First, then, we gather, from the fact that the Bengal army has been more prone to insubordination than those of Bombay or Madras several other important facts. We must not suppose, for instance, that, because the Bengal army is nearly as large as the two others put together-containing seventy-four regiments of sepoys; while Madras has fifty-two, Bombay only twenty-nine-the chances for revolt were much more numerous. On the contrary, the European force in the Bengal Presidency has at all times been much larger in proportion to the native army than in either of the other provinces.

But in Bengal still lies all that remains of that great Mussulman Empire which we overthrew, and the memory of which is far from being obliterated, as we have seen this year, when a king again sat on the throne at Delhi. And if it seem strange that the Hindoos, who writhed under the Mahometan rule, should feel an interest in this old seat of empire, we must remember that they too have memories. There is scarcely a Hindoo of decent education who will not have had his head filled by his teacher or his parents with little didactic sentences, in some of which Hastinapura, the City of Elephants, is named as that where Yudhishthira and his four brothers dwelt, and fought that famous Chevy-chase of India, which is the theme of the 'Mahábhárata,' the great Indian epic.

Again, in Bengal still live in indolence, luxury, petulance, and discontent, those scores of petty rajahs who are for ever giving our Indian Government so much anxiety in so contemptible a manner. We shall speak more of them under the head of 'civil management.'

But the pith of the matter is, that in Bengal the army is recruited more among the Mahometans and the Hindoos of high caste than elsewhere. Now, surely, many people who read the papers must have been surprised when they were informed that our army was formed of 'high-caste Brahmins.' They have always imagined that the Brahmin was the priestly caste, and quite distinct from the warrior. And to a certain extent they are right. We have most of us

picked up out of our books of general information at school, that there are four castes in India-the Brahmins, or priests, the Kshatriyas, or warriors, the Vaishyas, or merchants, and the Shudras, or serfs-and this was perfectly true some fifteen hundred years ago.

But the ancient institution which the Hindoo attributes to Brahma himself was of too restrictive a character to outlive foreign rule and foreign civilisation. Even in its palmiest days, the purity of caste was not strictly maintained. Polygamy began the work of corruption. A man of superior was allowed by law to marry a woman of inferior caste; and though the reverse was forbidden, we have evidence that even in the days of Manu the prohibition was constantly disregarded. Each of these irregular marriages produced a new intermediate caste, and the intermarriages of these multiplied the varieties endlessly. Some of these irregular castes were decidedly impure, others partially so, while others lost the stigma of impurity in the course of time. The result was, that certain families or tribes maintained a certain class of marriage, and ranked in the social scale accordingly. Thus the Brahmin families of Benares and Patna pique themselves on their pure descent. The Rajpoots limited themselves to purely military marriages, and many of their families still claim descent from the heroes of the 'Rámáyana' and 'Mahábhárata.' Under Mahometan rule, these castes collected themselves in various districts, and it is among these districts, where the nearest approach to purity of caste is found, that the Government of India have always thought it best to recruit their armies. Their object in doing so was clearly to provide in their ranks a spirit of martial honour, which would supply that patriotism which could not of course exist in a mercenary army. How great their error was, the late results have proved without contradiction, even if all the former mutinies, or attempts at mutiny, had not sufficed to do so. We cannot but wonder that men of the acuteness of those who have followed Clive and Hastings, should not have seen that the next best army for the position to a European one, would have been one com

posed of tribes and races having an inherent antipathy to the influential part of the population. If the Brahmin, the Rajpoot, the Banyan, and so on, are the ruling elements of native society, and the men who have some patriotism, however shortsighted, at heart, one would naturally have formed the army which was to check and restrain them from the ranks of the despised outcasts and low-caste tribes, with whom they could have no sympathy. The effect of such a choice might indeed have been to excite suspicion and enmity at first between the upper classes and the government, but, on the other hand, we should have raised the lower orders, and given an effective blow to that institution of caste which is so opposed to modern civilisation, to Christianity, and to sympathy between the rulers and their subjects. The effect of the opposite system has been to force the Government of India at all times to yield weakly to those very prejudices of caste which its very conscience - if no more worldly impulse-has forced it afterwards to combat. And this brings us to our second consideration.

We find that in half the cases of mutiny, including the present awful one, the cause assigned and perhaps, too, the real cause-has been a fear of breaking religious ordinances.

Such, indeed, was the often-repeated refusal to cross the sea. The Hindoo of the Aryan stock is essentially a land-lubber. The littoral of India is peopled by various other races, who have adopted more or less of Hindoo religion, manners, and even language, but are not Hindoos. Now, perhaps the greatest feature in the religious practice of the purer races is the necessity of daily bathing, morning and night. We know how much of religious observance in every country bas its origin in the mere preservation of health. It is on this account that we find every city and village of India situated either on the banks of a river or stream, or in the immediate neighbourhood of a lake.

To carry out this practice conveniently, would be very difficult on board a transport, and hence the principal cause of continual refusal to embark for foreign service.

Again, for the man who worships

Krishna the cow-herd; who reverences the whole vaccine race as the favourites of heaven; who has been taught from childhood to abhor as equally vile the slayer of a Brahmin and the slayer of a cow; who from the day of his birth to this moment, nay, through many a past transmigration even, has never tasted the flesh of oxen, and looks upon a beefsteak as an abomination even to the lowest-for such a man to be asked to put between his teeth a cartridge greased with the fat of an innocent, suffering, shamefully-slaughtered cow, the victim of those polluted Feringhees, whom Rakshasas are preparing to carry down to Naraka, is quite cause enough for a mutiny.

We laugh, and deny it. But_no English gentleman would force a Jew to live on salt-pork; and we must give in to the religious prejudices of our subjects, however absurd they may appear. How then are you to act? You might have dispensed entirely with the slaves of so inconvenient a religion, and recruited among the millions who are less particular on these points, but who make every whit as good fighting men, as we know from the experience of our many corps of irregulars (more than fifty of them in Bengal alone), and who would never, as your pampered sepoys have done, refuse trench and fatigue work. You might have dispensed with a native army entirely, or made it only an adjunct to your own English one, as the Romans did of old; and you might have given freedom and encouragement to the willing missionaries whom you snubbed, and who would have turned your sepoys into the best soldiers in the world. But you chose to pursue the antiquated policy of the merchants in the days of Charles II., and so the old burden over again. This brings us to our third consideration.

Batta was originally an extra allowance given to the sepoys to buy sweetmeats with, as an encouragement on any special occasion. It has since become a regular additional allowance during active service. It is not, and never has been, a reward of valour, but an encouragement held out to fight well, just as Hannibal used to promise his soldiers liberal sums and grants of land before a bat

tle; with this difference, that the batta is paid, and his promised gifts were not. If the principle of encouraging a soldier to do his duty by anything more material than the expression of his duty to do it, is a wrong one with any men, it is still worse with the Hindoo, who is notoriously fond of money; and five mutinies resulting from it in a quarter-of-a-century sufficiently prove the wretchedness of the system. But then it is not a principle, but only a usage-a part of that 'traditional policy' which the Indian Government has always pursued, and which not a few of its great men stand up boldly to defend.

But that traditional policy has become a system now of the weakest description. Our ancestors gave their sepoys sweetmeats, and we treat them no less like children, forgetting that, if they are selfish and puerile, they have none the less a strength which we cannot always control. Having begun on the petting and spoiling system, we have been compelled for the mere sake of peace and comfort to continue it, and every now and then, like foolish parents, we draw up, and become unnecessarily, and at least unreasonably, severe. The Hindoo is no fool, and he sees through this. He well knows what his value is. He knows that by being naughty he can get any amount of sweetmeats he likes; but he goes further than the mere child, and despises the weakness that cedes to his clamouring.

*

Lord W. Bentinck has gained himself a lasting name by abolishing Suttee, or immolation of the widow on her husband's funeral pile, but when he extended his humanity to the suppression of corporal punishment in the army, he could scarcely have seen what dangerous aid he was lending to the 'traditional policy' of pampering the sepoy. But the army saw it, and took advantage of it to be very troublesome some years after, till they forced the government into an acknowledgment of its weakness, by re-establishing the infliction in part.

There is no need to enter now into the system of transferring the European officers from one regiment to another, to facilitate promotion. But * More properly Satí. It is a Sanscrit

word, meaning a 'virtuous woman.'

the present mutiny enables us to speak in terms of the greatest condemnation of the native officers. The letters published in the Times' proclaim their misdeeds. In some cases (as in the 96th N. I.) it was a subadar, or subadar-major, who incited the soldiery to mutiny; in others (as at Cawnpore), it was an officer of the same rank who collected and organised the mutineers.

That there should be native non-commissioned officers, naïks (corporals), and havildars (serjeants), seems only sensible, if for no other purpose than to afford a safe stimulus for good conduct. But that men having at heart the fidelity no less than the discipline of so large a native force, should have clung to traditional policy' so fondly as to retain the anomalous positions of the native commissioned officers, is certainly astonishing.

These men are jemadars, subadars, and subadar-majors, answering in some respects to our ensign, lieutenant, and captain. They rise from the ranks, and their promotion is almost invariably by seniority. There can be therefore no excuse made that their position is an incentive to valour and good conduct. But this position is itself scarcely an enviable one. They are neither one thing nor the other, neither officers nor men. With the European officers their relation is one of complete inferiority. The youngest cadet takes precedence of the oldest subadar. With their men they are really on an equality, and keep their place only by virtue of a false military rank and longer experience. This rank, however, is sufficient to enable them to act as leaders to the men, and it is in this dangerous capacity that they have been so active of late, as in all probability it was through them that the mutiny was concerted, and the proposals of one regiment transmitted to another.

We have said enough to allow us to sketch the character of the sepoy here.

He is an excellent fighting man, and full of military spirit. If we had not the testimony of so many campaigns to this fact, we have the recorded opinions of distinguished commanders-in-chief, who had ample means of judging, and were paid very

large incomes simply to keep their eyes open. Lord Hardinge, Lord Gough, and Sir Charles Napier, all agreed at least upon this point; and the last of these says, 'no army ever possessed better-behaved soldiers than the sepoys.' The fact of their immense numbers being lately defeated by handfuls of British, does not disprove the assertion. We cannot speak of the bravery and military spirit of a mercenary army, as we do of those of a patriotic one. No mercenaries under the sun are good for anything without proper officers, or when once demoralised and disorganised; and the Bengal army, as a military body, may be said to have ceased to exist, when its European officers were gone.

Again, the sepoy is by nature true to his duty, as duty. The mere existence of a native force of 250,000 men, with rarely more that 20,000 Europeans to control them, during one hundred years, is a proof of this. When everything is taken into account, the natural enmity between conquered and conquerors, the freedom, amounting at times to license, of a native press, the powers left in the hands of native officers, the comparative nothingness of the European population, and the constant opportunities given to the sepoy to discover his own power, we can only wonder that so immense a force has never before turned upon us, to rend us. And, in fact, the world has wondered at it for the last fifty years, The fact is, that the sense of duty is very strong in the native breast. It is one of the few good things about the institution of caste. What we say of priests only, they say of every profession and trade. Once a warrior, always a warrior;' once a sweeper, always a sweeper;' and this extends to sons, grandsons, and so on. So that a man's only chance of salvation depends on the fulfilment of those duties which his religion attributes to the office to which he is born. There are only two feelings stronger than that of dutythe fear of offending the gods, and the love of money; and I think, while we might justly imitate the first, we cannot exculpate ourselves from the second.

On the other hand, the sepoy is selfish, haughty, ignorant, narrow

minded, and, like all orientals, venal. Lastly, it cannot be denied that he is cruel and bloody-minded, a brute who, like his own elephant, is amiable and docile when well treated, but implacable when roused. But, in condemning the sepoy, we must not forget that the absence of Christianity is sufficient to account for the intensity of his blood-thirst. People who cry out that the annals of the world contain no parallel to the atrocities at which we have so lately shuddered, and still shudder, forget the everyday amusements of Chinese potentates, and the terrible tales which the Isles of Greece yet hiss out against their Turkish ravagers. The pages of Josephus, Gibbon, and Lamartine, are every whit as foul with blood as the columns of the 'Times;' and the garden of Nero and the quays of Nantes are no less worthy of their church than the well at Cawnpore. It is not civilisation that allays the passion for blood, but Christianity. The Chinaman, the Roman, the Turk, and the Frenchman, are or were all civilised, but even the French were not a Christian nation during the Reign of Terror, when their government had established Atheism by edict. We may shudder, then, at the Hindoo, but we have no right to be surprised. It is our own fault if he is not Christian.

This brings us to the second part of our subject-the religious question; and here, as I did with Mr B., the manufacturer, I propose to go upon the lowest grounds. We have, therefore, to ask simply whether it is more convenient to govern India in an unchristian or in a Christian condition; and if the latter, what means there are of Christianising it.

We need not here separate the people from the army. If Christianity were to make any great progress in India, we should soon find it troublesome to recruit solely among the heathen, as the Roman emperors did in the third century, to say nothing of the absurdity of encouraging our religion among our subjects, but objecting to it in our ser

vants.

None but an Anglo-Indian, labouring under the nightmare of traditional policy,' would for a moment suppose that India Christianised would be more