THE POLICY OF AGGRANDIZEMENT. 



547 



Ireland was a conquered country and you might 

 do what you pleased in it : " If the king, by the 

 right of a conqueror, gives laws to his people, 

 the people must by the same reason be restored 

 to the right of the conquered to recover their 

 liberty if they can." The Scotch adore Wallace, 

 but if they caught a Wallace in India they would 

 blow him away from a gun. This inversion of 

 morality by the conqueror in his own favor, with 

 the effect which it produces on his character, is 

 one of the ugliest features of conquest. The 

 Sepoy was not a patriot, it is true, but he was 

 an alien, and more than an alien, in race and in 

 religion ; he was a mercenary serving for noth- 

 ing but his pay ; to look for love and loyalty at his 

 hands was looking for grapes on thistles ; there 

 could be no security for his fidelity but a vigilance 

 which had been relaxed, and precautions which 

 had been neglected. His caste — that is, his social 

 and religious existence — had been threatened, as 

 he imagined, by the greased cartridges. He had 

 further been worked upon by the fiendish cunning 

 of Nana Sahib, who had himself, it appears, been 

 turned from a sycophant into a malignant enemy 

 by unskillful handling. The frenzy into which 

 the Sepoys burst was of the sort to which all 

 barbarians are liable, and for which you must be 

 prepared if you choose to take barbarians into 

 your service. The wholesale slaughter of these 

 wretched men, in cold blood, when they had 

 laid down their arms, and in some cases when 

 they had apparently been guilty of little more 

 than being carried away like animals by a stam- 

 pede, may have been a political necessity of con- 

 quest, but it will never be described by impartial 

 history as an act of moral justice, and participa- 

 tion in it and in the hideous scenes of that pe- 

 riod generally could hardly fail to affect the char- 

 acter of the Englishmen engaged. The work of 

 Dr. Russell is well known. Lieutenant Majeridie's 

 " Up among the Pandies " is not so well known, 

 but it is a vivid, simple, and apparently truthful 

 photograph of scenes which that officer himself 

 witnessed. We give a couple of extracts below, 1 



1 " I have before adverted to the hardness of heart 

 which in some cases was shown by our men, and to the 

 careless and callous indifference with which they took 

 away human life ; and I will here relate one of several in- 

 stances which came under my notice in illustration of this 

 fact. After we had occupied the Iron Bridge for some 

 days, and when we supposed that the houses in the neigh- 

 borhood were quite clear of the enemy, we were aston- 

 ished one evening by hearing a shot in one of the many 

 buildings which we occupied, and, directly after, some of 

 the soldiers rushing in dragged out a decrepit old man, 

 severely wounded in the thigh. It seems that the sentry, 

 having heard somebody moving about the house, had 



and the reader will probably agree with Lieuten- 

 ant Majendie that, let the guilt of the sufferers 

 be what it would, the work of the executioners 

 must have bred in them " hardness of heart " and 

 " callous indifference to taking human life." Sup- 

 challenged, and, receiving no answer, fired, and hit the 

 poor old wretch in question in the leg. He was brought 

 out, and soon surrounded by a noisy, gaping crowd of 

 soldiers, who clamored loudly for his immediate execu- 

 tion, expressing themselves in language more remarkable 

 by its vigor than either its elegance or its humanity. 

 ' 'Ave his nut off,' said one ; ' Hang the brute,' cried an- 

 other ; ' Put him out of mess,' said a third ; ' Give him a 

 Cawnpore dinner' (six inches of steel), cried a fourth; 

 but the burden of all their cries was the same, and they 

 meant death. The only person in the group who ap- 

 peared unmoved and indifferent to what was going on was 

 he who certainly had every right to be the most interest- 

 ed. I mean the old man himself, whose stoicism one could 

 not but admire. He must have read his faie a hundred 

 times over in the angry gestures and looks of his captors, 

 but never once did he open his lips to supplicate for mer- 

 cy, or betray either agitation or emotion, giving one the 

 idea of a man bored by the noise and the proceedings 

 generally, but not otherwise affected. His was a case 

 which hardly demanded a long or elaborate trial. He was. 

 a native— he could give no account of himself— he had 

 been found prowling about our position at night ; stealth- 

 ily moving among houses, every one of which contained 

 a quantity of gunpowder, and where, for aught we knew, 

 and as was more than probable, mines may have existed, 

 which a spark dropped from his hand would have ignited 

 —or he was a spy, or— but what need of more ? In this 

 time of stern and summary justice (?) such evidence was 

 more than ample; he was given over to two men, who 

 received orders to ' destroy him ' (the expression usually 

 employed on these occasions, and implying in itself how 

 dreadfully common such executions had become), and 

 they led him away. This point being settled, the soldiers 

 returned to their games of cards and their pipes, and 

 seemed to feel no further interest in the matter, except 

 when the two executioners returned, and one of their com- 

 rades carelessly asked, ' Well Bill, what did yer do to 

 him 1 ' ' Oh,' said the man as he wiped the blood off an 

 old tulwar, with an air of cool and horrible indifference 

 which no words can convey—' oh, sliced his 'ed off,' resum- 

 ing his rubber, and dropping the subject much as a man 

 might who had drowned a litter of puppies " (page 222). 

 This old man, it will be observed, was not a Sepoy, he was 

 only a native, and not the slightest attempt appears to 

 have been made to verify the suspicion as to a mine of 

 gunpowder. In the next case the victim was a Sepoy, 

 taken in a skirmish, in which a British officer of a Sikh 

 regiment had fallen : 



" Infuriated beyond measure by the death of their offi- 

 cer, the Sikhs (assisted, I regret to say, by some English- 

 men) proceeded to take their revenge on this one wretch- 

 ed man. Seizing him by the two legs, they attempted to 

 tear him in two. Failing in this, they dragged him 

 along by the legs, stabbing him in the face with their 

 bayonets as they went. I could see the poor wretch writh- 

 ing as the blows fell upon him, and could hear his moans 

 as his captors dug the sharp bayonets into his lacerated 

 and trampled body, while his blood, trickling down, dyed 

 the white sand over which he was being dragged. But 

 the worst was yet to come : while still alive, though faint 



