The Sun.
London, England, 1857-12-21 00:00:00

July, '57 ; your wives and daughters are here in

misery, and at the disposal of savages, who have
ravished both young and old, and then killed us.
Oh ! oh !my child, my child ! Countrymen,
avenge it 1"
We have no wish to stir up barbarian passions
in the bosoms of a Christianised and civilised com-
munity, but we ask, with these specimen facts
before us, what aro we to say to those traitors to
our common humanity, who still whine about pity
for these wretches ? If JONATHAN ltoosE was
rightly sentenced to penal servitude for life, what
ought to be the sentence of these brutes? If
humanity demands that the English brute should
receive no mercy at the hands of society, why is
the Sepoy brute to receive it ? The English
savage mutilated and half killed the woman whose
unwise fondness had enabled him to blast her
fame for life, because his own character would
suffer a little. But the Sepoy brutes violated the
persons of the very women, from whom, and from
their husbands, they had received both confidence
and kindness, and then murdered or mutilated
them from fiendish cruelty. If their swinish
lust could, in any sense, excuse what every native
would avenge with torture or death on the spot in
the case of his own women, what can be said for
these hellish cruelties ? They were not even of
the slightest service to the perpetrators, since
they would not save them from any consequences
whatever.

Let then, Mr. J. P. GRANT, at Allahabad, and
all the civil service men who try to screen
the Sepoys, under whose guardian-angelship we
read that they walk about the town, inwardly
glorying in their comrades, and probably, in their
own villanies,—let them all know that England
will reckon with them speedily. They may be as
merciful as they please to unarmed natives, justly
suspected though they may be ; but of mercy to
a mutinous regiment England will hear nothing.
Death is the due of every mutineer. He knew it
when he mutinied. Yet, we would inflict penal
servitude, for life, on all who were not direct par-
ticipators or accomplices in the murders and other
atrocities, simply because of the necessity of
making a difference ; while we, who cannot tor-
ture, can inflict nothing worse than death. Even
the disarmed regiments, since they have learned
military drill, are dangerous, and deserve to be
employed for life on public works. But all who,
at such a time as this, have disobeyed orders, or
worse, with arms in their hands, if they have
done nothing else, ought yet to be annihilated as
soldiers. Extermination by the gallows, or by
penal servitude for life, must be the fate of every
mutinous Sepoy—of every one who can be captured
by our arms, or by offers of reward. The very
name of Sepoy ought to be interdicted ; and the
possession of fire-arms forbidden to every native
in the districts where mutiny has existed.
It is not needful, we know, to rouse our sol-
diers to their duty. They will do it, despite all
the GRANTS and all the DORINS in the world.
(By the way, most happy are we to learn from
the Calcutta papers that this "very Sybarite"
has resigned for next May—why not resign at
once ?) Our soldiers, we repeat, know their duty
to the violators and murderers of women and chil-
dren, and will do it ; they are yet Englishmen—
Englishmen not emasculated by the climate and
by sensitiveness to everything which convicts the
civil service and the old Indians of overweening
conceit and folly. They regard the hanged sepoy
as a tribute to justice, and care not that his exe•
cution proclaims the imbecility of the men wheat
all the independent Europeans wish to depose
from office and relegate to England. What we
fear is the cruel. lenity of the civil service when
martial law ceases. England will demand one
rule, that—By death or slavery the present sepoy
regiments must vanish from the face of society.