The Sun.
London, England, 1857-12-01 00:00:00

LONDON, TES DAY, DEC. 1, 1857.

Sam

We would earnestly direct public attention to
the very interesting and important meetings of
Monetary Reformers, which have just taken place,
on Friday and Saturday last, at Glasgow and East
Retford. Many of the leading merchants and
inbahitants deplored the evils to which they had
recently been exposed from the baleful operation
of The Bank Charter Act, and almost unanimously
called upon the Government for its repeal, or
modification. Although these gentlemen did not
go to the full extent we d
have desired, in
impeaching the equally injurious Act of 1819, it
is satisfactory to find a spirit of inquiry excit
and a disposition to question the authoritative
dicta thundered forth from Printing-house.„qu Aro
by the organ 'of " the hard calculators." y These
dictatorial assertions will no longer be taken
on
trust, If every description of credit is to be anni-
hilated, the faith iu the currency quacks will
aho be destroyed.
Truth must ba benefited by discussion. A strict,
searching, unprejudiced, and disinterested investi-
gation is all we desire, and we earnoAly hope
that all the Chambers of Commerce throughout
the. entire country will hold meetings, so that the
real feelings and wishes of the people way be
clearly ascertained. We believe that there would
be an overwhelming majority against the obnoxiotr
law and in favour of free trade in money, or more

properly speaking, in_currency, so great, that its
speedy abolition would be ensured. It has, until
recently, been the object of the hard calculators
to mystify the nation, to induce the industrial
classes to suppose that a really simple question
was one of a very elaborate character and it is
really ridiculous to find how many have been
misled, by the trick. Let those persons only de-
vote calm and attentive consideration to the
question, in which they are more deeply concerned
than any other that could be ventilated—en which
the welfare and prosperity of the country, and
the happiness of all the producers, the working
bees of the national hive, mainly depend.

To the meeting at East Retford, a full report
whereof will be found in another part of this
day's impression, we can refer with feel-
ings of unalloyed pleasure and satisfac-
tion. The speech of the Reverend JOHN
TWELLS disclosed a perfect knowledge of the
subject, and that knowledge turned to the very
best acount. Nor was the Rev. Gentleman for
half measures ; ho went to the very root of the
evil; and unanswerably proved that the Act of
1819 was equally impolitic as that of 1844,
although its injurious results were greatly en-
hanced by the complementary measure, which had
not only twice failed in the avowed objects for
which it was enacted, but would have produced
the very effects it was said it would avert. In
every point, in every argument put forward by
Mr. TWELLS, we fully and cordially concur.
Where everything was put forward in terse and
appropriate terms, it is impossible to present a
summary. The process of condensation had been
carried to the highest degree, and if we allude
enly to some few points, it is not because the
others are less worthy of attention, but that
time and space prevent the possibility of looking

to all. Mr. TWELLS' brilliant, and what is still
better
,his truthful —and, we do not Mean

to intrude on the functions of Punch by perpe-
trating a play on words), his sterling address,
must be carefully read in extenso, to be duly ap-

predated.
But for the extraordinary and unexpected dis-
coveries of gold in California and Australia, and
the increased production from the Ural Moun-
tains, the system would have long since fallen to
the ground. The introduction of 150,000,0001.
of gold bolstered up the plan, but foreigners A-
tained the benefit of that enormous amount
through the agency of Sir R. PEEL'S Acts. The
palmy days of Queen ELIZABETH, as they were
termed, merely occurred from the addition to the
circulating medium through the discoveries of
COLUMBUS. There were not in those days currency
quacks who professed to be " hard c.dculators,"
and who considered that they had a right to prey
upon industry, by transferring the property of
less wary men to their own hands, at less than
half the actual value. Plunder it might be
termed in the vicinity of the 011 Bailey.
" Looting " amongst Sepoys, " Swag " in the
ancient rookeries and thieves' kitchens of
the metropolis, but "hard calculation" in
Printing-house•-square. We guard against skittle
sharps, and those who take advantage cf
unheeding rustics, but the object is the
same in every instance—to appropriate the pos-
sessions of others. We may say with PEACUUM
in "The Beggar's Opera"—
" Since laws were made for every degree,
To curb vice in others as well as in me,
I wonder we've not better company
Upon Tyburn tree."

It is very easy to prophecy after the event has
happened. Rather an old truth it must be ad-
mitted, but one just now well worth repeating and
bearing in our remembrance.
Eighty thousand Sepoys revolt suddenly in
f. 1857 in the Bengal Presidency alone ; perhaps
, altogether the aggregate number of mutineers in
that portion of our Eastern Empire may be little,
if anything, short of one hundred thousand fight-
ing men, carefully trained and maturely disci-
plinesi. The defection startles us like a thunder-
bolt from a blue sky in a serene noon at midsum-
mer. The intelligence of so strange and appalling
a calamity falls upon the national ear as unexpec-
tedly as the sudden explosion of a volcano in the
midst of some calm green English landscape. Yet
—after the first shock of astonishment, everybody
begins to think—" Precisely ! What I have all
along anticipated I I saw clearly from the a ery
first how it must all end ! This is exactly what
I myself long ago predicted ! I knew perfectly
well the inevitable consequence of our misplaced
reliance upon these men ! The faithlessness of the
Sepoy was a thing notorious !"—and so forth.
Now, for all this, there is really only one word of
appropriate comment ; and that one word—hum-
bug I From first to last the self-graaulations ex-
pressed far and wide, as to the all but universal
recognition of the insecurity of our hold upon the
loyal affection of the Sepoy soldier, is literally the
very grossest delusion imaginable ! So far from
the Sepoy being in any way all this while under
the ban or the brand of suspicion, he has been,
now during one entire century, vaunted for his
steady and reliable attachment. We have, one
' and all, been, more or less earnestly, bragging of
his devotion to our Government. "One and all"
we repeat—even the most sagacious of ob-
servers. Even men like Sir CHARLES
, NAPIER, the glorious conqueror and adminis-
trator of Scinde. It is erroneously imagined
by many who have not themselves carefully scru
tinised the writings and opinions of that remark-
able man that he explicitly foretold the Infidelity
of our Sepoy troops. A most extraordinary !nis-
i apprehension, to say the least of it ! When, on
the contrary, so far from expressing any doubt
whatever as to the loyalty of the Sepoys, Sir_o.
NAPIER, during the course of hiS Slliiefrious
-
career, took frequent occasion to eulogise that
native section of our Anglo-Indian Army in the
strongest language imaginable, From his spoken
and written words alike, might very readily be
culled panegyrics the most emphatic upon the
Sepoy Soldiery—panegyrics having espeCial refe•
rence to the loyalty of those troops, and to their
attachment to the banners they had so often fol-
lowed to victory. What the sagacity of Sir C.
NAPIER did recognise, what that great man dil
distinctly and undeniably prophecy was—not the
innate and constitutional turpitude of the Sepoys,
but—the intrinsic and unconstitutional hollowness
of our whole system of Oriental misgovernment !
Against the folly of that system he raised his
authoritative and thrilling voice—in trait
ton fly, eloquently, energetically ! Against the
insanity and atrocity of our entire scheme of in, '-
administration in Hindustan he prot42sted ra:c-
!lately and consistently. But—not ag dust the
Sepoy troops as faithless, wero we warned by
him, any more than by Mfla,s, or by Onmn, or by
111aLcorze ! No—the writers upan India have
almost uninterruptedly, from first to last, for a
hundred years consecutively, from 1757 to 1837,
been all of one mind about the Sepys.
Take, in simple illustration of this, two of the
most popular writers of the day—MAIULAY Pad
ALISON ! Two of the most widely read and via:-
known of our annalists the Tory historian, and
the Whig historian.

Sir ARCHIBALD ALISON has written in so many
words at p. 617 of the 7th volume of hii

Hifitory of Europe, that " nothing could shake the
fidelity of the Indian troops ' He has there
further and yet more emphatically remarked that
--cg Volumes might be filled with the anecdotes
which have occurred during the last eighty years,

illustrative of thesteady courage and incorruptible
fidelity of the Sepoy troops." Thereupon he men-
tions one of these memorable anecdotes, dating as
far back as the siege of Arcot, where the provi-
sions at last running very low, the Hindoo soldiers
entreated their commander (ROBERT, afterwards
Lord OLIVE) to allow them to boil their rice, the
only food left for the whole garrison—saying
" Your English soldiers can eat from our hands
though we cannot from theirs ; we will allow them
as their share every grain of the rico, and subsist
ourselves by drinking the water in which it has
been boiled !" Turning the leaf on which we
read this, we find Sir ARCHIBALD upon the very
next page (p. 618, vol. vii), repeating " nothing
could shake their fidelity." And immediately in
further proof of this, relating another anecdote—
one of later date—one referring to the year 1783,
during the march of 1,500 Sepoys a distance of
500 miles to Madras. In spite of every tempta-
tion to defection proffered to them by the wily
agents of Trproo SAHIB—ALISON writes, " Not
only did they all remain true to their colours, but
they swam the tanks and rivers by which they
were separated from the officers during the night,
bringing them all they could save from their little
pittance ; for we,' they said, can live on any-
thing, but you require beef and mutton.' " So
much for Sir ARCHIBALD ALISON. Now for the
great Whig historian—his contemporary.
Lord MACAULAY is not one jot less explicit .in
his commendation of the Sepoys as loyal and
faithful soldiers of the Company. In his cele-
brated essay upon CLITE, he alludes to the fidelity
of the native troops repeatedly. His lordship, at
p. 185 of the 3rd vol. of his Essays says, in one
of his terse sente.lces—a emtence falling like the
blow of a hammer—a sort of sentence, with him
almost always, by the way, " hitting the right
nail upon the head"—" The troops were steady."
Those troops being the Sepoy troops—and
their steadiness, eliciting from the noble critic's
pen not one syllable expressive of astonishment.
He takes the fact as a mere matter of course—and
we hardly wonder to find him doing so, after
reading at an earlier page in the same volume (p.
161, vol. iii.) as follows—" A hostile Monarch
may promise mountains of gold to our Sepoys on
condition that they will desert the standard of the
Company. The Company promises only a mode-
rate pension after a long service. Bat every
Sepoy knows that the promise of the Company
wilt be kept : he knows that if he lives a hundred
years his rica and salt are as secure as the salary
of the Governor-General : he knows—" et cetera,
et cetera. Meaning by all this that we may rea-
sonably count upon the fidelity of the Sepoy sol-
dier. And as with MACAULAY, and as with
ALISON, so also with others. The belief—in spite
of all that is now said to the contrary—was
almost universal: the belief that JOHN SEPOY
WAS staunch to the back bone ! Occasional ex-
plosions of rage like the bloody outbreak at Vel•
lore in 1806, being looked upon by the majority
as events in their way gaits exceptional.
No—let there be an end, if possible, for once
and-for all, of this strange misapprehension. Let
us not close our eyes to the truth that this recent
revolt of 80,000, or 100,000 native soldiers in
the Bengai Presidency was altogether as startling
as it was unprecedented. It was not foreseen.
The break down of our system, our odious and
insensate system of Indian Misgovernment was
foreseen ,without doubt by many of us, clearly
and distinctly—and as clearly and distinctly: pre-
dicted ! But not this frightful and wholesale
mutiny of the Sepoys who had so long eaten our
salt, and worn our raiment, and fingered our
silver ! From this terrible and unimaginable
atrocity we may now learn the immensity of the
evils against which we have been all along pre-
testing—the evil we are now called upon to
ramedy—that of our whole scheme of Oriental
Misgovernment.