allayed by a few sagacious words or courageous acts by influential comrades or resolute European officers. Others marched out against the mutineers as sincerely as Ney against Napoleon, but were as powerless to resist the mysterious and morbid sympathy. Others manfully resisted the contagion when their defection would have been safe to themselves and most formidable to us, but succumbed to the increasing excitement when fortune had changed to our side, when there was every thing to discourage a mutiny, when failure was certain, and terrible retribution obviously and immediately at hand. Others, again, when our case seemed desperate, stood faithfully by our side, fought gallantly against their rebellious comrades, destroyed their own chances of successful mutiny, and then, with incomprehensible folly, turned against us just as our victory was complete. They seem to have "lost their heads" (to use a colloquial but expressive phrase) with the continuance of the excitement, as children and highly nervous people do at an orgie, or an execution, or a battle, or a scene of violence and peril of almost any kind. In future, then, we must take into our estimate of the Hindoo character, and our calculation of probable contingencies, this liability to insane panics and unaccountable outbreaks of irrational excitement,-propagated like fire across a prairie. It will seldom arise without cause; but the causes may often be trivial, untraceable, and apparently wholly inadequate to the result. We must govern the Hindoos as a race which, in addition to its normal characteristics, has this very unpleasant one of being subject to accesses of epidemic mania, which may perhaps be guarded against or rendered harmless by judicious arrangements and unsleeping vigilance, but which, when they occur, set reason, habitual feeling, and the strongest and plainest self-interest, altogether at defiance.

The second thing which we have learned is the tiger-like ferocity which lies dormant in the Hindoo character, and which the periods of excitement of which we have just spoken will almost certainly develop into life. The hideous love of cruelty, of inflicting pain for the pleasure of beholding agony, of spending actual intellectual effort in contriving unheard-of tortures, is a passion more than any other incomprehensible and abhorrent to our minds. We have heard of something like it in the middle ages individuals in history have at times appeared affected with similar morbid propensities to evil; superstition, mingled with malignant passion and fostered by absolute power, has brought some Europeans in former days to the very verge of this fiendish degradation. But all such cases have been regarded as monstrous-the nightmare freaks of nature. Above all, we have been accustomed to consider them as altogether belonging to the past,-dreadful and loathsome excrescences of times and stages of humanity long since and for ever passed

away. We have been rudely awakened from this delusion;and perhaps it is one which we ought not so tranquilly to have indulged. The taste for prolonged and gratuitous torture has in many ages and countries been distinctive of Oriental peoples. In India we have many traces of it. Religion there contributes to it. Human sacrifices prevailed there down to a very recent date. The annals of native reigns abound in specimens of elaborate and ingenious inflictions. Torture of many kinds prevails there in certain districts habitually even now. The atrocities of Delhi,

Jhansi, and Cawnpore, though they alternately make our blood boil with fury and run cold with horror, were not foreign to the character of their perpetrators. The people of India we believe to be, not savage, but mild in their normal moods. But the bestial and ferocious element, which in all likelihood entered originally into all human constitutions, has not been with them eradicated by long centuries of civilisation, but only covered over and put to sleep; and excitement brings it forth, as intoxication does that of the Malay. We believe, too, that this passion for shedding blood and inflicting agony is, like the excitement we have spoken of, in a great measure physical and morbid: the first sight or gratification of it arouses a frenzied thirst for more, which is propagated like an epidemic madness. Self-control is, as we all know, the special virtue of culture and training; and the civilisation of the Hindoo, elaborate as it is, is not only essentially vicious, but is only skin-deep. In dealing with him, therefore, it is necessary to bear in mind that he is not altogether a rational being, governed by motives, and amenable to interest and reason, but a creature of impulse, and still half a savage and more than half a child. Now untutored Englishmen can least of all men comprehend and manage characters of this sort.

A third peculiarity of our Asiatic subjects, which especially perplexes and disgusts the average Englishman, is their profound capacity for dissimulation. They have an absolute genius for falsehood. No oaths secure their truth. Not only does their tongue utter the most flagrant and elaborate lie, but they know how to surround it with every colour of probability and con-. firmation; and the imperturbable countenance, the ready smile, the regulated act, all are called in to aid in the deception. The most cautious and practised diplomatist, the most skilful and experienced judge, are often at fault; and nothing but long experience and special training can fit men to deal with such a vice at all.

There is still another anomaly in the Indian national character, to which Englishmen, fresh from the mother country and accustomed only to strong rude sense which they respect, and to prejudices and tastes which they understand even where they do not share them, find particular difficulty in accommodating them

selves: we refer to the singular admixture of subtlety and folly which pervades both the conversation and the conduct of the cultivated Hindoo. In no work on India that we have seen does this peculiarity come out so clearly as in Colonel Sleeman's amusing Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. The accounts of his discussions and consultations with ministers, princes, and pundits, are, in this point of view, exceedingly instructive. Few people display so much ingenuity and skill in argument; but the premises on which they argue indicate an ignorance and a credulity almost approaching to idiocy. The things they believe, and the things they assume, would disgrace the darkest and nakedest savages of Africa; but the dialectic shrewdness with which they will often handle these materials in controversy would challenge the admiration of the most finished intellect of Europe. Then, too, their beliefs, and what we may call their ecclesiastical ordinances, pervade and regulate every hour and every action of their daily life to a degree not paralleled by any other people; so that these consummately nonsensical premises on which they reason so acutely are always and every where in operation. Thus the Englishman who goes out to perform his part in the government of Hindostan finds himself at every step in collision with prejudices which he must despise, and yet is compelled to respect;-which he is obliged to treat with deference and forbearance, because they are the inveterate prejudices of millions, to whom they are real as the air they breathe, and as sacred as the life they cherish; and yet which in his heart he must regard with a sort of abhorrent contempt, as the very incarnation and extreme of ludicrous and sometimes loathsome nonsense. Now here is a discipline which all who know the naturally narrow and intolerant character of the British mind, will admit requires a very special preparation to attain. We are not originally or habitually, to say the least, tender or respective to alien follies and to superstitions and fancies which are not our own; yet in India we are compelled to be so under peril of our empire. A body of competent and respectable Englishmen, such as shine in vestries and town-councils, and prose and vote with no contemptible success in Parliament, would set India in a blaze before they had administered its affairs for six weeks.

Finally, India, both Hindoo and Mahometan, has its own peculiar codes, civil and criminal, by which it has governed for centuries; which are comprehended by its people, and blended and intertwisted with all the concerns of life; which it would be the height of tyranny to supersede by our own unsuitable and complicated forms; and which require long and careful study to understand and to administer. If there were no other reason why India must be governed by a specially selected and elaborately trained body of officials, this alone would suffice.

In no portion of our empire has British policy been remarkable for a uniform and consistent character. Our national peculiarities and our national institutions have both contributed to this negative result. In every thing-in politics more even than in most things-we are empiric, tentative, and unscientific. Our want of science and of system sends us too far into one extreme; our practical good sense shows us our error, and drives us back in the opposite direction. As a nation, too, we are remarkable for a perilous mental defect:-we take up ideas in turn, and not in combination; so that at one epoch we are governed by one set of notions and intent upon one set of objects, and at another we are on a wholly different tack. Neither have we, like some despotic nations, the advantage of being governed by statesmen of commanding minds, who arise from one class and bequeath their science to successors,-by Richelieus, Sullys, and Ximenes. Our statesmen are the growth or the accident of Parliament, as Parliament is the varying product of a growing and oscillating popular opinion. A steady and unswerving policy,—a policy at once clear in its principles, unchanging in its ultimate purposes, and persistent in the means by which those purposes are worked out, has ever been a desideratum to Great Britain, both at home and abroad. Yet a policy of this character is absolutely essential to us in dealing with India. Without it we shall throw away our great advantages; without it that anomalous empire will be perpetually jeopardised; without it we shall lose the respect of that astute and observant people; without it there will occur interregna of vacillation which ambitious native princes may turn to terrible account.

With such a policy-with ordinary skill superadded to our extraordinary energies-with average administrative sagacity, aided by the ample experience we have now acquired, -there is no reason, moral or material, why we should not retain our Indian empire for all time. We believe that we are under a solemn obligation to retain it. No one can doubt that our sway, with all its acknowledged defects and all its unfinished excellences, is a blessing to the Hindostanees. It is not positively good perhaps, but it is the best they ever had. By activity in developing it, and wisdom in adapting it, it is in our power to render it better than the best they ever dreamed of. The future of hundreds of millions-their material welfare, their moral progress-depend upon the continuance of our power, and upon the principles which shall henceforth govern our administration. No native princes ever did or ever can, in comparison with ourselves, either protect them from robbers, abstain from oppression, develop the resources of the soil, exonerate them from the nightmare of a filthy superstition, prepare them for a purer morality, or guide

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them in a better way. On every principle of justice and philanthropy we are bound to stay where we are.

Nor is there any real difficulty in doing so, now that we are warned, now that we are compelled thoroughly to understand our position and deliberately to settle our proceedings. The reasons are well explained by Mr. Cameron:

"I believe that no people ever existed on the face of the earth to whom the imperial rule of a foreign nation has been, as such, so little distasteful as it is to the inhabitants of India. Among the Hindoos, and the aboriginal races who have imbibed Hindoo principles, the system of caste must have prevented the growth of that predilection which elsewhere commonly arises in men's minds in favour of a national government. That singular system was calculated to engender a complete indifference in the subject multitude as to who might be exercising over them the powers of government; provided only that the persons placed in that position confined themselves within those limits which are recognised in the system itself. Every one intrusted the care of public affairs to the hereditary Chetrya, just as he intrusted the care of his beard to the hereditary barber.

Probably when foreign conquest came, the subject castes, brought up in those principles, would not feel that any injury had been done to themselves; though they might have admitted that the ruling caste had been injuriously thrust out, and had consequently just ground of complaint against the foreign conqueror. There is evidence as old as Strabo, and as recent as Colonel Sleeman, to prove that the cultivators of the soil, that is, the great mass of the Hindoo people, are, to say the least, more indifferent than the inhabitants of any other region, not as to the manner in which, but as to the hands by which, the powers of government are exercised over them. According to Strabo, it frequently happened that the hereditary soldiers were drawn up in battlearray, and engaged in actual conflict with the enemy, while the hereditary husbandmen, whom the system confined entirely to their own agricultural function, were securely ploughing and digging in the same place and at the same time. It was no affair of theirs which body of Chetryas might gain the victory, and afterwards exercise the powers of government. Their business was to till the earth, and to pay the government share of the produce to those who might happen to be conquerors.

Colonel Sleeman, whose abilities, and whose opportunities of studying the native character, are well known to every one interested in the welfare of India, has the following passage: It is a singular fact, that the peasantry, and I may say the landed interest of the country generally, have never been the friends of any existing government, have never considered their interests and that of their government the same, and consequently have never felt any desire for its success or its duration.'

The truth evidently is, that the governing caste, though born in the same country as the men engaged in tilling the soil, have always been aliens in relation to them. I do not mean that the governing caste