The Ashland union. [volume] (Ashland, Ashland County, Ohio) 1854-1868, 1857-10-28
British Atrocities in India in For.
mer Times.

When VIC consider the terrible at.
~rocities perpetrated by the British Gov.
ernment in India ever since it's establish.
ment there of the military d~espotism OF
the East India Company, it is not sur
prislng that the natives should make, as
10. the recent case of the Sepoy insur.
gents, a retribution SO savage and brutal
that it seems to be the work of fends
rather than of men. On the trial Of
Warren Hastings in England, during
the reign of George III, such evidence
was brought to light of the cruelty
practiced upon the Hindocs as chilled
the heart of the civilized world, with
the exception of the British aTistocracy.
1t makes one's blood run cold, even at
the present day, to read Burke's recital
of the deeds of Hastings and his Brit.
ish satraps in India. Listen to him as
he speaks to the House of Lords:
"My Lords, they Hastings servants,
began their atrocities by winding cords
around the fingers of the unhappy free.
holder, until they clung to and were al.
most incorporated with one another, and
then they hammered wedges of iron be-
tween them, until. regardless of the
cries of the sufferers, they had bruised
to pieces and forever crippled these hon.
est, innocent, laberious hands, which had
never been raised to their mouths but
with a penurious and scanty proportion
of the fruits of their own soil, &c. =
They made rods of a plant highly caus.
tic and poisonous, called GecAetta, every
wound of which testers and gapgrenes
At night these poor martyrs O.
avarice and extortion were consigned tc
dungeons, three times scourged, and
made to reck on the watches of the
night by periods and intervals of Tor
ment. They were led cut
before the break Of day, stiff and sore
as they were with the bruises and wound:
of the night, we're plunged into water,
and while their jaws chung together with
the cold, the blows and stripes were re.
moved on their backs. On
the same principle and for the same
ends, virgins who had never seen the SUI
we're dragged from the inmestsanctuarics
of their houses. and iu The open Courts
of Justice, these virgins, vaiuly invok
iRg Heaven and Earth in the presoEc,
of their parents, and while their shrieks
were mingled with the indignant eric,
aud groaLs of all sbe people, were pub
licly violated by the lowest and most
wicked of the human race. Wives were
torn from their husbands and suffered
the same fiagitious wrongs. =
Often they were out of the consoliDe
gloom of their dungeons, stripped naked:
and thus exposed to the world ; cruelty
scourged; and, in order hat cruelty
might riot in all the circumstances that
melt into tenderness the ~iercest natures,
the nipples of their breasts were put be-
tween the sharp and elastic sides of cleft
bamboos."
Every human heart, the world over,
will pity the unfortunate English women
and children upon whom the enraged
Hindoos have retaliated the outrages
and murders of Give and Hastings;
but the English as a nation deserve no
sympathy in any quarter of the globe,
and least of all in the United States
They are getting paid back in their own
coin. The measure that they melted out
to the natives Of India, has been meted
out to them, and they have no right to
complain.