The Sun.
London, England, 1857-10-19 00:00:00

a thought of what he had heard, unlesa, indeed,

what had fallen from old General Low, the mili
tarp member of the CJuncil. All the pert and
conceited flippancies of GRANT, the legal quibbles
of PEACOCK, and the complacent follies °lithe effete
Mr. DORIN, would by such men have been barely
endured. The despatch which 1.06 ES to go would
indeed have often been ready cut and dried for
the messenger, before they had ever listened as in
duty bound to the clishntac/aver of the FOUR.
However, here the two documents lie before
us. Lord ELLENBOROTIGII'S we adverted to in
part on Saturday. Unable to attend the
meeting of the Winchcomb Agricultural Associa-
tion, he writes to it his views of the character of

the mutiny and the mutineers, and of the mode

(by which the sons of the soil may best discharge
their duty of providing the requisite force to re-
tain, as well as to reconquer India. On the latter
point we gave our opinion on Saturday. Let
our readers, however, compare the tone of Lord
ELLENBOROUGH'S remarks on the deserts of the
mutineers, with those of Lord CANNING in his
circular to the Indian authorities. Lord ELLEN-
BOROUGH, at least, writes in the spirit of his
countrymen ; appealing to them to aid in raising a
competent militia, he says—
" Gentlemen, you may not have looked into all
the details of what has taken place in India,
but you must know this—that we have there a
great war forced upon us by rebels who would de-
prive all our countrymen of their lives, and Eng-
land of an empire—that where we placed our con-
fidence, we have been met with treachery__
where we acted with kindness, we have encoun-
tered murder--murder, not directed only against
men by whom resistance might be made, and from
whom wrongs might have been feared, but extending
equally to unoifencling, helpless women—to the
children at their knees, and to the infants at their
breasts—sparing none, and often inflicting death
with torture upon the body where it had already
more cruelly tortured the mind.
" We have seen there, in almost every instance
of mutiny, one general deliberate design, not only
to deprive us of the dominion we have so long held
with honour, but to place us, as a people, under
circumstances of outrage and of indignity, which,
if we submit to them, must render us, in the eyes of
all living men and of all future generations, a de-
spised and degraded race. Will you submit to thi4?
You will say you never will—you will have redress
and vengeance. We will say nothing about ven-
geance—that belong 4 only to a Higher Power ;
but to punish crime so signally as to deter all
hereafter from its commission, and to vindicate our
sovereign authority, this is no doubt our right, and
it is our duty."

Again, urging the value of their example, if a
patriotic one, he exclaims—
" It is impossible to over-estimate its importance.
There is nothing man holds dear for which we have
not now to fight. If we should not bear ourselves
manfully in the contest thus forced upon us, if we
should not succeed in it, we must be content not
only to lose the noblest empire in the world, but to
mike the name of Englishman a byeword of shame
amongAt nations. _

"The wives and daughters of our countrymen
have been publicly violated, their children have
been put to death with circumstances of cruelty
surpassing all we read of in history as the punish-
ments inflicted by God upon the offending Jews.
it has not been deemed sufficient to destroy us. We
were first to be dishonoured, and this in a country
through which we have proudly—perhaps too
proudly—stalked a 3 conqusrors for a hundred
years.'

These are unquestionably the sentiments which
Air the bosom of every Englishman at home, the
sentiments which arouse farmers and farmers' men
to do what in them lies to wipe out the foulest
blot ever inflicted on the fame of England.
But we turn to the document issuing from the
Governor and his Council, all of them persons al-
most on the spot—issuing from this man,
inched, several of them
and thes3 man, if,
deserve the name ; for t,) us, in ono's native clime,
it seems as if a tropical climate had reduced them
to the condition of those unfortunate persons
who guard the harems of Rajah 9, Nabobs, Peish-
was, and Eastern Emperors, and who cannot be
' stung to insuppressible indignation with indigni-
ties to either sax----vfe turn to this document, and
what is its object ? To proclaim martial law
wherever mutineers are in force ? To en-
courage firmness and decision when everything
depends upon it? To refer the civil autho-
rities to the military commanders, as the best
judges of what course the former should

take in each district ? Nothing, indeed, of this
kind from Mr. Some Secretary BEADON—no ; but

just a clause of condonation for what they might
have done in the way of severity in their respec-
tive districts on the ground of necessity—and then
a whole string of_wet-blanket paragraphs " lest
measures of extreme severity should be too hastily
resorted to, or carried too far." Some of the in-
structions seem to be almost surplusage, as when
the ABDIELS of a mutinous regiment are pointed
out as fit subjects for a " free pardon ;" which,
to any man in his senses, reads very much like the
QUEEN'S granting a free pardon here to a con-
victed man when proved afterwards to be inno-
cent. Then that mere deserters should be handed
over, when possible, to the military authorities—
of course, only we are sorry the Indian Civil Service
needs instruction on such point. But then fol-
lows a list of minute instructions for Civil officers
of the company placing them, as much as may
le in the condition of children, and designed
to check independent and vigorous action.
" Above all things be not too severe,"
is the pith and meaning of some dozen long para-
graphs.

Now all this may sound very kind and very
good. It would be a shocking thing when half
the Sepoys have outdone the worst atroJities of a
JEFFRIES, that any of them should fall into the
hands of a Civil Service JEFFRIES. A shocking
thing, we freely own, if any Sepey who had saved
In officer, or had vainly tried to dissuade from
mutiny, should suffer with the fiends who have
murdered their officers, and worse than murdered
women and children, and men, too—but of this
last we believe no soldier, not to say civil judge,
could be guilty in cold blood. We own,
however, we do not think it a very shocking thing
if some scores or hundreds of mutineers who all,
by a most righteous law, deserve death, should
meet with their full deserts instead of transpor-
tation or slavery. We have not, nor has any
Englishman, the slightest wish for oue stroke of
❑eedless severity ; but, while Delhi was yet un-
taken, while Lucknow was threatened with the
fate of Cawnpore, while NANA SAHIB yet com-
manded his thousands, and while Oude swarmed
with rebels, we think a cramping wet blanket cir-
cular of this kind about the worst thing which
could possibly have been issued ; natives may
hear of it, and, at least, able civil servants will
be fettered by it.
If a circular needed to be sent, surely it should
have been one authorising the local authorities to
subordinate themselves in all things to the military
authorities. -Holding them responsible, not for
overstepping the restraint of leniency, but for
allowing an offender to escape on whom they could
lay their hands. We think we see the drift of
the whole. It is to uphold as much as possible iu
the face of such a large influx of English troops,
Mr. Secretary BEADON'S pet civil service ; to repre-
sent them as the supreme authority everywhere,
and to give a tacit warning to the CAMPBELLS, the
HAVELOCYS, the NrAus, and all the military
men, that they, even when the country is full of
mutinous soldiers, are to play second fiddle to the
gentlemen of the Honourable East India Com-
pany's Civil Service. It seems also to be another
instance on the part of Lord CANNING of the same
vacillation which sent back, and then recalled, the
Nepaulese Contingent ; which refused, and then
accepted, the Calcutta Volunteers ; which tole-
rated the sale of thousands of arms, and at last
forbade it ; which, according to this last mail,
has kept back OUTRAM and the reinforcements for
HAVELOCK at least ten days, although the fate of
Lucknow hung on a horse-hair ! and which kept
the Commander-in-Chief out of a seat in the
Council, when he ought rather to have united in
his single person the offices of the Governor, and
the Council too, with that of Commander-in-
, Chief. India now needs a competent Dictator.

There really appears to be a contagion in crime
as in disease. Ever since the Sepoy atrocities
came to the knowledge of this country, we have
had the public journals filled with the record of
evil deeds the most brutal and the most sangui-
nary. Scarcely a week passes without horrifying
us with the narrative of two or three detestable
murders and attempts at assassination. It is
scarcely a month since we took occasion in these
columns to comment upon the frequency of late of
a crime we then designated (in spite of so many
examples calculated to produce a very different
impression) as one particularly and essentially un-
English in its character. The dastardly use of
the knife—with a view to the possible prevention
of the frequent recurrence of which infamy we
urgently suggested the application to the perpe-
trators of it of some very ignominious species of
punishment.

Since then, in corroboration, or rather in direct
enforcement, of our argument, how many horrors
of this kind have we not had cause to enumerate !
Besides the murdered body of the wretched woman
whose remains were discovered in Leigh 'Woods,
with a bullet-hole iu the skull and the throat cut
—there is the horrid double murder down at
Warleigh House, where the two poor victims (hus-
band and wife) were stabbed to death, actually
while paying a visit of good-fellowship. There is
the unfortunate man DRURY, who was destroyed
by wounds inflicted by some sharp instrument
down at Liverpool. And another yet more fright-
ful event of the same kind in the same place--the
fratricide of the butcher struck down with a blow
from a taile-knife by his own brother, while the
family were seated at supper, quarrelling. There
is the last horrible wifelnurder in London, where
the murderous instrument was a razor. There is
the mangled body of the man found in the Re-
gent's Canal, with two, cuts in the throat,
proving death t ) have resulted in the same
way from the same foul treatment. Finally—to
make an end of this frightful catalogue of horrors
—there is the hideous discovery of those fright-
fully mutilated fragments of a human form found
upon the abutment of Waterloo-bridge—in regard
to which it appears absolutely preposterous t
suppose, for an instant, that it is nothing worse
than the brutal hoax of some crack-brained Medi-
cal Saidents. Aad we may state at once that we
feel constrained to regard any such supposition a
preposterous (among other reasons) for the few
very simple and obvious reasons here following
—Firstly, because it is wholly incredible that any-
one, however crack-brained, could run th© fearful
risk of being disc3vered with such a very suspici-
ous carpet-bag full of goods in their possession.
Secondly, because it is yet more incredible (if poi:-
sible) that anyone, however fool-hardy, would
voluntarily run the still more frightful risk of be-
ing caught depositing su._:h a load, in such a situ-
ation, under such a combination of circumstance:;.
Third:y, that, allowing it, for the sake of argu-
ment, to be a hoax of this description, it is incon-
ceivable that, in spite of the darkness of nigh.-,
that shelving abutment should just exactly have
been hit upon, with a dangling rope, when even
in the bright daylight that same abutment is in-
visible from the overhanging parapet. Beside::,
the deliberate opinion arrived at by the prof s-
sional witnesses amounts distinctly to this—that
the kind of mutilation is such as no anatomis

could, by possibility, have accomplished in tilt
process of dissection. Moreover, the notion of
such a hoax as the one hinted at, is altogether in-
compatible with the discovery of thoso