fore all that is decent, all that is humane, all that is generous and hopeful in Europe and America have gone with us in the strife.

It may be questioned whether any catastrophe less fearful would have roused the English nation from its apathy respecting every thing Indian. Our strange indifference as a people to our Eastern Empire, our ignorance of the history and peculiarities of that magnificent dependency, have long been our reproach, and have excited the amazement of all intelligent foreigners. Indians and Indian subjects have been habitually voted bores. Indian statesmen and Indian generals have been despised. It has always been a matter of difficulty to "make a House" on the occasion of an Indian debate. It is not too much to say, that for threequarters of a century-from the day when the daring and profitable crimes of Warren Hastings and the gorgeous and fiery eloquence of Burke for a brief period concentrated public interest on our Oriental possessions, down to the arrival of the tidings of the massacre of Delhi-the smallest of our distant colonies, and the paltriest of our party squabbles at home, have more vividly riveted the attention and more thoroughly excited the interest of the great body of the nation than all the grand achievements and all the momentous concerns of the most magnificent of our dependencies. The press, the parliament, and the people have been alike uninterested, because alike ignorant. This can never be again. Our lethargy has been rudely but completely shaken off. Every one now is thinking, writing, learning, talking, about India, and about nothing else; and by dint of discussion and study we shall in time come to understand it thoroughly. But probably nothing short of what has actually occurred would have sufficed to effect this transformation. If only a few regiments had mutinied, and a few officers been shot, we should have applied some partial remedy, made some trivial change, and gone to sleep again. Faction would have seized the occasion to throw stones and mud, ignorance would have been ready with its clamour, presumption would have been ready with its nostrums, and statesmanship-or what passes for such-would have been ready with its patches and its salves, its nibbling empiricism, and its lazy and cowardly and perilous postponements. We should have had no searching investigations, and no thorough reforms. But now we have been shocked into seriousness, startled into depth, frightened into something like purity of patriotic sentiment. Faction, though not silent, is almost unheard; ignorance and vanity have assumed for once almost a listening and learning attitude; and the petty and malignant passions that usually run rampant through our politics seem for the moment abashed and overawed. The gravity of the crisis, and the magnitude of the suffering, while they have swept away much of our prejudice and

many of our vicious national propensities like cobwebs, have cleared our vision, and intensified our intelligence, and strung our nerves to a tone of unwonted resolution; and we are in a mood to go to the bottom of the question, and to compel our rulers to a corresponding thoroughness of action.

But this is not the only advantage of the position which the mutiny has forced upon us. The very extent of the catastrophe has made our path clear, and our task comparatively easy. As far as military reorganisation is concerned, our statesmen in India have what so rarely falls to the lot of statesmen-carte blanche, an unencumbered field. The Bengal army is gonepassed away into history, with all its defects, all its obligations, all its claims. It might have been very difficult to reform it; it will be comparatively easy to reconstruct it. The moment the principle on which its reconstruction is to proceed has been determined, the moment we have satisfied ourselves as to those errors in its former constitution which rendered possible its late crimes and dissolution, we are as free to act as on the first day of our imperial existence; there are no ruins to interfere with the new edifice we choose to build, no embarrassing legacies of the past to hamper or control our action. If we are not successful now, if we do not create a new army perfect at all points, adequate to our necessities, and specially adapted to our circumstances, we can plead no want of means or experience or golden opportunity in extenuation of our failure. Never did rulers set to work with more unfettered hands.

Again; this revolt, with its attendant circumstances, has added prodigiously to our knowledge of the conditions of the problem with which we have to deal. Even to those best and longest acquainted with India, it has come like a perfect apocalypse of the native character. It has poured a flood of unexpected light into all the dark and loathsome recesses of that strange inscrutable compound of human elements. The peculiarities and inconsistent attributes it has brought to the surface have astonished those most who had lived most familiarly with the Hindoos and Mahometans of Bengal and Central India. If we had philosophised or legislated before, we should have philosophised and legislated in the dark. Now, surely, we are ripe for approaching the whole of this great question. And what has passed will surely compel us-we shall be very senseless and very guilty if it do not compel us-to study thoroughly and to determine distinctly and deliberately the principles on which our entire government of Hindostan shall henceforth be conducted; so that all our measures shall be consistent with each other, and convergent to one point; and so that for once, and in one quarter of the globe, British policy shall be systematic, uniform, and persistent. We can no longer, without wilful folly, act a little on

one plan and a little on another; hesitate between two opposing theories, and end by borrowing something from both, or trying timidly and inefficiently each of them in turn; allow one governor-general to upset or neutralise the proceedings of a predecessor, perhaps his antipodes in opinion and temperament; in a word, leave one of the grandest empires ever intrusted to a nation at the mercy of that vacillating policy which is the invariable result of half knowledge and half convictions. The most grave and anxious questions are before us; and we can neither evade them, nor nibble at them, nor put them aside till' a more convenient season. We must now decide-and decide after searching inquiry and patient thought; decide upon that thorough comprehension and consideration of the matter which allow of no retraced conclusions or repented steps-whether in future India is to be governed as a colony or as a conquest; whether native agency is to be welcomed or to be excluded; whether we are to rule our Asiatic subjects with strict and generous justice, wisely and beneficently, as their natural and indefeasible superiors, by virtue of our higher civilisation, our purer religion, our sterner energies, our subtler intellect, our more creative faculties, our more commanding and indomitable will; or whether, as some counsel, we are to regard the Hindoos and Mahometans as our equal fellow-citizens, fit to be intrusted with the functions of self-government, ripe (or to be ripened) for British institutions, likely to appreciate the blessings of our rule, and therefore to aid us in perpetuating it; and, in a word, to be gradually prepared, as our own working-classes are preparing, for a full participation in the privileges of representative assemblies, trial by jury, and all the other palladia of British liberty. We have to decide, morcover, what is perhaps the most difficult problem ever submitted to statesmen for practical solution, viz. how to secure to the government of India that immunity from the direct influence of parliamentary caprice and party conflicts without which our noble empire would be jeopardised every hour, and yet to retain to Parliament that substantial control in ultimate resort which we may be sure the English people will never consent to surrender.

In discussing these grave questions-which we shall do as concisely and compendiously as the subject will permit-we purpose to eschew all clouding and embarrassing details, and to deal only with the principles, political and religious, by which our future government of India should, in our judgment, be guided. We shall speak little of the history of the revolt; indeed we shall dwell but little on any portion of the past; and, if we can help it, we shall not preach or moralise at all. We shall not attempt, as some have done, to connect our late calamities with our ancestral sins, to make out the pedigree of God's judgments, to

trace out each hideous torture inflicted by savage animals on guiltless victims to its seminal unrighteousness in bygone days. To our minds there is scarcely more insane and insolent presumption in handling the Divine thunderbolts as pious men are wont to do, than in thus dogmatically pronouncing on their meaning and their cause. That God does visit guilty nations, as guilty individuals, with heavy and appropriate retribution, neither religion nor history will allow us to doubt. But we know also that He "seeth not as man seeth;" and that in judging of the actions of men and states He employs weights and measures far other than those in use among the angry controversialists of our political arena. We know, too, that if there is one feature clearly deducible from His dealings with mankind, whether individually or collectively, it is that His punishments are never arbitrary: they are consequences, legitimate, logical, inevitable results, flowing from crime in natural course,—not unconnected and artificially annexed inflictions; effects ordained by nature, not sentences pronounced by a judge. But no such links can be made out in the present case. No man can accuse us of having brought this revolt and these massacres upon ourselves by cruelty or oppression. All charges of the kind are simply and notoriously false. We may have sinned, but not against the sepoys. They at least had no wrongs to avenge. We may have been foolishly indulgent; we assuredly were never criminally harsh. We may have brought the catastrophe on ourselves by want of judgment; certainly not by want of kindness or of justice. God's dispensations, however grievous, are not always penal. Does the soldier who falls in the breach necessarily deserve to die? Is the martyr who perishes at the stake suffering for his sins? No; both are agencies in God's hands in the cause of victory and progress. They by passion, as others by action, carry forward the great aims of Providence. Away, then, with all cant about God's judgments on our Indian oppressions. Even if we admitted the fact, we should deny its relevancy. In old times, we have no doubt committed many injustices, and been guilty of unwarrantable spoliations; for which Heaven might righteously have chastised us, and for which man might fairly enough have taken vengeance. But those who have turned against us have been precisely those whom we had never injured. And for long years our sincere desire has been to govern justly and beneficently. We have not done all we might; but we have done much, and have been honestly labouring to do more. The police is bad; but it is better than it was under the native princes, and we are amending it by slow degrees. Torture and oppression exist under our rule, it cannot be denied; but it is only because we have not yet been able entirely to eradicate these ingrained native propensities. The evils and abuses that are

still rampant are those we have not yet succeeded in suppressing. Our sins are those of omission and of oversight alone.

We shall be reminded of our policy of annexation. We believe our acts of annexation to have been sometimes hasty, sometimes injudicious, sometimes, in earlier days, iniquitous. But the policy as a whole we conceive to be righteous and inevitable,righteous because, while usually most reluctant, still inevitable. From the day when the Great Mogul conferred upon us the first gift of territory and of government, the whole of our subsequent progress was a settled and irrevocable destiny. We could no more help absorbing the native dynasties and states than the Americans can help eating out the Red Indians. We might have done it more slowly, more tenderly, more righteously; but no reluctance on our part, and no resistance on theirs, could have precluded, nor perhaps very long retarded, the certain and necessary issue. The Company have obstinately, almost fiercely, and for generations almost steadily, set their face against all extension of territory in Hindostan. Governor-general after governor-general has gone out resolved to have no more war, and to abstain from annexation. Statesmen after statesmen have deplored the growing evil, and put forth solemn warnings of resulting danger. But the force of circumstances, the clearest obligations of rulers, have been too strong for any opposition. Prohibiting directors, coy and pacific governors-general, Cassandra statesmen, have all found themselves carried away by the current, and compelled to follow the same river to the same ocean.

A few moments' reflection will explain this uniform result. Many causes contribute to it, and it is brought about in a variety of ways. Energetic settlers in a country rich in resources and full of promise naturally desire a small pied-à-terre whereon to erect factories, and forts to protect those factories against the attacks of hostile and capricious neighbours. They purchase some such small territory; no one can blame them for so doing. They are surrounded by tribes and princes whose normal condition is that of warfare and reciprocal encroachment. The strangers have skill and science which render their assistance invaluable to any party whose cause they may espouse. One of the belligerents offers as the price of their aid some commercial advantages which it is very important for them to attain; the other perhaps has shown them an unfriendly spirit, or done them some actual wrong. They give their assistance, and receive the promised price. In course of time, as they become more and more wealthy and influential, the native chiefs whom they have succoured grow jealous and uneasy, treacherously endeavour to resume what they have granted, or commit some act of atrocious and unpardonable barbarism on the persons or property of the settlers. Of course this must be resisted and punished; of course