TO RESPECT WITHOUT PANDERING TO CASTE.

305

assurances have lost much of their weight on the mass of the natives. Moreover, the large influx of Englishmen fresh to India is daily keeping this feeling alive, by heedless and inconsiderate, often unintentional, offences to that very feeling. It should ever be remembered that the natives, especially the Hindoos, are of a deeply religious turn of mind. We may look down with scorn on a mind so constituted as to regard caste as the sum and substance, the beginning and the end, of religion; yet it is a fact, and in our intercourse with such a people the fact should be borne in mind. It need involve no compromise of our own religious principle to have respect to the feelings, while we reprobate the tenets, of other creeds. It need involve no sacrifice of Christian truth to deal cautiously and considerately with superstitious error. It is not necessary, for instance, to recognise in the ranks of the army, in Government offices, or in Government schools, any priority of caste, such as is assumed by natives among themselves. It is enough that we treat all alike; promote worth, reward merit, punish delinquency, in the Chumar as well as in the Kulin Brahmin. This may be done without wounding their religious sensibilities. And all this is wholly consistent with the efficient action of a Government which a Christian nation exercises over a heathen colony; and it is by such a course alone that India can be well, wisely, and safely ruled.

This warning has the mutiny, in its religious phase, given us. Let the Englishman, by even-handed justice

VOL. II.

U

306

THE BREACH MAY THUS BE REPAIRED.

and wise liberality, by truthfulness and probity, by gentleness and courtesy, by sobriety and chastity, in his public and in his private life, show his real superiority, not merely as the result of Western civilisation, but as the fruit of a practical Christianity,—and the warning may not have been sent in vain.

That breach so much to be lamented between the two races may yet be gradually lessened, the mutual antipathy now existing be removed, contempt on the one hand and suspicion on the other be mitigated and allayed, and confidence between the ruler and the ruled, the white and the black, the Christian and the heathen, be restored and blessed.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE MUTINY, AND GOD'S HAND THEREIN.

A SHORT time after the battle of Waterloo, Alexander Knox, in writing to Mrs Hannah More, commented on that great victory in the following words: "How highly has Britain been honoured! and yet how awfully has all undue exaltation been suppressed by the critical turn which, after all, effected a prosperous conclusion. It was not human wisdom which wrought our deliverance." Nor was it human strength. A single nation on a foreign land combating and overcoming nearly the whole force of Europe, arrayed against her and the cause of freedom which she had made her own, was a glorious sight! Such a sight Waterloo beheld. Yet, with all the glories of that victory-a victory almost without a parallel, in the unequal conflict, the desperate struggle, and the momentous results-there was, in reality, little to feed national pride, or to engender boasting; far more to fill the mind of the conqueror with grateful acknowledgment to the God of Battles.

* The substance of this chapter has already appeared in the pages of a small Indian periodical; but as the author had more right to it than any one else, he has no hesitation in reproducing it here.

308

WATERLOO-AND THE MUTINY.

On the whole career of Napoleon had been inscribed that Divine assertion regarding one who, in his gener-, ation, had been no less the scourge of nations: "Hast thou not heard how I have done it? Now have I brought it to pass that thou shouldest be to lay waste fenced cities into ruinous heaps. Therefore their inhabitants were of small power, they were dismayed and confounded” (2 Kings, xix. 25, 26). In his downfall at Waterloo was as plainly written the Divine denunciation, "I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest" (v. 28). Over his defeat the song

of exultation rose, like that

of Deborah and Barak:

"They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera" (Judges, v. 20).

Turn from Waterloo and its victory to India and its mutiny. "When I look back on the events of the last four months," wrote Sir John Lawrence,* "I am lost in astonishment that any of us are alive. But for the mercy of God we must have been ruined." Thus did he, whom England so justly regards as "the saviour of India” in having held the Punjab, acknowledge the powerlessness of man to effect that great work. He whose iron will, whose wide grasping mind and unwearied energy, carried Englishmen along with him and held down natives, is yet the first to confess it was not human wisdom or human strength that wrought that great deliverance, but the power and will of a

* Extract from a private letter read by Captain Eastwick at the meeting of the East India Company Proprietors, in seconding the resolution that a pension be voted to Sir John Lawrence.

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THE POLITICAL STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1857 309

merciful Heaven, whose fiat holds the surging minds of nations as it does the billows of the vast deep"Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther."

How strikingly was this illustrated throughout that eventful period! When the mutiny broke out, the Bengal Presidency contained less than twenty thousand European soldiers, with above ten times that number of native troops; the intruding dominant race were not in all above a quarter of a million, while the races they had conquered and ruled numbered nearly one hundred millions.* Such were the relative proportions of English and natives.

How far the mutinous spirit in the army extended was not at first known. Mercifully, it affected only a few regiments: but it might have involved the whole army, regular and irregular alike; nay more, it might have carried with it every race from Calcutta to Peshawur -Bengalee, Poorbeah, Punjabee, Afghan-every creed, Mohammedan, Hindoo, Buddhist, Sikh—and then, not an Englishman, not a Christian, could have escaped!

Look again at the state of the world, and of the political relations of England, at that time. Had the alliance with France been then tottering in the scale, England would not have dared to weaken herself at home even to rescue her noblest colony. Had the Russian war been still raging, she could have ill spared any troops for India, when already compelled to fall back on her militia in order to throw every available soldier into the Crimea. Had the Persian expedition

*This calculation refers to the Bengal Presidency only.