20 FEBRUARY 1858, Page 19

THE CEYLON REBELLION.

Lesheth How, Ambleside, 4th February 1858. Sue—In reading the Reverend Mr. Gurney's Sermons, and the notes append- ed to them, on the Indian Mutiny, I have been forcibly reminded of the re- hellion in Ceylon, of which I was a witness, now forty years ago. Its outbreak was as sudden and as unexpected, its progress very similar ; and may the termination and consequences of the two be alike,—those, the con- sequences, in India as in Ceylon, a better system of government, founded on a wider basis of humanity to meet wants, feelings, and aspirations, common to Hindoes with their fellow men.

The voice raised in these admirable discourses against reckless revenge, against confounding the innocent and guilty, against the treatment of the Natives as savage beasts that the earth is to be rid of, it is to be hoped will find a cheering response in the reflecting minds of our countrymen ; the acts denounced being equally inhuman, impolitic, and unchristian. It is right we should hold in abhorrence the deeds of cruelty perpetrated by the Sepoys. But are these deeds of theirs, terrible as they have been, a novelty ? Have not like deeds and atrocities been committed by Eu- ropeans, and even by our own people ? Every civil war, every war of reli- gion, affords proof in the affirmative) thetreatment of the Moors by the Spaniards, of the Albigenses by their Roman Catholic fellow subjects, of the Covenanters by the Episcopalians. To revert to the rebellion in Cey- lon, too well do I remember the many acts of cruelty, some equal or nearly equal to the worst charged against the Sepoys, committed by our troops on the unresisting and unarmed Cingalese of the interior. In writing an ac- count of that rebellion, I described some of its horrors : before publication, I submitted the account to General Sir Robert Brownrigg, who was Governor of Ceylon at the time and commander of the forces, and who I am sure would have prevented them—the deeds of cruelty—had it been in his power ; at his request I suppressed the details, (an omission perhaps wrong,) these being, as he said, disgraceful to our troops, and not likely to be, however true, of any service if made known to the world. In war, too often considered glorious in its "pride, pomp, and circum- stance," it cannot be gainsaid that the fiercer and the evil passions predo- minate; and how much more so in the worst of wars, a civil war. Then indeed the Furies, these very passions personified, are let loose ; and whether in Delhi or Paris, in the glens of the Atlas or of the Highlands of Scotland, wherever the country, whatever the race, paree vials is too commonly for- gotten, and such redeeming orders as those of General Wilson given on the occasion of the storming of Delhi are, it would appear, rather the exception than the rule ;—terrible indeed is the old storming licence !

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