Another little quarrel on our hands has not been brought
to a close—the disturbance in the centre of Bengal. We have already reported the outbreak of the Santa's, inhabitants of the hill dis- trict about two hundred miles from Calcutta ; and so far as events are concerned, there is little more to report than that the disturb-. ance continues and has spread. The insurgents appear to increase in numbers, they extend their aggressions, and they have sacked factories as well as sacrificed life by thousands. It turns out that the primitive superstition which serves them for a religion has been exasperated into a new fanaticism by an infusion of a so- called "Christianity " : as in the case of China, the Gospel of St. John has been administered to them in a way that has con- verted them into a species of revolutionary Latter-Day Saints; and they have their John of Leyden prepared to establish a perpetual dynasty, to the total discomfiture of Ifahomed- ans, Brahmins, and British. Perhaps, pushing Englishmen, who have suggested to these rude savages ideas of a possession in the soil by settling them upon it with ideas of divine right by an ill-considered distribution of St. John, have not taken emfficient pains to enlighten the people whose pride they pampered. At the same time, they have alarmed their jealousy by bringing amongst them factories, railways, and other signs of possession and' indus- try ; which produced upon the Santals exactly the same effect as the phenomena have done upon the natives of the West of Ire- land. It is evident that these people, inhabiting a district so near to the British capital of the province, have been neglected ; and we have to pay for the moral neglect in the lives and property destroyed, and in the cost of putting down the insurrection for- cibly.
