatching a pistol from his holster, fired
in return, but missed his man; and before he could draw his
sword, the Sepoy brought him to the ground with a blow. A
guard of the regiment was close by, but they did not interfere.
The European Sergeant-Major called out to them, but their
native Lieutenant forbade them to stir, and Mungul Pandy
wounded a second Englishman, the Sergeant-Major, and then
the guard struck the two wounded men with the butts of their
muskets.
One Mohammedan was faithful, and seized Mungul Pandy just as he had re-loaded his piece. LieutenantColonel Wheeler acted feebly and inefficiently; but General
Hearsey was presently on the spot, with some other officers,
and Mungul Pandy fired at and wounded himself. General
Hearsey promoted the faithful Sepoy to the rank of Sergeant on
the spot; and it is said, in India, that Colonel Birch, the same
man to whom is attributed the order for the greased cartridges,
had the hardy imbecility to give a 'severe wigging' to the
General for this departure from the sacred punctilios of routine

39
promotion. The native guard and their officer were left at
large, while the regiment which had previously mutinied at
Berhampore were marched on this station to be disarmed.
It is said that, on the last night of this march, a deputation, of Mungul Pandy's comrades, joined them, and proposed that they should that very night kill all their
officers, march on to Barrackpore, where the two regiments
were prepared to join them, then burn the bungalows, surprise and mriassacre the European force, then march on Calcutta, and sack it. But the 19th, having learned that they
were about to be disbanded, were already in a penitent mood,
and had sent a petition to the Governor-General, offering to
proceed at once to China, or any other place, by land or sea, if
they were only pardoned: thus they rejected the counsel of their
bloody brethren of the 34th. They were marched into Barrackpore, and there disbanded; but the 34th, who had gone much
further than they, were left untouched.
The Jemadar (native Lieutenant) of that corps, who had forbidden his men to rescue the wounded Adjutant, was left three
days at large, and four weeks passed before he was brought to
punishment. The men of his guard, who beat the wounded
officer, were at liberty; their comrades, who refused to give
them up, were not disturbed; and that for five weeks. Thus
Lord Canning told every Sepoy in India, in what is the most
emphatic language to say anything in, acts, that it was a matter
for long consideration whether native officers who helped in the
murder of a European one should be hanged, and that it was
worth while to house, clothe, feed, and pay Sepoys for beating
wounded Englishmen.
The policy of conspirators is tremulous, and such steps looked
not like English honesty, but native cunning. Every Sepoy
would read fresh evidence of evil design in every token of fear.
An oversight had irritated disaffection into suspicion; temporizing turned suspicion to certainty; and resistance broke out.
From Lucknow, the capital of Oude, came the news that a
doctor, who tasted a bottle of physic before giving it to a sick
Sepoy, was set down as a conspirator against caste, and his
house burned. At Umballah, much farther away, the Commander-in-Chief was led, by the sullenness of the men, to
address and attempt to reassure them. At Sealkote, in the
heart of the Punjab, letters were found from the precious 34th
at Barrackpore, urging their comrades at the former place to
revolt. A Jemadar of the 70th regiment was found going

40
through the lines, exciting the men to mutiny; and when a
court-martial of his native brother officers sentenced him to
the gentle pain of dismissal, the authorities complacently ratified the decision. In the midst of all this, orders were given
that the British regiment which had been broight up from
Burmah to overawe the 19th while being disarmed, should be
sent away again.
This crowning folly was hindered by the rush of events. On
May 3rd, a Sepoy at Lucknow received a letter from the 7th
Oude Cavalry, which had belonged to the ex-King, and was lying
seven miles off, to this effect: 'We are ready to obey the
directions of our brothers of the 48th in the matter of cartridges, and to resist either actively or passively.' The Brahminfor, be it said, he was a Brahmin-showed this to a Havildar
(Serjeant), and he to a Subahdar (Captain); and the three
carried it to Sir Henry Lawrence, whose great character thus
elicited one of the very, very few gleams of light which have
broken on the darkness of the plot. That same day he learned
that four men of the regiment whence this letter came, had entered the room of their Adjutant, armed to the teeth, and told
him that they did not dislike him, but he was a Feringhee
(European), and must die. Lieutenant Mecham looked at
them, and said, 'I am unarmed, and you may kill me if you
like; but that will do you no good, for you will not succeed in
this mutiny, and another Adjutant will be appointed.' The
calm on his countenance and in his voice quelled the rage of the
murderers, and they retired, leaving him unharmed.
When night had just fallen on the lines of these mutineers,
they were thunderstruck at being summoned to meet Sir Henry
Lawrence, who was backed by eight guns manned by Europeans,
with one English and four native regiments. They were ordered
to form close in front of him, and to lay down their arms. As
they silently obeyed, the port. fires of the artillery suddenly
flashed in the dark. 'Don't fire! don't fire!' screamed the
mutineers, and rushed frantically away. That night all their
ringleaders were secured by native soldiers.
This news reached Calcutta on the 4th; and, as if the electricity of the telegraph had galvanized the Government, the order
to send off the English regiment to Burmah was recalled; and,
two days after, the 34th were ordered out for punishment, after
more weeks of respite than their accomplices at Lucknow had
hours. An order of the Governor-General was read, detailing
their great offences, and announcing their penalty, simple dis-

41
missal. This was to be read to every regiment in India. When
it reached Oude, Sir Henry Lawrence had the courage to set it
aside.
Lord Canning had wisely attempted to imitate his
energy; he wisely resolved not to imitate Lord Canning's feebleness. Nevertheless, it was made known to every Sepoy that,
when the Governor-General did his worst, it was but dismissal; and it is confidently affirmed that, at the same time,
the Sepoys had offers of better pay from the Kings of Delhi and
Oude.
The clouds had long been growing black, and now the
thunderbolt was coming. On the same day that the 34th received their tardy dismissal, a parade was ordered at Meerut, on
purpose to test the troops by serving out unexceptionable cartridges. Out of the ranks of the 3rd Cavalry, eighty-five men
boldly advanced, and refused to take them. They were tried by
a native court-martial, and eighty were sentenced to ten years'
imprisonment, with hard labour; the remaining five to six
years. Three days after their mutinous act, in the presence of
guns, and English rifles, and English horse, with their own and
two other native regiments, they were stripped of the British
uniform, and laden with fetters; imploring General Hewitt for
mercy during the process, and at the close reproaching their
comrades for permitting it.
They were not put under a
European guard, but lodged in the common jail, guarded only
by natives.
The next day was a Sunday,-Sunday, May 10th, 1857,henceforth in the calendar of many a family a blood-colour day.
When we think how peacefully we sat in our homes or our
churches that day, and that thousands in India sat in theirs just
as peacefully, we feel how short is human sight!
' One who
has served under Sir Charles Napier' thus tells the tale of that
Sunday :' The Havildars made the morning report to their officers; the men
of the European regiment attended morning service as usual, and there
was no sign of the coming storm. The day passed away as Sundays
generally pass in India, and not even the Serjeants, who live in the
native lines, had noticed anything to call for report, or even for
remark. Evening church-time was approaching : the 60th Rifles
were turning out with their side-arms to proceed thither; officers, too,
were dressing either for church or for an evening ride. Sepoys!
restrain your impatience for half an hour longer, and Meerut is your
own. Providentially they cannot restrain it. Suddenly the alarm of
fire is given; then there is loud shouting, as if the Sepoys were turning out to quench the flames. But, then, that volley of musketry,
followed by another and another ! those discordant yells ! that clatter-

42
ing of cavalry ! the bugle sound of the alarm! It is not fire only
that has caused this direful outcry; it is mutiny! insurrection!
THE BENGAL

ARMY

HAS

REVOLTED

!

'It was nearing five o'clock on that memorable afternoon when, at
a given signal, the 3rd Light Cavalry and the 20th Native Infantry
rushed out of their lines, armed and furious. A detachment of the
former regiment at once galloped in the direction of the jail. On
reaching it, its gates were opened to them without resistance, and
they at once liberated all its inmates, including their imprisoned comrades: a native smith was at hand to strike off their irons. These
men, infuriated by their disgrace, ran with all possible speed to their
lines, armed themselves, and mounted; they then rushed to the scene
of action, yelling fearfully, and denouncing death to every European.
Meanwhile the remaining portion of the 3rd Cavalry and the 20th
Native Infantry had proceeded to the lines of the 11th with all possible
speed. Thither also the officers of that regiment, alarmed by the
shouting and noise, had gone before them. They found Colonel Finnis
haranguing his men, and endeavouring to keep them firm to their
colours. The men were wavering when the 20th arrived. The men
of this regiment, whose hands were already red with the blood of
several of their own officers, seeing this hesitation and its cause, at
once fired at Colonel Finnis. The first shot took effect on his horse only,
but almost immediately afterwards he was riddled with balls. All
discipline, all better feelings, now vanished. It is true that the
Sepoys of the 11th permitted their officers to escape with their lives;
but having done this, the greater portion of them followed the example
of the 20th. And now ensued a scene of disorder, rapine, and murder,
which pen cannot describe. Every house and building near the lines,
except the hospital, had been fired; and the smoking and blazing
barracks and houses, the yells of the mutineers, and the shouts and
shrieks of the multitude gathered there, numbers of whom fell from
the shots of the mutineers, made on that dark night a scene than
which one cannot be imagined more horrible.
Officers galloping
about, carrying orders to the European troops, were fired at, not only
by the mutineers, but by the native guards placed over the public buildings for security. Ladies driving in their carriages, gentlemen in their
buggies, who had left their houses unsuspicious of evil, were assaulted,
and, if not murdered, treated with a brutality to which death would
have been a relief. Not only the Sepoys, but the released jail-birds,
fifteen hundred in number, the population also, that "vile rabble"
which is always available for plunder or murder, had joined the
movement, and spread terror and desolation all around them. Nor were
houses or public offices safe places of refuge from these assaults.
Most of the houses in Meerut-all of those in the military lines-are
thatched with straw, and easily inflammable: the plan of the insur.
gents was to set fire to the roof, and to murder the frighted residents
as they quitted the burning dwelling. Many met their deaths in this
way; more, providentially, escaped; yet not one of those in the latter
category owed their safety to the mercy of their assailants. In some
instances outrages were perpetrated which the pen refuses to record.
These men, whom we had pampered for a century, who had always
professed the utmost devotion to us, seemed suddenly converted into
demons.
Nor was this a solitary example; other stations were

43
destined to witness atrocities fouler, more brutal, and more treacherous
than even those of Meerut.'
Had the man who smothered the flame at Lucknow been at
Meerut, with a regiment of English rifles, one of English horse,
and a troop of English artillery, not a single company of the
mutineers would have escaped. They were only three regiments. Yet they all got away, or nearly all. The British force
was, after a long delay, brought out against them, but soon led
back 'to guard the station,' while Delhi, India, England, were
left at the mercy of the mutineers. The General who served his
nation this turn was 'superseded for supineness' after some
months had passed.
The tiger had now tasted blood, and all the ferocity of his
nature was awakened. The next morning, the English at Delhi
received a hasty intimation to repair to a strong place outside
the walls, called the Flagstaff Tower.
(After all that has
passed, in alluding to those British-built towers and bastions of
Delhi, we have a painful recollection that they were executed by
a valued friend, who does not live to lament the unforeseen use
to which his engineering science has been turned.) To the
Flagstaff Tower several hastened, others never received the
message, others it reached too late. The Meerut murderers were
at hand. To face them, Brigadier Graves had three regiments
of infantry and a battery of artillery, all native!
Not a company of English troops ! 'Plenty of mischief,' wrote Sir Charles
Napier, years before, to an officer of artillery,* ' will be hatched
within those walls, and no European forces!'-' Meanwhile,'
says the writer whom we have quoted just above,'Meanwhile the regiments were ordered out, the guns loaded, and
every possible preparation made.
The Brigadier harangued the
troops in a manly style; told them that now was the opportunity
to show their fidelity to the Company to whom they had sworn
fidelity, and by whom they had never been deceived.
His brief,
pithy address was received with cheers.
The 54th, especially,
seemed eager to exterminate the mutineers, and loudly demanded to
be led against them.
The Brigadier, responding to their seeming
enthusiasm, put himself at their head, and led them out of the
Cashmere Gate to meet the rebels, whose near approach had been
announced. As they marched out in gallant order, to all appearance proud and confident, a tumultuous array appeared advancing
from the Hindun. In front, and in full uniform, with medals on
their breasts gained in fighting for British supremacy, confidence
in their manner, and fury in their gestures, galloped on about two
hundred and fifty troopers of the 3rd Cavalry: behind them, at no
* Private letter, published in the Times.

44
great distance, and almost running in their efforts to reach the
golden minarets of Delhi, appeared a vast mass of Infantry, their
red coats soiled with dust, and their bayonets glittering in the
sun. No hesitation was visible in all that advancing mass; they
came on, as if confident of the result. Now the Cavalry approach
nearer and nearer ! At this headlong pace they will soon be on the
bayonets of the 54th. These latter are ordered to fire; the fate of
India hangs on their reply. They do fire, but, alas ! into the air; not
one saddle is emptied by that vain discharge. And now the Cavalry
are amongst them; they fraternize with them; they leave the officers
to their fate; and these are remorselessly cut down wherever they
can be found !'
Some fled to the palace of the King of Delhi for refuge. It
is said that when the Sepoys cried, 'What shall we do with
them?' the clement reply from the throne was, 'What you
like; I give them to you.' And with our brothers, with our
sisters, with our little girls, with our merry boys, those tigers
and satyrs did 'what they liked.' That day the honour of
England's daughters was outraged in the streets.
There was a young Lieutenant of artillery who thought of the
most important thing in Delhi, the Arsenal, which the Commandant seems to have entirely forgotten, though, with that
exception, his conduct was excellent; but, had he duly ordered
the firing of the magazine in case of need, the mutineers would
have been comparatively powerless. The young soldier laid a
train; went into a subterranean passage; waited until he heard
the raging of men within the building, until he heard them
wrestling outside for entrance. ' It is full,' he said. The ratch
is applied, the ground quakes, from fifteen hundred to three
thousand poor wretches are blown into the air; and yet the
hand that dealt the blow, though scorched and bruised, is not
dead. Some of his noble comrades reached Meerut; and have
heard, no doubt, many a man's and many a woman's warm word,
'Well done;' but he has gone to the grave to which he devoted
himself. Of all the names which the mention of Delhi will
hereafter recall to the memories of Englishmen, none will ring
upon the ear with a tone so solemn and so grand as that of
Willoughby!
What he destroyed was the small-arms magazine; enough of
stores remained to supply the rebels with the means of longcontinued defence, which might all have been destroyed. From
the Flagstaff Tower a puff of smoke was seen, then a 'huge
coronet of red dust,' then came the noise of an explosion. The
Sepoys in the Tower turned the two guns which were there
upon the Europeans; Brigadier Graves told them to escape, and

45
was himself the last man to leave. And that escape!
What
tales have been told, and what tales remain to tell!
Through General Hewitt's ' supineness,' the disaffected Sepoys
throughout the country had now obtained the one thing necessary to give them courage,-success. An English station well
manned by Europeans had been burned; the perpetrators of the
deed had marched off unhurt ; and.the former capital of India had
become their easy prize. The man who issued the greased cartridges gave conspirators the means of turning Sepoys into mutineers; General Hewitt gave mutinous Sepoys courage to become
rebels.
The King of Delhi, who owed us nothing but obligations;
whose ancestors had been reduced to a mere pageant before we
appeared on the field, tossed about from Mahratta to Rohilla,
iow with eyes put out, now with a little army; whose father,
instead of this, had lived in peace, plenty, and respect, under
our protection ; who was himself rich, and at ease, by our
bounty; he at once put himself at the head of the movement,
called the regiments by the names of his sons, appointed Lall
Khan, of the 3rd Cavalry, the Meerut regiment, his Generalin-Chief, and issued proclamations, promising double pay to
Sepoys, and plenty of blessings to the people.
' Success,' that magic word for the timid, sped through every
Sepoy station ;-success, in the face of an equal, or nearly equal,
force of Europeans ;-success, so well used as to secure boundless stores, a fortress, a metropolis, and an Emperor.
No
wonder that the Sepoy, who had so long hesitated between
fear, hatred, and self-interest, should now think that the scale
was turned as to the latter, and rush at once to vengeance and
greatness by rebellion. The English had tried to rob him of his
caste, dearer than life; and now their hour was come. The
Bengal army revolted, murdering, violating, and burning wherever they could. All Oude soon raged around the calm, strong
presence of Sir Henry Lawrence, who with five hundred men
stood against a kingdom, until a shot brought him to the grave,
-one of the best and greatest men whom England ever sent to
India. Blood is on the head of those who placed him in that
newly-annexed kingdom with but one European regiment, and
of those who delayed the formation of railways by which he
might have received support in time. In the Punjab, the vigour
of his brother, Sir John, backed by such men as Chamberlain
and Edwardes, sufficed to extinguished the flames of rebellion in
detail as they broke out; so that the mutinous army received no

46
important accession thence, and the loyal one did. The admirable management of the Punjab supplied us with a base of
operations in the Plain of the Indus, west of the insurgents, in
addition to that furnished by Bengal, on their east.
Although it is no exaggeration to say that the Bengal army
revolted, the prevalent ideas, and even the representations in the
Press and in Parliament, of the extent of the rebellion are much
exaggerated. From a tone of confidence approaching to levity,
some of our journals passed at once to the position that we had
to re-commence the conquest of India. The confidence was
excusable, for nearly all who knew India shared it; and it will
prove well founded in the long run, resting, as it did, on the full
persuasion that no native power existed capable of destroying
the British empire in India. But we have never yet come near
the position of having to re-conquer India. First of all, out of
two hundred reigning Rajahs, not one of any importance has openly
set himself against us; for the King of Delhi had not one soldier,
and Nana Sahib was a private person. Had the reigning Rajahs
led out their four hundred thousand men to join the Sepoys,
even then it had not been all India. But several of them
promptly and energetically took our side. Again, the Madras
and Bombay armies, one hundred thousand strong, remained
our friends; and all the territory south of the central
mountains, the whole of the great Table Land, of the Mountain
Foot, were undisturbed. Scinde, Guzerat, Bengal, Orissa, never
needed re-conquest. Rajpootan with its seventeen millions was
on the whole steady. The Punjab was ruffled, but was immediately pacified by its own garrisons.
The rebellion never established itself west of Delhi, never
(till the' eleventh hour') broke out east of Benares; the
distance betweeni these being little over four hundred miles.
At Benares, however, it never had a day's ascendancy. In fact,
any one may define to himself, very easily and completely, the
seat of real rebellion, the country needing to be re-conquered, if
he will trace the Ganges up to its junction with the Jumna,
and, beginning at Allahabad, say, ' There is the hostile frontier;'
then let him ascend the line of both these great rivers, with
Oude and Rohilcund skirting one, and Agra and Delhi lying on
the other, and he will have before him the scene on which our
soldiers have to triumph. Serious outbreaks have occurred
south of this; but the mutinous troops have marched northward, from Neemuch and other stations, to Delhi, leaving the
field open for re-occupation without the necessity of re-conquest.

47
Most of it has been already reclaimed, and forces from the
south are steadily approaching Delhi.
Had all India to be re-conquered, we should have against
us, first, our own Sepoys, say 250,000; secondly, the armies
of the Rajahs, 400,000; thirdly, the people, either in arms
or passively hostile; fourthly, all the strong places occupied
by the enemy. Instead of this, we have lost about 80,000
Sepoys, of whom perhaps 60,000 are in arms against us ;
with what amount of abetting rabble we do not at present
know.
They hold only one strong place, Delhi; and all the
other great fortresses of India are in our hands.
Neither
the people nor the Princes have joined the mutineers, so
that the work to be done, though serious, difficult, and costly,
is no more a re-conquest of India than the suppression of a
French revolt, which had occurred at Paris, would be a conquest of Europe. They who speak of re-conquering India have
very imperfect ideas of what such words mean. What lies
before us is much less than that, and yet it is far from being a
trifle.
The movement towards repressing the rebellion began from
three sides,-Calcutta on the east, the Punjab and the Hills on
the north-west, and the Bombay Presidency on the south. The
Commander-in-Chief was hunting in the hills, though the army
had long been in a state of the most alarming ferment. He
moved towards Delhi, and, while pausing at Kurnaul for siege
guns, was carried off by cholera. General Anson possessed all
the qualities of a perfect gentleman, accomplishments unquestionably of great value in any sphere, and furnishing sufficient
qualifications for an appointment about the Court ; but every
one knew that he had never commanded an army, every one
believed he had never commanded a regiment, and many military men asserted that he had never commanded a company.
It is a great crime to appoint any man to high command whose
professional reputation does not insure the confidence of those
below him. Every active Captain or Adjutant in India believed
that he knew more of the art of war, practically, than his
Commander-in..Chief. How far this feeling-for nothing is so
contagious as a feeling of this kind-passed to the Sepoys, we
cannot tell.
The fallen Chief was succeeded by one who had seen service,
General Barnard. He reached Delhi on the 8th of June, just
four weeks after it had been seized, swept the rebels before him,
took twenty-six guns, paused at the walls, and resolved not to

48
risk an assault. He maintained himself outside the walls;
bravely repulsed innumerable sorties, inflicting terrible loss on
the enemy ; and died at his post, of the same plague which had
carried off General Anson. His policy has had one advantage,
-that of making Delhi a trap, to which the mutineers have
been drawn from all points; but, had he carried forward his
victorious men, they would have planted his standard on the
walls, and the hearts of the mutineers would have sunk all over
the country. In battle, or in policy, timidity with Hindus is
folly; they bend before bravery, but spring up at the least sign
of weakness. From the 8th of June up to this day, Delhi has
continued to be the centre of the struggle, receiving new hordes
from stations which had mutinied, sending them out as they
arrived to attack our forces, receiving back the defeated survivors, and again recruiting its numbers and its courage by new
arrivals.
From the side of Calcutta, our movement consisted in sending
reinforcements up towards the seat of war. In this, at least,and, we fear we must say, in this only,-the Government of Lord
Canning showed itself equal to the requirements of the moment.
From Burmah, from Madras, from Ceylon, from Mauritius, and
from the Chinese expedition, it sought and found help. As the
troops arrived, they produced a double effect: first, their appearance in Calcutta quenched the hope of mutiny among the conspirators there; and, secondly, as they moved on to the interior,
they carried the return tide with them. Among the first effects
were the disarming of the troops at Barrackpore, and the
capture of the King of Oude; but, as if everything done in
Calcutta itself was to be defective, the Fakeer, whose revelations
when under sentence of death led to the King's capture, was
allowed to escape from prison; and whether he had told enough
to be of much value, we do not know.
Among the arrivals was a regiment from Madras, and the
first the English public knew of its Colonel was that, when his
men were leaving by the railway, the train was ordered to
start before they had all arrived.
He remonstrated; the
station-master insisted that, the time being up, the train must
go; the Colonel put him under arrest, and, when the last of his
men were in the carriage, set him free.
This was Colonel
Neill, and the regiment was the Madras Fusileers. He might
have been in Benares in twenty-four hours, had the railway
been finished; but at last he did reach that city, and the same
night came the outbreak of rebellion: with more than ten to

49
one against him, he ended it in half an hour or so. Had he
been at Meerut, with two noble regiments and artillery, Delhi
would never have passed into rebel hands. It was on the 4th of
June that this collision at Benares occurred, and that point was
the farthest down the Ganges at which real fighting took place,
before the recent outburst at Dinapore. Here the two advancing
waves, of the rebel and of the re-conquering power, first met,
and the former was rolled back; a tide was setting in against
a stream.
From Benares, Neill and his force soon reached Allahabad.
There the officers of the 6th had been murdered at mess by the
men who in the forenoon assured them of their loyalty; and,
though the authorities retained hold of the place, things were in
fearful confusion, and were managed without energy. Colonel
Neill, though junior to the officer in charge, had happily
authority to take the command. 'Things changed as if by
magic.'
Rebels were punished, order was restored, and the
surrounding district as well as the city overawed. One of the
sufferers was a boy Ensign, from the smiling vale of Evesham,
who, after being wounded, spent five miserable days and nights
in a gully, blistered by the sun and chilled by the dews, until at
last he was dragged dying to the presence of a fellow who had
set up as a small Rajah.
Here he saw a native Christian,
a convert from Mohammedanism, and a Catechist of the
American Mission, enduring menaces to make him deny
Christ. He glanced round in his anguish, as if for help or
courage, and the dying English boy raised his feeble frame, and
said, ' O Padre, whatever you do, do not deny the Lord Jesus!'
Just then a noise was heard outside, the noise of angry men:
it was Colonel Neill's gallant band; the persecutors were soon
punished, the native Christian was released, and the lad whose
voice had strengthened him died among friends.
Let his
memory be cherished in every home of the peaceful, beautiful
vale of his nativity!
At Allahabad a second important step was gained, the rebellion being rolled so much farther back from the metropolis. At
the same time, the base of operations, on the opposite side of
the rebel field, was being strengthened and made available.
The whole of the regular Sepoy regiments in the Punjab, or
nearly the whole, were disarmed; corps were raised from the
people of the country itself, hostile to the Brahmins and Mussulmans; and some forces dispatched to Delhi.
Colonel
Herbert Edwardes,-who gained much celebrity in the great Sikh
D

50
war, was able, with other officers, to arouse emulation to be enlisted, among the people under his government: not only did
Chiefs on whom he called respond, but those whom he passed by
remonstrated. At Sealkote the Sepoys broke fairly out, and,
having murdered several officers, marched for Delhi; but, on
their way,they were beaten into the Ravee by Brigadier Nicholson,
and then, after having found temporary refuge in an island,
were utterly routed; instead of them their victor marched for
Delhi, and the miserable remainder of them were caught by
native authorities, and delivered up. General Van Cortlandt,
who had earlier performed similar feats, took the same road.
Thus, from the west, as from the east, the return tide was
setting in.
At Neemuch and Nusseerabad successful and bloody risings
had taken place; and also at Indore and Mhow, all south
of Delhi.
From these points ten thousand mutineers appeared before Agra, the seat of the Lieutenant-Governor of
the North West Provinces; five hundred British soldiers,
instead of awaiting them in the fort, went out to attack them;
and, though the proceeding was mismanaged, fought them for
three hours, and made such an impression that, instead of being
besieged, they saw the host move away. Holkar, the head of
the second Mahratta nation in point of importance, stood firm
when his troops at Indore rebelled; was reproached by them for
not resembling his ancestor, who had been a foe not unworthy
of the steel of Lake and Wellesley; but replied that the murder
of women and children did not make part of any religion. A
column under Colonel Steuart, advancing from Bombay, has
taken possession of these regions, and thus the return tide has
set in from the south.
We left the force advancing from Calcutta at Allahabad.
There Neill fell ill; but, happily, not fatally. In the meantime,
at the next important post, Cawnpore, on the banks of the Ganges,
and on the frontier of Oude, one of the first soldiers in India
was nobly playing his part. Sir Hugh Wheeler made a temporary
but strong fort out of his barracks, and soon needed it; for his
Sepoys rose, and at their head was placed a Mahratta of note
living in the neighbourhood. What could have induced our
Government to make the most sacred and exciting lands of
Hinduism the residence of conquered Monarchs, we cannot tell;
but, among others, the Peishwa, or great Mahratta Priest-King,
when dethroned, was placed, with a royal pension, in the sacred
land by the Ganges.
Having no son, he adopted Nana Sahib,

51
who very naturally wished for a royal pension, in addition
to all the property of the ex-Peishwa. He obtained the latter,
was denied the former, lived in state, kept troops and artillery,
talked English, visited the officers, and seemed very friendly.
No sooner did the disturbance offer a hope of revenge for the
refusal of the pension, than he took part with the mutineers;
and of his atrocities all the world has heard. In Europe, they
are new and horrible. In India, such things were beginning to
be strange, because of British supremacy; but they formed the
ordinary appendages of native war, and every year had its wars.
To us the horror is, that noble British men and delicate British
women were the victims over whom this wild beast gloated. We
say British, rather than English; for in the streams that have
reddened the Ganges the blood of the three kingdoms has flowed
indiscriminately. But no one who knew the Hindus, or had
even an idea of their history, would expect much better or much
worse than what has occurred. The organ of Tipu Sahib is preserved in the East India House, and may be seen by any visitor
in the instructive museum of that establishment. It is an
instrument expressive of any native hero's feeling towards an
enemy, and one after Nana Sahib's own heart. Its form is that
of a British officer prostrate, with a tiger standing upon him;
its music is the alternate cry of the Briton and growl of the
brute.
Nana Sahib and Sir Hugh Wheeler! One burns to write
two such names in the same line ! Yet the latter was the prey of
the former. With some three hundred men, Wheeler maintained
himself against a host, in a mere barrack, riddled with cannon
shot, and crowded with women and children. At last he fell,
and his hapless followers, trusting to the word of Nana, took
boat for Allahabad. They were fired on from the banks of the
river, and most of them thus destroyed; but many women were
reserved for the gratification of our enemies, until the avenger
drew nigh.
Brigadier Havelock had left Allahabad, at the head of
1,800 Britons. In the terrible heats of July, this brigade in
eight days marched a hundred and twenty-six miles, won four
battles, took twenty-four guns, and recaptured Cawnpore. On
the 12th of July, (a day memorable as the anniversary of the
battle of the Boyne,) they reached Futteypore, found the rebels
in force, were attacked, and the result is best told in General
Havelock's words to his men, which show that he can write as
well as fight :.D
2

52
'MOVEABLE

COLUMN.

' Morning Order, July 13th, 1857.
'Brigadier-General Havelock, C.B., thanks his soldiers for their
arduous exertions of yesterday, which produced, in four hours, the
strange result of a whole army driven from a strong position, eleven
guns captured, and their whole force scattered to the winds, without
the loss of a single British soldier !
' To what is this astonishing effect to be attributed? To the fire
of the British artillery, exceeding in rapidity and precision all that
the Brigadier-General has ever witnessed in his not short career; to
the power of the Enfield Rifle in British hands; to British pluck,that good quality that has survived the revolution of the hour; and
to the blessing of Almighty God on a most righteous cause,-the
cause of justice, humanity, truth, and good government in India.'
Three days afterwards, they defeated the enemy in two
separate engagements, again capturing several guns; but here
Major Renaud, who, in the absence of Colonel Neill, commanded
the Madras Fusileers, received a -wound, from which he has
died. The next day, they encountered the whole body of the
rebels under Nana Sahib in person, in an intrenched position,
which was skilfully turned, and bravely carried in the face of a
determined opposition, which cost us one man in every fifteen of
those engaged, but ended in the complete rout of the enemy and
the surrender of Cawnpore. Nana Sahib, however, in retiring,
had more caution than the Commandant of Delhi; for he took
care to have the magazine blown up. More than a hundred
and twenty of our countrywomen, who had been preserved
up to the day of the battle, were now not to be found;
a well was choked with their bodies; and all that remained of these women above ground was 'long tresses of
hair, dresses covered with blood, here and there a workbox or a
bonnet.'
After a day or two's rest, General Havelock passed on for
Bithoor, the seat of Nana. The wretch had abandoned it, and
our force burned it to the ground; and whether its savage
master is drowned in the Ganges, or still lives, we are at present
left in uncertainty, the report being that, in crossing the stream,
he had drowned himself and his family. Hence General Havelock
proceeded direct towards Lucknow, and on the 29th of July came
upon 10,000 mutineers, strongly posted, with fifteen guns, whom
he routed, capturing all their ordnance; and, after a halt of four
hours, he assaulted a second strong position, carried it, and
captured all its guns. After another victory, he fell back to
place his sick, wounded, and captured guns in safety, received a
small reinforcement, and set forward anew. We leave General

53
Havelock almost within sight of the noble little band who have
held their ground around the grave of Sir Henry Lawrence ; and
the hope that, ere this, they have met above that great man's
ashes has already made many a heart in England say, ' God
bless General Havelock !'
The present position of affairs, then, is, first, symptoms of the
mutiny beginning to appear in the Bombay army, at Kolapore;
secondly, great anxiety in parts of the Madra Presidency lest
the approaching Mohurrum should witness an outbreak; thirdly,
government restored in Central India and confirmed in the Punjab; fourthly, in Bengal, the rebellion driven up the Ganges from
Benares to Allahabad, from Allahabad to Cawnpore, and from
Cawnpore to Oude; our besieging force at Delhi triumphant in
twenty-two engagements, but kept small by constant losses, yet
expecting powerful reinforcements in the columns of Van
Cortlandt, Nicholson, and Havelock, all of which will come
as victors ; and all this before reinforcements have arrived either
from the Cape or from England.
Yet by the folly of the Government in refusing to disarm
three regiments at Dinapore, and keeping an imbecile old man
in command, disturbance has been gratuitously imported to
Behar; and the heroism of the little garrison of Arrah, where a
dozen English and forty-five Sikhs repulsed and held at bay two
thousand or three thousand Sepoys, has been deprived of its
legitimate effect; for a detachment, was driven at night into the
jaws of an ambuscade, when half of them fell.
If we turn for a moment to look at the effects of this
mutiny, one of the first and most obvious will be, a better
knowledge in Europe of Hindu character. It was the fashion
of a certain school to paint that character as; so gentle, that
the atrocities of this rebellion took the public by surprise.
But no one familiar with the best writers upon India,-with
such writers as Orme or Mill,-ever expected that Hindus
in warfare would act otherwise than they have acted. Feebleness and ferociousness easily unite in the same person.
Any one who had read the accounts of Bengal dacoity, or
gang robbery, would know that even the most cringing of
all the Hindu nations habitually indulge in incredible atrocities, when once engaged in conflict. The authentic memoirs
of any native Court, whether Hindu or Mussulman, would be
It is impossible to caltoo horrible for belief in England.
culate the saving of human life which has resulted from the

54
British conquest, if it was only through the stopping of
murders by authority. We know a case of one lajah, now
deposed, of whom his former subjects say that he killed only
five thousand persons while he was on the throne; whereas
his father had killed about ten thousand; and his uncle, a
much greater and abler man than either, who in his day
rendered services to the Government of the Marquis of
Wellesley, had killed at least fifteen thousand. A case was
well known, in which the Queen of the Nairs, in whose country
it was not fashionable for women to cover the chest, on learning that one who had been abroad did so since her return to
her own country, ordered her breasts to be cut off. But the
narratives with which our papers teem have settled for ever
the question in the mind of the British public, whether the
character of the natives is, or is not, that which a religion full
of blood, and lust, and murder, in its most sacred tales of its
gods, is calculated to foster. The Hindus are heathens, with all
the cruelty which heathenism continually nourishes.
Another effect will be, a clearer apprehension on the subject of native institutions, especially that of caste. This has
been hitherto regarded rather as an oriental curiosity than as
By the
a bad institution, a practical curse to mankind.
horrors of this rebellion, many will be taught that caste is the
most unnatural barrier ever interposed between man and man,
the greatest source of estrangement between neighbours of the
same race and language, and the most dangerous obstacle
to intercourse between different nations.
It must henceforth be looked at gravely as one of the worst things existing
under the sun; not to be rudely assailed, because that would
rouse fanaticism in its defence, but to be calmly and strongly
passed by, in every arrangement let alone, all ordinances and
regulations proceeding upon the basis given us by our own constitution, and leaving, in the enjoyment of their rights, those
who prefer the pride of caste to the advantages we offer them:
and these will be very few; for when the Hindus are not forced,
they easily slide into practices irreconcilable with caste, if any
In fact, the scrupulous
advantage is to be gained thereby.
Brahmins of the south of India would not acknowledge the pure
Brahminical caste of a single man of the Bengal Army, in so
many ways have they departed from the strict regimen of their
system to secure secular advantages, although they have
resented with violence, of which we all are aware, the supposed
attempt to pollute them by fraud.

55
Another effect of the rebellion is, to scatter for ever the confident belief which nearly all the English residents in India
entertained, that the Hindus and the Mussulmans could never
combine. On this point no one can reproach his neighbour; for
all were agreed, and all have been equally disappointed. We
put it the other day to a Hindu of rank and note, how it was
that his people could unite with the Mussulmans. His reply
was, 'All the men in India who remember the miseries of the
Mussulman days, have now white beards. The present generation know nothing about it; the pains that we have gone
through are all forgotten, and the people have joined, thinking
they would clear the English out of the way, and have the
country to themselves.' Henceforth our policy can never take,
as the basis of any one proceeding, the assumption that the
Hindu and the Mussulman cannot make common cause against
us. That hitherto all-pervading element in the calculation of
Indian policy must wholly disappear.
Another effect, closely allied with this one, is the proof,
terribly perfect now, that the policy of our Government in
matters of religion has been a total failure. That policy has
been, in its public principles, purely atheistical. As a Government, to have no religion at all, and to support Hinduism for
the Hindus, Mohammedanism for the Mohammedans, and
Christianity for the English, with a view to please all, has
been the way of our Government. Our whole Indian policy
has been tinged with the original character of commerce.
We have traded in everything, from crowns down to cowryshells, and from opium up to conscience.
Which would
cost least, or which would pay most, has always been the
ruling consideration.
Meaner than any conquerors in any
country before, we have been ashamed and afraid to avow and
encourage our own creed. Our authorities did all that in them
lay to keep Hindus and Mussulmans in complete ignorance of
Christianity. They did more: they did all that in them
lay to excite the jealousy of the natives against Christian
efforts to enlighten them. They sowed fear and discontent, by manifesting disfavour to their own religion to obtain
the confidence of the Hindus.
Even with an honest and
straightforward people, such conduct could not obtain respect;
but to those who can never believe in the integrity of any
one, so deeply is their own character imbued with dissimulation, all these evidences of tremor or anxiety could have but
one meaning;-they were adopted to hide a conspiracy.

56
Had the Government been as honest as the Mussulmans
when they were in power, or as Runjeet Singh, or as any
kind of rulers that the Hindus have ever had to do with
before,-that is, had they avowed, and acted on, and encouraged
their own religion,-the whole body of Hindus would by this
time have known what that religion and its principles are, and
been persuaded that to it the idea of obtaining crowds of
nominal adherents, by fraud or force, would be utterly abhorrent.
The Mussulmans, acting upon their principles, and Runjeet
Singh on his, not only encouraged but compelled conversion,
not only discountenanced but persecuted other religions; and
yet there are no traces in the history of India that this course
was the cause of any material weakness to their governments.
We, with other principles and another creed, which would have
led us never to coerce any man's conscience, never to interfere
with any man's rights, ought, by frankly displaying a purer belief
and a more elevating worship, to have held out to all mild invitations to become wiser and holier, with the strong assurance
of acts, not of words, of habitual acts, that their conversion by
other means than that of sincere conviction was not only
undesired by us, but would be dreaded, as the introduction of
vices and superstitions within the pale of our religion. They
who, by their un-English cowardice in all matters of morals;
who, by their steady bartering of the name and form of Christianity for supposed favour with Brahmins and Mooliahs; who,
by abetting heathen ceremonies and administering persecuting
heathen laws, by shutting up the Sepoy from all Christian
enlightenment, and making the army a store-house of antiChristian prejudices, kept a perpetual magazine of disaffection in
the country, and then applied to it the match of the greased
cartridges, now turn round upon those against whom their
policy has been all along directed, and untruly say, 'The
When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said
mischief is your doing.'
unto him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel? And he answered,
I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father's house, in
that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and thou
hast followed Baalim.
Again, one of the most immediate results will be, the revival
in the native mind of the old dread of British valour. For years we
have ceased to meet native hosts with small bands; our armies,
from the days of Lord Hastings down, have assumed proportions
which complimented every enemy with the show of meeting him
on equal terms; and besides, European and Sepoy qualities have

57
been confounded, the fire of the British regiment inspiring its
neighbour, the soul of the British officer animating his men.
In this state of things, the deeds done by handfuls of English
in the heroic days of Clive and Lawrence, Wellesley and Lake,
had faded from the native memory; and many Sepoy regiments
probably thought themselves quite a match for British ones.
Their first trial at Meerut seemed to justify such an idea. But
since that day, how often has the brow of the rebel darkened
and furrowed with terror, as he heard the tale of what tens and
twenties of Britons have done! Five hundred attacking ten
thousand, and frightening them away, as at Agra; a handful
holding Lucknow against all the forces of the kingdom; another
handful holding Cawnpore; less than three hundred scattering
three thousand at Benares; and the fearful charges of the Rifles
at Delhi, when, ten against a hundred, they dash forward with
the cry, 'Remember the Ladies,-Remember the Babies,' and
everything flies before them : these are feats which heroes can
appreciate, and which cowards will feel to the depths of their
soul. They will tell, too, of that officer at Agra who
killed five-and-twenty men; of poor Skene, who, after cutting
down six or seven, saw his wife seized, and then, drawing the
pistol he had reserved, sent one ball through her heart, and the
other through his own head; and of Miss Wheeler, the daughter
of the gallant Sir Hugh, who shot five with a revolver before
they secured her.
Against such tales they can set those of women ripped,
mutilated, stripped naked, sold by auction, burned alive;
babies hacked and cast into the flames; husbands mutilated,
and compelled to witness the dishonour of their wives; but
none of heroism or prowess. They have never gained an action
in the open field, no matter what their odds; never carried
a position against British arms, no matter how few. Their
success has been only by murder, not once by victory. In the
history of the world there never was a rebellion with such
means and advantages, which effected so little. The old heroic
fame of British prowess rises up anew from the annals of
every encounter, except the first at Meerut; from Lucknow,
from Cawnpore, from the banks of the Ravee, and the field of
Futteypore; and for at least another generation the records of
great deeds will be alive in the memory of the people; the
deeds no longer of the first conquerors, but of the modern
British troops, fighting not against undisciplined hordes, but
trained and picked battalions.
Nothing is so forcible an

58
instrument of command over the Hindus as a sense of personal
prowess; for this goes deeper into their hearts than either
admiration of military science, or a sense of the benefits of
good government. This grand element of our national ascendancy has received, and is now receiving, wonderful illustration.
Nor will the display of our military resources be less signal
than that of individual heroism. Before this outbreak all the
world would have agreed in saying, that the total defection of
the Bengal army must overthrow our power in that Presidency.
Yet this has occurred, and that at a time when the British
force was extremely weak; but after three months have elapsed,
the revolted army has not secured a single Province; Oude, its
home and stronghold, being at the last date swept by a British
army, while its capital had never been without a garrison. And
not in a single place, where a British force was stationed, had
they maintained themselves for a day, not even at Dinapore,
before poor General Lloyd.
At the same time Ceylon
sends men and guns; the Mauritius, men and guns; the
Chinese expedition becomes an army of reserve, and by this
time the Cape of Good Hope has probably sent its men and
guns; and by the time these have ceased to arrive, will begin
o appear noble hosts from England, in steamers and sailing
ships, which will swell our forces to eighty-seven thousand
Britons,-enough to sweep India, were it all in arms, from Cape
Comorin to the Himalayas, and from the Himalayas back again
to Cape Comorin. We exaggerate to ourselves the smallness of
the military resources of England, and we teach others to do
the same; but this Indian rebellion will show us, and show the
natives, what neither of us knew before, that by British bayonets
alone we could conquer again and again the length and breadth
of immense India. Time never saw an army so far distant
from its own country, equal to that which we shall have in
India in three months. Our steamers, well placed on the rivers,
could alone command half of the great cities.
But some ulterior plans will soon present themselves before
us, and demand our judgment, and require our prompt approval
and our firm support. When the trouble is past, what then?
What is to be the future policy of England in India? Is it to
be a temporizing, hollow, half-Hindu policy, attempting to
bolster up an insecure power, by cloking our national faith and
principles? or is it to be a manly English policy, taking our
stand as what we are, rulers; rulers now by double right, and

59
well-tested strength; rulers who have a character which we
proclaim to be higher than that of the people we rule, a religion
more enlightened, laws and institutions more benign, and a
will which we mean shall command ? Nothing is more remarkable than the difference of tone between the letters of practical
men, resident in India, which have appeared, and the words of
politicians, more or less affecting knowledge of Indian questions.
Several of the latter, and among them, to judge by its quibbling
dispatch on the Sonthal question, the Court of Directors, clearly
feel inclined to do a little more duty for the Brahmins, to repent
of the exceedingly small measures of Christian truth and justice
to which we have ever dared to commit ourselves, and to ' behave
ourselves' like good friends of every abomination, however much
opposed to us and our interests, as well as to the Christian faith,
provided only it be well pleasing to the potentates whom we
subserve. On the other hand, men writing from the midst of
the dangers say straightforwardly and strongly that this must
end the reign of double-dealing and temporizing for ever; that
we must let the natives know that we are masters, and that
India is to be ruled not by either Brahmins or Moolahs, but by
Englishmen, with English ends, and English principles. To
this latter section we at once declare our adherence. We must
henceforth feel and assume that we are not in India by permission, but by power. We now hold the country not by the
good will of the Brahmins; but alone by the good hand of God,
and the strength of the English people. If the Government
can rely on Brahmins in time of danger, let it court them; if
it can only rely on the people of England, if it can only invoke
the providence of God, let it follow a Christian policy.
We are far from joining in the wild, savage, yet natural cry for
a bloody retribution, wherewith our journals have horrified all
Europe. Let meet and dignified punishment be administered to
murderers and mutineers; but let no deed give the heathen the
impression that our excitement at their crimes springs not from
horror, but from emulation. As to the mosques, the towers, and
the palaces of Delhi, we should be glad that not a stone remained;
as to the homes of the common people, we would leave them
alone. Let Britain sweep before her everything that resists, but
let the defenceless feel that they have no enemy in Christian
armies. With the native Princes we would be equally tolerant:
their caution in the present case shows that having something
to lose is not without its weight. Those who have been actively
loyal ought to be well rewarded.

60
We are equally far from advising persecution for religion or
caste; let Hindu, Mussulman, and Sikh, as heretofore, feel
that, under Christian rule, his conscience is as free as air. Let
no trifling with temples, processions, or questions of caste, give
the impression that our Government charges itself with the
direction of religious movements. Let every man be sacredly
protected in his liberties; but, on the other hand, let the
Government frankly say, ' We are Christians, and our religion is
to be on the footing of the most favoured; no heritage shall be
alienated, no civil penalty suffered, for becoming a Christian; no
act, such as a re-marriage of a widow, consistent with Christian
morals, shall be punishable; no rite stained by cruelty or
obscenity publicly permitted.' Above all, let them say, 'We force
no one to be educated, we leave all free; but if schools are provided by us, they must teach physical truths which overturn
Brahminism, and therefore it is right that they should teach
moral truths which lay a basis for purer religion.' There is
something terrible in the fact that, at this moment, when
heathenism is showing us what it is, our authorities are actually
expunging from school books such sentences as, ' God is a
Spirit ; ' showing not only their cowardice, but their ignorance;
for that is a sentence which every Brahmin in India would call
beautiful. The day for such trading in creeds and principles is
past: either let us keep out of education entirely, or be honest,
and teach what we believe to those who are willing to be
instructed. We should deprecate active interference, on the
part of the Government, to procure conversions; but why dread
them, show a jealousy, and discourage them in every way short
of actual persecutioni? This has been our craven policy, and
has hindered many from becoming Christians. Had Sepoys,
clerks, and all classes been assured of protection, every regiment
and every public office might now have contained Christians,
who would have felt their interest one with ours, and been ready
to discover any plot.
We plead then for an English, an eminently English policy;
tolerant, liberal, free; but frank and courageous, as becomes our
honour, our valour, and our Christianity. With the noble
institutions which have blessed ourselves, let us confront all
opposition; and the people who would begin new courses of agitation at any sign of double-dealing, will respect, obey, and
soon imitate us, when they see that we are true to ourselves, and
resolved to be so. There must be no receding from one step
taken in advance, no sop to mutiny, no shred of pretence for

61
any future conspirator to argue that murders will make Englishmen give way. Even if, after long years of experiment, it
should prove that measures having some complexion of Christianity had better be repealed, (which time will never show,) it
would be madness to think of retracing any steps now.
With an English policy we must have an English force. We
are not prepared to say that a native army can be altogether
dispensed with, although Colonel Macdonald's arguments to
that effect have been left unanswered, by those who have written
on the other side. But this we say without the shadow of a
doubt, that, with railways completed throughout India, the
country would be far more secure with 80,000 European troops
than it was without railways with all the Sepoy hordes. There
may be Sepoys still ; but let them be few; money will be better
spent in making roads.
Lord Stanley's proposal of quickly
constructed and cheap lines struck us, at the time it was made,
as one of the best ever brought forward; and how much has all
that has since transpired confirmed this view!
It is to be
hoped that his Lordship will return to this practical suggestion
in great earnest when Parliament next meets.
With English troops we also want to see English settlers.
Among the many errors of the East India Company, not one of
the least has been its blind adherence to a policy which discouraged British independent enterprise in the country. This
jealousy began in the days of trading, when the Company's
servants wanted all the field for fortune-making to themselves.
But it has retained a pertinacious and baneful vitality. Rather
than encourage the influx of British capital, energy, and loyalty,
they have fostered the opium trade, the most accursed commerce, after the Slave Trade, which ever disgraced a nominally
Christian Government. We do not expect that the discouragement of settlers will end till Leadenhall Street is ended; for
there the ' covenanted service' is sacred as Brahmins in Benares.
For that service we have high regard; many of its members are
among the best of men, and most valuable of officers; but
the present events have shown of what value planters are in a
time of difficulty; and had the independent British residents
counted by hundreds instead of by tens, many a centre of
information and influence, many a refuge and defence, would
have been provided in the day of danger. Few as they were,
some of the planters did the Government great service.
The petition of the British inhabitants of Calcutta falls with
terrible effect on the men in power there. We reluctantly join

62
any cry against those who, at a great crisis, are charged with
overwhelming responsibility. We give the members of Lord
Canning's Council credit for doing all of which they are capable;
but our own impression of their incompetence and want of
principle is painful. His Lordship is surrounded by very little
men, and has proved incapable of rising above them. We cordially wish to see the Queen assume the reins of power over all
the empire.
Looking at the disasters which have befallen us, we may both
console ourselves that they were not merited from the people,
and at the same time feel that they are not unmerited from the
God of our nation. Judging ourselves by Hindu standards, the
people owed us nothing= but gratitude. We have ruled them
better than they ever were ruled; given them for the first time
repose, security, and freedom; and brought into their country
improvements which no other Asiatic race have yet received.
But judging ourselves by Christian standards, we must not
wonder that chastisements have overtaken us. If our women
have been disgraced, how many of those of India have our
officers and troops dishonoured ! Have we not on that soil permitted wholesale murders of widows and of old men, under
pretext of religion ? and though we interposed, at last, on behalf
of the former, the ghaut murders of the Ganges-that Ganges
which ran red at Cawnpore with English blood-still continue.
Have we not introduced licensed drinking-houses, to debauch
the people, for profit? Have we not fed on the odious opium
revenue ? Have we not trafficked in prostitution and the obscenest idolatry by our temple subsidies? Have we not steadfastly befriended Heathenism and Mohammedism, and yielded
to Christianity the commonest liberties only inch by inch, as
Have we not shut
it was necessitated by public opinion?
out, as far as possible, the name and fear of God from our
schools and Sepoys, and placed our confidence in opposing His
Gospel ?
The Christian people of England must hear a call to awake in
the chastisements which have smitten us so sorely. Men whose
thoughts go no higher than secular interests will naturally
incline to their old courses of petting superstition, of dreading
light and truth. But those who believe in a Ruler who smiles
on goodness, and bids light speed with His blessing, will see in
the new disclosures, now made, of heathen hearts, strong reason
for more exertion to mollify them with the Gospel; and in
the disasters of a Government carefully non-Christian, a loud

63
proclamation, that, to secure God's protection, we must fulfil
His mission, and enlighten the land committed to our care.
We look steadily into the future. The trial long past, the
new order established, and what then? Our comfort is that
the destiny of India will be hastened by this awful providence.
When a great work is to be accomplished for which mere human
measures are hopelessly inadequate, the Almighty is wont to interpose by extraordinary means,-by means which man could
not conceive and dare not execute; from which we first shrink
in terror before we bow to them in gratitude. Perhaps it is so
in the case of this terrible visitation. Mercy not only 'seasons
justice,' but inspires it. Nothing less than a sword to 'go
through the land' will plough up the field for the reception of
humanizing and immortal truths. Nothing but a social earthquake could break up that system of consolidated wrongs which
we call India. The curse of its native rule was the twofold
curse of idolatry and oppression; it has groaned for ages under
the tyranny of' gods many and lords many.' And now that we
are about more thoroughly to supersede the rapacious and cruel
rule of its chiefs, it will behove us to put to shame its foolish
and obscene ' divinities' by the exhibition of a purer worship.
If we take the country and its people for our beloved Queen,
shall we not put both it and them under the protection of the
same true God? It is only as we are faithful henceforth to the
spirit of our own institutions, civil and religious, that we may
profit by this dreadful lesson, and hope to see the slow but
steady light of prosperity advance above the plains and heights
of Hindustan.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY WILLIAM NICHOLS, 82,

LONDON WALL.

On the 1st of January, 1858, will be Published No. XVIII.,
Price 6s., of

THE LONDON QUARTERLY

REVIEW,

A
e

fvural

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it r

dcn

ntrh,

ls, anoii

THE LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW contains careful reviews of
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P.S. The following Papers on India have appeared in the
LONDON

QUARTERLY

In No. I.-"
V.-"

REVIEW :-

INDIA UNDER THE ENGLISH."
THE NEW EDUCATIONAL MEASURE FOR INDIA."
BRITISH GOVERNMENT AND BUDDHISM."

VI.-"THE

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