The Sun.
London, England, 1857-10-15 00:00:00

ourselves in the dust before JIIGGERNAUTH, SIVA,
VISHNU, and old MAILOMET too ; and their wor-
shippers or disciples have tried to put their foot on
our necks for it 1 The Bishop and the M.P. did
their part on this topic well. We trace, however,
the origin of the evil to the Government of India
by a batch of little-souled traders. English gen-
tlemen would not thus have dishonoured their
faith and lowered themselves, like Dutch burgo-
masters, for mere gain.

Mr. GLADSTONE, as became him, wielded the po-
litical lash, and this time applied it to the right
delinquent. He denounced in his best style, the
secrecy of Indian Ad ministration. It was so conducted
that India is to Englishmen a Foreign country,
and that no one knows anything of it, unless he
has made it a special study. This is perfectly
true. All political questions of any importance
are more or less understood by the constituencies ;
they are discussed in the House of Commons and
in the Peers ; they are presented catechetically at
the hustings in all important elections ; every
man who pays the least attention to public matters
has some opinions about them ; but on India it is
a thousand to one whether he has any opinion at
all. Australia and the Canadas, as soon as they
began to be important through their trade and
population, began also to attract the attention of
the people at home ; but India, whose population
is talked of sometimes as 200,000,000, some-
times as 150,000,000, sometimes as 100,000,000,
as if a few score millions were a matter of indiffer-
ence there, has, till this very outbreak, attracted
infinitely less attention than the humblest question
of domest;c policy. The country, like the Hud-
son's Bay territories, has been treated as the
property of a trading company. This company
and. the Board of Control have quietly parted the
patronage between them ; and the latter has
received the aristocratic share of the patron-
age as the price of letting the com-
pany do what it would with its own ; aud,
pretty effectually, has the company barred
the door in the face of the general English
public. "India for the Civil Service I" has been
their motto, when it ought to have been " India
for the Indians, through making it attractive to
English energy, commerce, and capital 1"
The Company's break-down is complete. Not
a rag has it left to clothe its nakedness, and glad
are we to number Mr. GLADSTONE among its un-
sparing enemies, for with a good cause what may
he not effect ? Leaden Hall has not politically a
shilling in the pound, and we hope the coming
session will see it pronounced an uncertificated
political bankrupt, and forbidden ever to trade
in political administration again.

Reverting to the Bishop, we were, by the bye, a
little amused at his reference to his father's famous
:esolution, ultimately expunged by the East India
Company from the preamble of the Act of 1783
—" that India must be held by the British nation
for the moral and religious good of the nations
thereof." Does SAMUEL of Oxford forget that what
he calls " religious good " his father would have
deemed religious evil, and evil, too, almost as bad
as Mahommedanism or Hindooism itself ? If we
remember rightly, WILLIAM WILBERFORCE was a
leader of " The Clapham Sect," and wrote a once
celebrated book on "Practical Piety," which
piety was, we believe, of the puritan, stamp, and
utterly opposed to Apostolical succession dogmas,
baptismal regeneration, and all the second-hand
mummeries of Puseyism. WILLIAM WILBERFORCE,
if we are not mistaken, would almost as soon have
sent Mahommedan Mootvies to India, as Anglican
priests, who believe in apostolical succession and
sacramental efficacy.

Those professional ghoul, the Resurrection-
men, have, it is true, become extinct as a separate
class of the community. Their " occupation has
gone," like OTHELLO'S. They have pasied away
into that old lumber-room of dilapidated curiosi-
ties in which are stored up the memories of the
Rakehells, and the Footpads, and other Minions
of the Moon, by whom, in byegone times, this
island was so often "frighted from its propriety."
Yet—the new Anatomy Act, by the agency of
which a final quietus was supposed to have been
administered by the Legislature to those very
amiable gentry the Body•anatcbers, obviously still
requires considerable revision and amendment.
For—it is perfectly evident that the " witching
hour" still strikes, sometimes, when

~
Churchyards yawn,
And graves give up their dead."

It is manifest, in spite of all our Parliamentary
Precautions, that there still remain to this hour
a few supplementary kidnappers of the dead, the
burthen of whose song is that of HAMLE•r's quaint
friend with the shovel and the waistcoati--.

" A pickaxe and a spade, a spade,
Azd 0 for a winding-sheet 1"

The horrible truth that it is so, has come out very
recently, in the midst" of certain revolting reve-
lations. The disclosures we mean that have unex-
pectedly been made in various parts of the me•
tropolis, in connexion with the investigations set
on foot by the police in regard to this hideous
tragedy—the last act but one of which took place
on Thursday se'ennight, over an abutment of
Waterloo-bridge. The last act being yet reserved
for performance (let us believe) upon a certain
scaffold outside Newgate Gaol, within sound -of
the death-bell of St. Sepulchre's.

That occasional Resurrection-men are still
abroad at intervals has been pretty clearly proved,
we take it, by two or three of these same disgust-
ing revelations—the Anatomy Act to the contrary
notwithstanding ! A couple of human heads—
one a man's, the other a woman's—are found
poked away as negligently as a potsherd or a dead
kitten, under the mould and fallen leaves in a
corner of Sussex Gardens I A bit of a human
foot is roked up from the filth and slush of the
Grand Junction Canal ! Horrid little pieces of
the human form seem really to be scattered here
and there all about London—some of these, we
read, bearing evident marks of having been ope•
rated upon by the delicate implements of the
anatomist. One of the heads pulled out of the
earth in Sussex Gardens (the man's head) we are
told "is quite hard and withered." Of the
other, we learn, yet more horribly, that it " is that
of a female, with red hair appended." The frig
meut of the human foot hooked out of the C.tnal
is described as being " the fore-part of the foot
from the anele joint" and no more. An odd
skeleton or two about the same time turns up here
and there—evidently secreted away under rather
suspicious circumstanc r. And not by any mean:,
the least loathsome pact of the proceedings conse-
quent upon the discovery of that sickening carpet-
bag full of bones at Waterloo Bridge, is the fact
that, in the police-yard at 133 w-street, they have
been trying to fit one head after another on to the
mutilated remains of the poor murdered victim !
All this is surely very terrible and very
detestable ! But, f.,r that precise reason, it
ought on no account to be smoothed over, or
smothered up. We should, at once and earne;tly,
look well to this abomination. We should find
means without delay, we should adopt measures
prompt and well considered, with a view (if pos-
sible) to the prevention henceforth of the'possibility
of our having all the nobler sentiments of hurna-