The Sun.
London, England, 1858-08-14 00:00:00

INDIA AND CHINA.

We have received our Calcutta papers by the
Overland Mail. The following is the editorial review
of the Bengal Hurkaru, dated Calcutta, July 3 :
" The state into which the insurrection has now
resolved itself is curious. We have recovered all the
fortresses, one after another, which the mutineers
had dared to seize as points which they had hoped
to make so many centres of regular operations ; and,
as our forces cannot be everywhere at once, the muti-
neers have successively fallen upon a few strongholds
from which they had been already driven on former
occasions, but which they were enabled to re-enter,
simply because we had stripped them of their garri-
sons in order to have men in the field.
" The general result of this incessant game of hide-
and-seek is, however, more and more salient and per-
ceptible as the struggle continues ; and we may now
say with strict exactness that, in the first place, the
rebels no longer retain a single position in all India
which they could make even a show of defending in
r the presence of any of our moveable columns ; and,
in the second place, the points which' they hold, as it
were, provisionally, and in our necessary absence
from any given locality (evacuated by us in order to
operate elsewhere) are places of inferior importance,
as well as visibly reduced in number. In short, we
have, in this sense, obtained at last a complete mas-
tery of the rebellion, that we occupy actually nearly
all the strong places throughout India, nearly all the
military centres and strategic points, and that there is
not one such spot left which we cannot take at plea-
sure.

" In addition to this broad and general result, we
have taken so many guns and stores in the hundreds
of nameless collisions, which have all, or almost all,
eventuated in victories, and we have, in the main,
succceeded in inflicting so incessant a carnage, not
upon any one field so much as in engagements that
hardly offer a grasp to narrative, that not only the
moral energies but the physical resources of our bru-
talised and irreclaimable enemy are now obviously
betraying the effect.
" Wherever a British force appears, there it is
master ; and yet the immensity of the country
baffles, not the military, but the constabulary efforts
of our army.

" It is impossible that the mutineers should not
feel—and, indeed, they show that they feel—the ul-
timate hopelessness of their situation. It is no longer
a war, it is a bloody and cruel hunt, in which the
hunted wreak all the atrocities of their despair upon
the villages and districts through which they fly.
" The sepoys began with audaciously high aims.
They would, at this moment, be less out of heart,
had they not tried an ambitious game ; had they,
from the outset, contented themselves with that sys-
tem of flight, plunder, and assassination into which
their operations have sunk at last. But they would
hold Delhi, they would rebuild the Mogul Empire,
they would issue proclamations, they would ape a
regular Government and a regular army, they would
invite their followers and well-wishers to judge
them by the open stand they attempted against all
the power of England, and by their success in de-
fending the seats of ancient indigenous authority in
which they had collected their strength. These
scenes, bearing names to conjure with' in the native
imagination, and venerable to Hindoo or Mussulman
by a thousand traditions of 'eastern grandeur, have
been wrenched from the grasp of the rebels by the
most inadequate numerical forces, and this in the
face of all India, which was, as it were, bidden to the
spectacle, and anxiously watched the result of the
open challenge. The ideas of an equal conflict
are dispelled for ever ; the very prophecies circu-
lated so industriously among a superstitious and
grovelling population, the appeals made to the books
they were taught to revere, announcing the close of
our dominion as the decree of destiny reserved
for fulfilment at this exact epoch, all have contri-
buted to deepen the shock which their secret expec-
tations have sustained; anir what was undertaken
with the undisguised profession of the wildest hopes
is now persevered in from the dictates of equally
undisguised despair.
" The rebels themselves feel the rebellion, in all its
original purposes, to be a grand failure. And if we
add, the death of nearly all the leaders who first
duped them into their career of infructuous and un-
availing crimes, we can realise the despondency
which has succeeded to sanguineness.

" But, if all this be true in a military sense, it is not
less true that the thorough unmanning and dis-
couragement of the enemy is highly unfavourable
to our cause,' and renders the pacification and re-
settlement of the country the more difficult.
" So complete are the disruption and demoralisation
of the ex-armies of the sepoys, that, with the excep-
tion of Oude, and of that large force which Sir
Hugh Rose has been driving headlong before him
for more than forty days, over many hundred miles
of country, those armies make no longer the least
pretence to their recent character, and have broken
up into robber gangs, with whom murder, not battle,
is a possibility; and the plunder of isolated than-
nabs
and zemindaries, not the seizure of great fast-
nesses, the only remaining ambition. To follow all
these gangs in detail through their devious maraud-
ings would necessitate such a sub-division of our
forces as their numbers would render highly impru-
dent. In our last overland summary we described
the career of the last sepoy army deserving the
name, which still affected to keep the field, after Sir
Hugh Rose had beaten it out of Calpee, and sent it,
denuded of artillery, broken, although desperate, and
abandoning its wounded along the track of its flight
to Gwalior. There, it had to deal with only our
native allies, the troops of Scindiah, two-thirds of
whom behaved like cowards or traitors, and left their
Maharajah in the midst of an engagement. We then
expressed a hope that, flushed with this temporary
success so soon after their overthrow, the rebels
might be infatuated enough to wait for Sir Hugh
Rose, and give him battle again.

" Our hopes have been realised. On the 19th of
Tune Sir Hugh Rose dated from the Palace of Gwa-
lior a new despatch announcing a decisive victory
after five hours' fighting. Our overland summaries
have been lately filled with the name of this most
capable and strenuous soldier ; and we trust that the
gratitude of his country, never slow to pick out
merits so real and so splendid al his, may avail itself
of this opportunity to encourage emulation by the
unstinted rewards conferred upon an illustrious ex-
ample. What adds to the merit of his last achieve-
ments is, that he was ill, and it was supposed that
Brigadier Napier mould have been obliged to under-
take command.

" He captured 16 guns, 70 elephants, and a great
quantity of warlike stores, in the combat to which
we have adverted; and Brigadier Napier, a very
vigorous, accomplished, and able soldier, pursued the
runagates, and captured 25 guns more and other mu-
nitions, three days later. The rebels were reported
to have taken a westerly direction ; but they had
not reached, as was at first supposed, Jeypore or
Bhurt pore. The whole of the fugitives from Gwa-
for reached Hindoun on the 24th ult., and two days
afterwards they were estimated, with camp followers,
at 15,000. From Agra troops were following them.
The Governor-General meantime proclaimed, in jus-
tifiably haughty terms, the quick re-instalment
of Scindiah in his Maharaj.

" The outbreak in Bombay has been vigorously
repressed, and the chief of Nurgoond and others have
been hanged, and unless some of the numerous
beaten gangs now wandering over the country make
their way towards the north of the Deccan, and con-
trive to raie the Mahrattas, we believe the Wektern