LORD CANNING.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR:1 SIR,-With regard to your impression that Lord Canning revised sentences passed in the North-West Provinces of India, under the special Acts of 1857, and the extract from the Friend of India of October, 1859, you give in support of your view, I well remember officiating as the Deputy-Judge- Advocate-General to General Walpole's division, at the trial of a rebel Sepoy, who had been taken in the advance of that force through Oude, immediately after the fall of Lucknow in April, 1858. The court-martial was held under the pro- visions of the Act of 1857 regulating the proceedings for the trials of mutineers.. The finding and sentence of death were confirmed by the General, and the prisoner was blown from a gun the next morning. It is evident that Lord Canning did not revise that sentence, and I am equally certain that the Commissioners accompanying the forces employed in sup- pressing the rebellion exercised the powers given them by the Acts, as Mr. Seton-Karr says, entirely without reference to other authority; If it had not been so, we should not have seen, as we did occasionally when we moved on our march in the morning twilight, dead men hanging on the trees in the neighbourhood of the night's camping-ground.—I am, Sir, &a., C. W. EARLE, late Captain, Rifle Brigade. 4 Cadogan Gardens, S.W., February 9th.
[Our authority was the official report quoted in the Friend of India. We cannot pretend at the distance of thirty-three years to reconcile all discrepancies ; but we presume the truth to be that in certain classes of cases sentences were submitted to Lord Canning, and in others not. If this was not so, what created his published impression that much injustice had been done P—En. Spectator.]
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