The American

What is to be done with India?

The time will certainly arrive when a tremendous inquisition will be held on the unparalleled atrocities which darken the pages before us. England must and will spare no labor, no cost, no military force, no judicial vigor that may be required, to hunt down the perpetrators, and award them the penalty of their crimes. In this instance, we have to make examples that shall never die or decay in Indian memory. But for the present, we must repress our indignation, and stop to reason on these narratives.

The comments that we make we feel cannot be disputed by the most captious envier of our Indian greatness. In many cases the native soldiers, even when conspirators, and only waiting the opportunity, have acknowledged the kindness of their British officers, and protected them from violence, even at some risk to themselves. Our personal relations thus come out clear. We have only been too confiding; we have left even too much to the native officers and given them too substantial an independence. They feel this. Hence we read in one instance of their giving the British officers and other residents several hours' law, offering them the means of escape, allowing them to carry off their private property, and even giving them money or mounting guard at their houses to protect them from chance violence. Such particulars are important to the defence of our Indian rule; for that rule has been a military one, and we only hold the country as the Romans once held Britain. Whence, then, these hideous atrocities; boat loads of fugitives shot down, dragged ashore, and butchered in heaps? Whence the proportion of the victims at most of the stations? The answer has its consolation. Sometimes a few aggrieved sepoys, against the feeling and resolution of the regiment, have the opportunity of the confusion to assassinate the objects of their personal dislike. Everywhere, as a natural and inevitable consequence the prison doors have been thrown open, and thousands of a class which is found everywhere, and nowhere in greater numbers and depravity than in India, have broken loose, to follow their brutal passions and wage a natural war with the maintainers of order. Sometimes a pretender on the Mahommedan law of adoption has carried out the sanguinary code on every man, woman, and child of the infidel race that came within his reach. Sometimes a wandering mass of mutineers have taken a wanton vengeance on a crowd of British fugitives happening to come in its way. These are all incidents of social chaos. Generally the influence of personal relations has had a counter-acting tendency. No doubt the Hindoos have only those feelings for us altogether that the subjugated usually have towards their rulers; and no doubt the Mohammedans have only those more bitter feelings that the supplanted naturally have towards their supplanters. The religions and races are against us. This we cannot help. But we submit that these narratives, heart-rending as they are, throw favorable light on our personal relations with the people.

But we will put a question or two suggested by these details. Can anybody deny that India requires a ruler to win the affections of some; to suppress the ferocity of others; to control religious murderers and religious robbers; to arbitrate between a creed of exclusion and a creed of extermination; to harmonize into one political whole races of hereditary soldiers, hereditary priests, hereditary manslayers, hereditary plunderers, and other races as distinct in their character as they were in the days of Alexander? Is it not for the interest of civilization and humanity that we who have this charge, and can show pre-eminent claims to it, should grasp it and maintain it with the whole strength of the empire? Who else is there that has his foot on Indian soil who can keep down this volcanic mass of criminal tendencies? Who else can ever guard the prisons that have just vomited out their thousands to the terror of the community? Who else can keep the highways open, and prevent the necessity of resorting to byways? Even at this crisis we feel sure that if the whole presidency of Bengal could be polled. the return would be in our favor. Terrible as the blow has been to us—to those who read of massacre after massacre of their countrymen, and have too much reason for fearing that their friends are among the victims—we have no doubt the visitation has fallen quite as severely on the civil population. They look to us to re-establish our name and authority by the most effectual means. It is not, then, only because blood cries from the earth for vengeance, or because a thousand British families are plunged into grief or distracted with anxiety, but for the more substantial and paramount reason that we are the Providential governors of India, that we must now inflict a terrible retribution and purge the land of its crimes. We have done much, if not our utmost, to humanize the people, to teach them justice, and to give them liberty; so may we with a safe conscience, and no fear of evil tongues, take exemplary vengeance on the authors and abettors of this unmerited insurrection.—London Times.