SEPOY - GENERALS.
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR:1
SIR,—The writer of the letter with the above heading in the Spectator of February 8th seems to me to miss the point of Mr. Seton-Karr's letter in the preceding number, and so to confuse the whole issue between him and Mr. Forrest, or Mr. Forrest's reviewer. The point, I take it, of Mr. Seton-Karr's letter is that Sir John Lawrence was bound, while doing all that man could do to stem the tide of mutiny, to take a wide view, to look ahead, to look beyond Peshawur, the extreme frontier, beyond the Punjaub, the most recently acquired and —thanks to his own exertions and those of his brother, Sir Henry Lawrence—the most loyal of Indian provinces, to the vast Empire of which it formed only a part. Edwardes and others stationed at Peshawur, and alive to its great local importance, argued—they would hardly have been human if they had not done so—as if Peshawur were India. Lawrence —he would hardly have been Lawrence if he had not done so—took a wider, and perhaps a truer, view. He knew Delhi and its inhabitants as no one else at the time knew it, the historical capital, the Rome of India, the seat of the greatest of the Moguls. To argue, as your correspondent does, that Delhi was not then regarded as important because it was not properly' garrisoned by Europeans is a short-sighted argu- ment. It is to forget how blind the chief authorities in India `were at the time to dangers which, wise after the event, we see, or fancy that we see, were staring them in the face. Had the siege of Delhi, the heart of India, been abandoned just at the time when, if the little force upon the Ridge were adequately reinforced, it might be expected to fall, the flame of mutiny must have burst out from it not in one, but in every direction, just as the blood circulates from the heart to all the extremities of the body. The phantom of the Mogul sovereignty would have been a. phantom no longer, but the sternest of realities. On the other hand, to retire from Peshawur in favour of Dost Mohammed would at the worst have opened only one approach to India; and between the fanatical Mahommedans of Delhi and the much wilder and still more fanatical Mahommedans of Afghanistan —had Dost Mohammed, one of the ablest rulers , that -Afghanistan ever had, been unable to hold them suf- ficiently in check—there lay the living rampart . of those splendid Sikhs, on whose hatred, national and religious, to the Muslim, and on whose loyalty to ourselves, Sir John Lawrence had proved that he could safely count. To retire to one corner of "the Peninsula" in order that he might save and regain the whole was the truest wisdom and the truest courage of Sir Arthur. Wellesley. To propose to retire in case of dire necessity from one outlying corner of a peninsula immeasurably vaster than Spain in order to save the whole was probably the truest wisdom and courage of Sir John Lawrence. • The valour and loyalty of the Sikhs might well have proved a Torres Vedras to Afghan invaders. Lawrence was never afraid of being thought' to be afraid, the most con- temptible form of cowardice, and thanks chiefly to his exertions the dire necessity never came.—I am, Sir, Jr-c., [We publish Mr. Bosworth Smith's able summing up of the case, but must now close the correspondence. — En. Spectator.]
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