KAYE'S SEPOY WAR.*
Mn. KATE cannot be accused of writing on too compressed a scale. The first volume of this history contains 640 pages, very closely printed, illustrated with ample notes, a considerable ap- pendix, and a sufficient index, and it is only an introduction. It ends with the arrival of the telegram which announced to Cal- cutta the explosion at Meerut, that is, with the very first incident in the mutiny proper. It comprises a sketch of all the causes which, in the writer's opinion, tended to produce the catastrophe, a history of the army which was its principal motor, and accounts of all the great English personages mixed up with its earlier incidents. As an introduction, though perhaps too lengthy, the book has very remarkable merit. Closely filled with details, it is singularly free from obscurity, indeed Somewhat too free,—human motives, impulses, and actions being rarely so transparent as they appear in this volume to be. The narrative, though of necessity not often stirring, is everywhere easy, flowing, and graceful, and rises here and there into passages of high, if some- what over-artistic eloquence. Its first peculiarity, however, is fairness, that fine sense of justice which will not even criticize an enemy without acknowledging the merits which make it worth while to spend one's breath in opposing his views or ex- posing his projects. Mr. Kaye by the structure of his mind is 'incapable of personal rancour, and be has trained his poli- tical prepossessions into so rigorous a subjection that he can see and acknowledge the grand design underlying projects _which in his judgment 'produce nothing but mischief. He has been amply supplied with information, having besides his access to the records of the India House, the papers at the disposal of the executors of Lord Canning, of Sir James Outram, and of Colonel Baird Smith, the assistance of Sir John Lawrence,- Sir Herbert Edwardes, and many others who occupied prominent posts during the great struggle. His bias is of course towards the ideas known in India as "old Indian," but except in the single instance of the annexation of Oude we cannot perceive that political feeling has in any sense warped his judgment. Upon that point lie is either misinformed or wilfully blind to the bearing of his informa- tion. There is not the slightest ground for believing that Lord Dalhousie's minute against the annexation of Oude, which he quotes, was a " transparent disguise," that he intended anything more than his words conveyed, viz., to sequestrate the country, that is, to substitute temporarily a Resident for a king, with on undisturbed native administration. It is within our per- sonal knowledge that Lord Dalhousie felt the final resolution of the Cabinet, prepared by a committee of three, of whom Lord Canning was one, as a personal rebuke to himself, and that he omtemplated for twenty-four hours resigning at once rather than, as he felt it, yield the victory to his own subordinate, Mr. J. P. Grant. It was the extraordinary minute of that gentleman, perhaps the ablest and most eloquent paper ever written upon an Indian project, which finally determined the Cabinet to order the annexation of Oude. With this exception, however, and allowing always for his bias towards a party, Mr. Kaye is just, or if be fails, fails only from a kindly unwillingness to pronounce the verdict of crass incompetence which several of those he mentions deserve. His estimate of Lord Dalhousie strikes us as peculiarly fair, and affords a striking contrast to the wretched_ abuse in which men who while he was alive basked in his smile have since his death indulged. It is a long extract, but it is one better worth reading than any criticism we shall write, one worthy alike of the historian and his subject.
"When, on the last day of February, 1856, 'the Most Noble' the 3farquis of Dalhousie placed the Portfolio of the Indian Empire in the
• 7914 &lam War. By J. W. Kaye. Loudon; William Alleu and Co hands of his successor, all men said that a great statesman and a great ruler was about to depart from the land. The praises that were bestowed upon him had been well earned. He had given Ids life to the public service ; and many feared, as they sorrowfully bade him farewell, that be had given it up for the public good. He stood before men at that time as the very embodiment of Success. Whatsoever ho had attempted to do he had done with his whole heart, and he had perfected it without a failure or a flaw. The policy which during those eventful eight years had been so consistently maintained was emphatically his policy. The success, therefore, was fairly his. No man had ever stamped his individuality more clearly upon the public measures of his times. There are periods when the Government fades into an impersonality; when men cease to associate its measures with the idea of one dominant will. But during the reign then ended we heard little of the Government ;' in every one's mouth was the name of the individual Man. And in this remarkable individual manhood there was the very essence and con- centration of the great national manhood; there was an intense Englishism in him such as has seldom been equalled. It was the Englishism, too, of the nineteenth century ; and of that particular epoch of the nineteenth century when well nigh every one had the word progress' on his lips, and stagnation was both disaster and disgrace. A man of strong convictions and extraordinary activity of mind, ho laid fast hold of the one abstract truth that English Government, English laws, English learning, English customs, and English manners, are better than the Government; the laws, the learning, the customs, and the manners of India; and with all the earnestness of his nature and all the strength of his understanding he wrought out this great theory in practice. He never doubted that it was good alike for England and for India that the map of the country which he had been sent to govern should present one surface of Red. He was so sure of this, he believed it so honestly, so conscientiously, that courageous and self-reliant as he was, he would have carried out this policy to the end, if all the chief officers and agents of his Government had been arrayed against him. But he commenced his career at a time when the ablest of our public functionaries in India, with a few notable exceptions, had forsaken the traditions of the old school—the school of Malcolni, of Elphinstone, and of Metcalfe—and stood eager and open-armed to embrace and press closely to them the very doctrines of which they perceived in Dalhousie so vigorous an exponent. He did not found the school; neither were his opinions moulded in accordance with its tenets. He appeared among them and placed himself at their head, just at the very time when such a coming was needed to give consistency to their faith, and uniformity to their works. The coincidence had all the force of a dis- pensation. No prophet ever had more devoted followers. No king was ever more loyally served. For the strong faith of his disciples made them strive mightily to accomplish his will ; and he had in a rare de- gree the faculty of developing in his agents the very powers which were most essential to the fitting accomplishment of his work. He did not create those powers, for he found in his chief agents the instincts and energies most essential to his purpose ; but he fostered, he strengthened, and directed them, so that what might have run to weed and waste without his cherishing care, yielded under his culture, in ripe profusion, a harvest of desired results But one fatal defect in his character tainted the stream of his policy at the source, and con- verted into brilliant errors some of the most renowned of his achieve- ments. No man who is not endowed with a comprehensive imagination can govern India with success. Dalhousie had no imagination. Lack- ing the imaginative faculty, men, after long years of experience, may come to understand the national character ; and a man of lively imagi- nation, without such experience, may readily apprehend it after the intercourse of a few weeks. But in neither way did Dalhousie ever come to understand the genius of the people among whom his lot was cast. He had but one idea of them—an idea of a people habituated to the despotism of a dominant race. He could not understand the tena- city of affection with which they clung to their old traditions. He could not sympathize with the veneration which they felt for their ancient dynasties. He could not appreciate their fidelity to the time- honoured institutions and the immemorial usages of the land. Ho had not the faculty to conceive that men might like their own old ways of government, with all their imperfections and corruptions about them, better than our more refined systems. Arguing all points with the pre- ciseness of a Scotch logician, he made no allowance for inveterate habits and ingrained prejudices, and the scales of ignorance before men's eyes which will not suffer them rightly to discern between the good and the bad. He could not form a true dramatic conception of the feelings with which the representative of a long lino of kings may be supposed to regard the sudden extinction of his royal house by the decree of a stranger and an infidel, or the bitterness of spirit in which a greybeard chief, whose family from generation to generation had enjoyed ancestral powers and privileges, might contemplate his lot when suddenly reduced to poverty and humiliation by an incursion of aliens of another colour and another creed. He could not see with other men's eyes ; or think with other men's brains ; or feel with other men's hearts. With the characteristic unimaginativeness of his race he could not for a moment divest himself of his individuality, or conceive the growth of ancestral pride and national honour in other breasts than those of the Campbells and the Ramsays."
We feel sorely tempted as we read that brilliant passage to put in a demurrer, to show, as we believe we can do, that want of imagination was not Lord Dalhousie's defect, but want of sympathy with the Oriental tone of thought ; but we must per- force refrain. The stern pride of the man has locked up his papers for years, and till they are set free his real nature, and the wealth of personal love which he contrived to evoke, and which was never yet granted to an unimaginative man, must remain un- known. We would only remark that he has been dead for years, that he died silent while England believed that his policy had produced the mutiny, and that to this hour there is not one man of his great personal following who does not resent the sligh slur on his name as a personal and deep offence.
Mr. Kaye's view of the causes of the mutiny is a compromise between the opinion of those who believe' it to have been an outburst cf national feeling, and those who consider it caused by the incident of the greased cartridges. Ha thinks that events had tended for years to produce a serious discontent. The prac- tice-of annexation had offended the native sense of justice, and the war carried on by Government against the native nobility had irritated every man'of family and position. This hostility was, though unavowed, perfectly real, Sir John Lawrence in the Punjab and Mr. Thoma=on in the North-West, two utterly differ- ent men, mashing 'the noblesse with equal zeal under the idea that they were thereby advancing the interests of the peasant proprietors. They in fact carried out French ideas without per- ceiving that the population they intended to benefit was strongly opposed to their views. Then the army had fallen into a state of very indifferent discipline. Mr. Kaye gives a vivid account of the minor Mutinies which preceded the great one, of the wrath of the sepoys at the massacre of 1824, when a regiment was shot down without warning for refusing to go to sea, of the effect of the loosened ties between the officer and his men. He condemns utterly the abolition of the practice of flogging, which left dis- missal almost the only secondary punishment, and brings out with new force the effect of the order compelling all new re- cruits to enlist for general service, an order which, however, was visibly essential to the Empire. Ho accounts by an accumula- tion of unlucky incidents for the spread of the belief that the English intended to force Christianity on the sepoys, and gives a great but by no means exaggerated importance to the oc- casion of the outbreak, the preparation of the greased car- tridges.
"The Brahmin carried this story to his comrades, and it was soon known to every sepoy at the depot. A shudder ran through the lines. Each man to whom the story was told caught the great fear from his neighbour, and trembled at the thought of the pollution that lay before him. The contamination was to be brought to his very lips ; it was not merely to be touched, it was to be eaten and absorbed into his very being. It was so terrible a thing that, if the most malignant enemies of the British Government had sat in conclave for years, and brought an excess of devilish ingenuity to bear upon the invention of a scheme framed with the design of alarming the sepoy mind from one end of India to the other, they could not have devised a lie better suited to the purpose. But now the English themselves'had placed in the hands of their enemies not a fiction, but a fact of tremendous significance, to be turned against them as a deadly instrument of destruction. It was the very thing that had been so long sought, and up to this time sought in vain. It required no explanation. It needed no ingenious gloss to make the full force of the thing itself patent to the multitude. It was not a suggestion, an inference, a probability, but a demonstrative fact so complete iu its naked truth that no exaggeration could have helped it. Like the case of the leathern head-dresses, which had convulsed Southern India half a century before, it appealed to the strongest feelings both of the Mohammedan and the Hindoo; but though similar in kind, it was incomparably more offensive in degree—more insulting, more appalling, more disgusting."
The cartridges were never issued, but the sepoys were already convinced that Government intended an attack upon caste, in order that by inducing the soldiery to forfeit their peculiarities they might compel them to serve in any quarter of the world. The story flew from station to station, until at last on 12th of May, 1857, a little paper was forwarded from house to house of the members of Council.
"The little paper, then, on the 12th of May, travelling from house to house in the office-box, was a telegraphic message from Lieutenant- Governor Colvin, announcing to Lord Canning that the great military station of Meerut was in a blaze, that the cavalry had risen in a body, and that every European they had mot had been slain by the insur- gents. Ihere was something terribly significant in the very form of this message. The Government of Agra had received no official tidings of the events that had occurred at Meerut. But a lady at the former place, who had been about to pay a visit to her friends at Meerut, had received a message from her niece, who was sister of the postmaster there, warning her not to attempt the journey, as the cavalry had risen. This was the last message despatched. Before the authorities could send intelligence of what had happened, the telegraph -wires wore out by the insurgents."
Mr. Kaye has yet the whole of the true " history" of this great outbreak to publish, and we must reserve real criticism for a subse- qttentvolume, but we venture to call his earnest attention to two points.. One is the history of the civil measures adopted by Lord Canning to meet the mutiny—the Six Acts, &c., of which no one in England knows anything, all public information having by a strange accident gone down .in the Alma, and the other a sub- ject on which even Anglo-Indians are profoundly ignorant. What did the leaders of the mutiny do in the districts in which they set up a quasi-regular government, such as Rohilcund ? There must exist in the archives accessible to Mr. Kaye reports from the civil officers replaced by Lord Clyde's victories des- cribing the state of affairs they found, and from them it is pos-
sible to gain a clear if not a full idea of the changes introduced into our system by natives left at liberty to act. No such con- tribution has ever been made to our kuowlege of native ideas as these documents might be made to yield in such hands as Mr. Kaye's, and we trust when the time arrives he will in this instance forego his otherwise wise resolution of trusting to private documents rather than to public records. We wish him every success in a work which if he completes it will be the only com- plete history of the grandest episode in the English career of empire.
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