The Sun.
London, England, 1857-12-03 00:00:00

LONDON, THURSDAY, DEO. 3, 1857.

Sam

This day will commenco one of the most
portant sessions in which the Parliament of the
United Kincflore has ever been engaged. It iA
true that we are not concerned in any European
I'var, and that her 'MAJESTY will be enabled t
ann°llrlce that she receives the most amicable
assurances from foreign Powers. But we have
had to encounter even more dangerous foes. Our
Indian territories have been distracted with intes-
tinal commotions—

" Civil dissension, with its vip'roas tooth,
That gnaws the bowels of the Commonweal,"
hal been in operation. Those who had partaken

of our salt, who were clothed, fed, paid, armed,
and disciplined by ourselves, had turned against
their benefactors, and perpetrated unheard-of
atrocities. The lives—not only of the officers by
whom they had been invariably treated with kind
consideration and indulgence, but even of their
II
wives and children—of every European, male or
female, adult or infant, were sacrificed under cir-
cumstances of unparallet.al brutality and barbarity.
The mild Hindoo seemed to have, by some i
magic change, been turned into a Red Indian,
with some fearful vengeance to inflict. The ven-
detta was proclaimed against England and the
English, and fearfu:ly was it executed at Cawn-
pore and Gwalior, and other districts, by demons
in human shape, headed by the infamous NANA
SAHIB. But, happily, the neck of the rebellion
has already been broken. "The snake is scotched,"
though not yet "killed," and a s3arching and
stringent inquiry must be instituted into the
causes of the fearful revolt; and an improved system
of government must be instituted, by which the
anomalous double, or rather treble Government
may be completely abolished, and the affairs of
India conducted under a single department, where
there shall be no divided responsibility, and the
British Parliament can exercise its legitimate in-
fluence over the Anglo-Indian Empire —secure
in the welfare, prosperity, and happiness of its
faithful inhabitants, and prevent the abstraction
of one of the brightest gems from the diadem of
Queen VICTORIA.

There is another, and, if possible, more im-
portant subject that must be forthwith attended
to. The Bank Charter Act has totally failed in
its intended operation. It has falsified every
prediction respecting it, and even the statements
made as to its objects long after its first suspen-
sion. Sir R. PEEL declared that it was intended
to prevent fluctuations in the value of money, and
panics similar to those of 1838-9. Not a word
was then spoken respecting its ensuring the con-
vertibility of the Bank-note, and for a very good
reason that was never questioned. The
credit of the Bank was good for every do-
mestic purpose. It was not that there was
a doubt of payment, or that the amount of bul-
lion in its vaults was taken into consideration,
until the publication of its weekly returns led to
the apprehension of a deficiency in the circulating
medium, in consequence of the reduetion of the
bullion stored in its vaults. Notes were just as
acceptable as gold. Even in 1825, the fortunate
discovery of a box of 1/. notes-averted the suspen-
sion of cash payments, and the permission to
extend the issues was equally beneficial in 1847.
There was, therefore, no question respecting con-
vertibility until little more than a twelvemonth ago,
when a person writing 'under the Fout de plume
of "Mercator," and who was stated, by the organ
of " the hard calculators," to be an eminent finan•
vial authority, declared that the solo object of the
act was to ensure convertibility, or, as it was
termed, that the bank-note should always main-
tain its value—a matter, by the way, which was
never doubted.

The reason of this departure was obvious.
The alterations in the value of money had
been more sudden and violent, and occasioned
far greater distress and difficulty than at any
previous period. The suspension of the Chatter,
in 1847, proved not only its inefficiency in that
respect, but that it was calculated to promote the
very evils it professed to remedy. A new pretext
then should be put forward, and this has also
been exposed and detected. And now the hideous
monster has been stripped of its disguise, and
stands revealed in all its deformity. The obj2ct
was not to prevent, but to create panics—not to
ensure, but to endanger convertibility—which
has been more imperilled by its means
than at any former period. It is to
serve "the hard calculator ;" to enable him
to obtain 20 or 30 per cent. for money, at the
expense of the industrious classes—to confiscate the
property of those who do not quite so thoroughly
understand the working of the OYBRSTONE system
of currency. Tisis intention will, however, be
defeated. The people of Great Britain have been
awakened from their apathy, and will in-
sist on the repeal of the obnoxious, and
we may add, iniquitous law. Tho chief
danger now to be avoided is procrastination. It
will be attempted to shelve the question for a
time. But the Fabian policy can no longer pre-
vail. The artful dodge is now thoroughly un-
derstood.

We yesterday spoke of the promised Reform
Bill, and that, we are glad to find, will at all
events be brought under the consideration of the
Legislature.

According to the last despatches received from
India, and printed at length in The Sun of Mon •
day evening, it would appear that the Organiser
of this terrible and gigantic revolt of the Sepoys
in the Bengal Presidency distinctly selected, as
the pretext for the outbreak, the rumoured (and,
of course, fallacious) notion that England was
about to attempt the conversion of the Hindoos
by main force, by terrorism, by physical constraint,
to Christianity. The conjecture that it was really
so, has been prevalent amongst us from the com-
mencement. The authentic revelation now brought
to light proves that the supposition, instinctively
arrived at, was in no way erroneous—that in
very deed this monstrous delusion as t) the pro-
selytising designs of Great Britain was made use
of, with little less than devilish adroitness, by the
fomenters of discontent, and, in the end, of open
and bloody insurrection iu Hindostan. The con-
triver of the Bengal Mutiny, indeed, seems to
have displayed a villainous ingenuity by spreading
abroad among the native soldiery the corrobo-
rative belief that the first step towards this com-
pulsory conversion from Paganism--a measure
insidiously resolved upon, it was reported, with a
view to the preliminary destruction of caste, the
very basis of Hiudoo religion—vas the greasing
of the rifle cartridge ! So that, after all, it turns
out that—madness though the Bengal Mutiny is
in itself—there has been decidedly all.tho while
(as the more sagacious opined from the outset)
a " method in the madness " of the Bengal
Mutineer !

It is curious—now that we have arlived at
this definite conclusion as to the real source of the
Indian outbreak—it is sufficiently curious, to re-
mark, in regard to the " report," and the sub.
sequent " defection," a rather singular coinci-
dence, that of the extraordinary and glaring
siwilarity of the Sepoy mutiny of 1806, and of
the Sepoy mutiny of 185'T—the revolt in the
former instance at Vellore, and in the latter in-
stance a Futtegliur !
According to the Proclamation of the M adras
Government—dated the 31 of December, 1,i06
a report bad been then spival and credulously
believed among the Sepoy troops that it wa 3 [we
quote the very words of tho Madras Proclaim tion]
" the wish of the British, Government to co, avert
them by forcible means t o Christianity." H (nee
was it that on the 10th of July 1806, the Eua-o-
pean barracks at Vellore—containing at the time
four complete companies of the 69th Regiment
er
were surrounded by two battalions of Sepoy troops
revolted from the Company's service ; -villains,
who poured in a murderous fire through Ulf) doors

and windows, ands° effected the deadly work of that
ever infamous massacre. Having destroyed those
ill-fated companies of the 69th regiment, the
mutineers then carefully butchered every one of
the European sentries, cut down all the soldiers
they found at the mainguard, and even remorse-
lessly put to death the sick they discovered in
, the wards of the military hospital—besides this,
I ransacking the officers' bungalows and destroying
in cold blood every person they chanced to find in
them I Such was the horrible massacre result-
ing in 1806 from the revolt at Vellore : the spirit
of mutiny spreading afterwards from that nucleus
of defection, to Nunydroogland Bangalore. And
this outbreak—half a century ago, remember !
originated in the belief that the British Govern-
fment were about to convert the Hindoos by main
orce to Christianity ! Then, as now, a little
trumpery notion getting abroad among the Sepoys
strangely but strongly in corroboration ! Then,
not as now about greased cartridges, but—to the
effect that the Sepoy turban (that crown of the
Brahmin !) was about to be changed into some-
thing very like the then helmet of the European
Light Infantry ! Such, in brief, is the cu-
rious and, but for its frightful consequences in
each instance, the ludicrous coincidence observable
on comparing the Bengal Mutiny of 1857 with
the Vellore revolt 50 years earlier. There were
the same passions at work in each instance,
the same sanguinary fanaticism, the same lament-
able and disastrous misapprehension. Only that
what in one instance was little more than a strictly
local outbreak has proved in the other to be the
insurrection of a whole army : necessitating in
consequence not simply the application of a rigor-
ous corrective, but the total reorganisation of our
whole scheme of Oriental government.