Томас де Квинси
The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 1
4. It is most unfair, undoubtedly, to attack any man in our present imperfect state of information. But some neglects are unsusceptible of after excuse. One I have noticed, which cannot be denied or varnished, in Lord Canning. Another is this:—Had he offered 10,000 rupees (£1000 sterling) for the head of Nena Sahib, he would have got it in ten days, besides inflicting misery on the hell-kite.
III. SUGGESTIONS UPON THE SECRET OF THE MUTINY
(January, 1858.)
The first question arises upon the true originators, proximate and immediate, of the mutiny—who were they? This question ploughs deeper than any which moves under an impulse of mere historic curiosity; and it is practically the main question. Knowing the true, instant, operative cause, already we know something of the remedy;—having sure information as to the ringleaders, we are enabled at once to read their motives in the past, to anticipate their policy in the future;—having the persons indicated, those who first incited or encouraged the felonious agents, we can shorten the course of public vengeance; and in so vast a field of action can give a true direction from the first to the pursuit headed by our Indian police. For that should never be laid out of sight—that against rebels whose least offence is their rebellion, against men who have massacred by torture women and children, the service of extermination belongs of right to executioners armed with whips and rods, with the lassos of South America for noosing them, and, being noosed, with halters to hang them.65 It should be made known by proclamation to the sepoys, that de jure, in strict interpretation of the principle concerned, they are hunted by the hangman; and that the British army, whilst obliged by the vast scale of the outrages to join in this hangman's chase, feel themselves dishonoured, and called to a work which properly is the inheritance of the gallows; and yet, again, become reconciled to the work, as the purgation of an earth polluted by the blood of the innocent.
Who then, again I ask—who are those that, after seven months' watching of the revolt, appeared, by any plausible construction of events, to have been the primal movers in this hideous convulsion? Individual opinions on this question, and such as could plead a weight of authority in regard to experience, to local advantages for conjecture, and to official opportunities for overlooking intercepted letters, there have been many; and at first (say from May 10 to the end of June), in the absence of any strong counter-arguments, some of these were entitled to the full benefit of their personal weight (such weight, I mean, as could be drawn from the position or from the known character of him who announced the opinion). But now—namely, on the 15th of December (or, looking to India, say the 10th of November)—we are entitled to something weightier. And what is there which generally would be held weightier? First, there are the confessions of dying criminals;—I mean, that, logically, we must reserve such a head, as likely to offer itself sooner or later. Tempers vary as to obduracy, and circumstances vary. All men will not share in the obstinacy of partisan pride; or not, by many degrees, equally. And again, some amongst the many thousands who leave families will have favours to ask. They all know secretly the perfect trustworthiness of the British Government. And when matters have come to a case of choice between a wife and children, in the one scale, and a fraternity consciously criminal, in the other, it may be judged which is likely to prevail. What through the coercion of mere circumstances—what through the entreaties of wife and children, co-operating with such circumstances—or sometimes through weakness of nature, or through relenting of compunction—it is not to be doubted that, as the cohesion of party begins rapidly to relax under approaching ruin, there will be confessions in abundance. For as yet, under the timid policy of the sepoys—hardly ever venturing out of cover, either skulking amongst bushy woodlands, or sneaking into house-shelter, or slinking back within the range of their great guns—it has naturally happened that our prisoners have been exceedingly few. But the decisive battle before Lucknow will tell us another story. There will at last be cavalry to reap the harvest when our soldiery have won it. The prisoners will begin to accumulate by thousands; executions will proceed through week after week; and a large variety of cases will yield us a commensurate crop of confessions. These, when they come, will tell us, no doubt, most of what the sepoys can be supposed to know. But, meantime, how much is that? Too probably, except in the case of here and there some specially intelligent or specially influential sepoy officer, indispensable as a go-between to the non-military conspirators moving in darkness behind the rebel army, nothing at all was communicated to the bulk of the privates, beyond the mere detail of movements required by the varying circumstantialities of each particular case. But of the ultimate purpose, of the main strategic policy, or of the transcendent interests over-riding the narrow counsels that fell under the knowledge of the illiterate soldier, since no part was requisite to the fulfilment of each man's separate duty, no part would be communicated. It is barely possible that so much light as may be won from confessions, combined with so much further light as may be supposed to lurk amongst the mass of unexamined papers left behind them by the rebels at Delhi, might tell us something important. But any result to be expected from the Delhi papers is a doubtful contingency. It is uncertain whether they will ever be brought under the review of zeal united to sagacity sufficient for sustaining a search purely disinterested. Promising no great triumph for any literary purpose, proving as little, perhaps, one way or other, as the mathematician in the old story complained that the Æneid proved—these papers, unless worked by an enamoured bookworm (or paperworm), will probably be confiscated to some domestic purpose, of singeing chickens or lighting fires.
But, in any case, whether speaking by confessions or by the varied memoranda (orders to subaltern officers, resolutions adopted by meetings, records of military councils, petitions, or suggestions on the public service, addressed to the king, &c.), abandoned in the palace at Delhi, the soldier can tell no more than he knew, which, under any theory of the case, must have been very little. Better, therefore, than all expectations fixed on the vile soldiery, whom, in every sense, and in all directions, I believe to have been brutally ignorant, and through their ignorance mainly to have been used as blind servile instruments—better and easier it would be to examine narrowly whether, in the whole course and evolution of this stupendous tragedy, there may not be found some characterising feature or distinguishing incident, that may secretly report the agency, and betray, by the style and character of the workmanship, who might be the particular class of workmen standing at the centre of this unparalleled conspiracy. I think that we stand in this dilemma: either, on the one hand, that the miserable sepoys, who were the sole acting managers, were also the sole contrivers of the plot—in which case we can look for further light only to the judicial confessions; or, on the other hand, that an order of agents far higher in rank than any subaltern members of our army, and who were enabled by this rank and corresponding wealth to use these soldiers as their dupes and tools, stood in the background, holding the springs of the machinery in their hands, with a view to purposes transcending by far any that could ever suggest themselves to persons of obscure station, having no prospect of benefiting by their own fullest success. In this case, we shall learn nothing from the confessions of those who must, upon a principle of mere self-preservation, have been excluded from all real knowledge of the dreadful scheme to which they were made parties, simply as perpetrators of its murders and outrages. Here it is equally vain to look for revelations from the mercenary workers, who know nothing, or from the elevated leaders, who know all, but have an interest of life and death in dissembling their knowledge. Revelations of any value from those who cannot, and from those who will not, reveal the ambitious schemes communicated to a very few, are alike hopeless. In default of these, let us examine if any one incident, or class of incidents, in the course of these horrors, may not have made a self-revelation—a silent but significant revelation, pointing the attention of men to the true authors, and simultaneously to the final purposes, of this mysterious conspiracy.
Now, it has not escaped the notice of many people that two most extraordinary classes of outrages, perpetrated or attempted, have marked a very large majority of the mutinous explosions; outrages that were in the last degree unnatural, as out of harmony with the whole temper and spirit of intercourse generally prevailing between the sepoys and their British officers. The case is peculiarly striking. No reproach on the character of their manners was ever alleged against their British officers by any section or subdivision of the sepoy soldiery. Indeed, the reproach, where any existed, ran in the very opposite channel. Too great indulgence to the sepoy, a spirit of concession too facile to their very whims and caprices, and generally too relaxed a state of discipline—these features it was of the British bearing towards the native soldiery which too often, and reasonably, provoked severe censures from the observing. The very case66 which I adduced some months back, where an intelligent British officer, in the course of his evidence before some court-martial, mentioned, in illustration of the decaying discipline, that for some considerable space of time he had noticed a growing disrespect on the part of the privates; in particular, that, on coming into the cantonments of his own regiment, the men had ceased to rise from their seats, and took no notice of his presence—this one anecdote sufficiently exemplified the quality of the errors prevailing in the deportment of our countrymen to their native soldiery; and that it would be ludicrous to charge them with any harshness or severity of manner. Such being too notoriously the case, whence could possibly arise the bloody carnage by which, in almost every case, the sepoys inaugurated, or tried to inaugurate, their emancipation from British rule? Our continental neighbours at first grossly misinterpreted the case; and more excusably than in many other misinterpretations. Certainly it was unavoidable at first to read, in this frenzy of bloodshed, the vindictive retaliations of men that had suffered horrible and ineffable indignities at our hands. It was apparently the old case of African slaves in some West Indian colony—St. Domingo, for instance—breaking loose from the yoke, and murdering (often with cruel torments) the whole households of their oppressors. But a month dissipated these groundless commentaries. The most prejudiced Frenchman could not fail to observe that no sepoy regiment ever alluded to any rigour of treatment, or any haughtiness of demeanour. His complaints centred in the one sole subject of religion; even as to which he did not generally pretend to any certain knowledge, but simply to a very strong belief or persuasion that we secretly meditated, not that we openly avowed or deliberately pursued, a purpose of coercing him into Christianity. This, were it even true, though a false and most erroneous policy, could not be taxed with ill-will. A man's own religion, if it is sincerely such, is that which he profoundly believes to be the truth. Now, in seeking to inoculate another with that which sincerely he believes to be eminently the truth, though proceeding by false methods, a man acts in a spirit of benignity. So that, on all hands, the hellish fury of the sepoy was felt to be unnatural, artificially assumed, and, by a reasonable inference, was held to be a mask for something else that he wished to conceal. But what? What was that something else which he wished to conceal? The sepoy simulated, in order that he might dissimulate. He pretended a wrong sustained, that he might call away attention from a wrong which he designed. At this point I (and no doubt in company with multitudes beside that had watched the case) became sensible of an alien presence secretly intruding into this pretended quarrel of the native soldier. It was no sepoy that was moving at the centre of this feud: the objects towards which it ultimately tended were not such as could by possibility interest the poor, miserable, idolatrous native. What was he to gain by the overthrow of the British Government? The poor simpleton, who had been decoyed into this monstrous field of strife, opened the game by renouncing all the vast advantages which he and his children to the hundredth generation might draw from the system of the Company, and entered upon a career towards distant objects that for him have absolutely no meaning or intelligible existence. At this point it was that two enigmas, previously insoluble, suddenly received the fullest explanation:—
1. What was the meaning of that hellish fury suddenly developed towards officers with whom previously the sepoy had lived on terms of reciprocal amity?
2. What cause had led to that incomprehensible enmity manifested, in the process of these ferocious scenes, towards the wives and children of the officers? Surely, if his wish were to eliminate their families from the Indian territory, that purpose was sufficiently secured by the massacre of him whose exertions obtained a livelihood for the rest of the household.
It was tolerably certain that the widows and their children would not remain much longer in the Indian territory, when it no longer offered them an asylum or a livelihood. Now, since personally, and viewed apart from their husbands, these ladies could have no interest for the murdering sepoys, it became more and more unintelligible on what principle, steady motive, or fugitive impulse, these incarnate demons could persist in cherishing any feeling whatever to those poor, ruined women, who, when their anchorage should be cut away by the murder of their husbands, would become mere waifs and derelicts stranded upon the Indian shores.
These had seemed at first two separate mysteries not less hard to decipher than the primal mystery of the mutiny itself. But now all became clear; whatsoever might be the composition, or character, or final objects of that tyranny which had decoyed the sepoys under its yoke, one thing was certain—namely, that the childishness and levity of the Hindoo sepoy made it difficult in excess to gain any lasting hold over his mind, or consequently to count upon his lasting services. But to this general difficulty there had now supervened one signal aggravation, in a shape hateful to those who encountered it—namely, the attractions of the British service, which service would be no sooner abjured than it would be passionately regretted. Here lay the rock which threatened the free movement of the insurrection. It was evidently determined by those who meant to appropriate the services of the sepoys, that they should have no retreat, no opening for recovering a false step, in the well-known mercy of the British Government. For them it was resolved that there should be no locus penitentiæ left open. In order to close for ever that avenue to all hope of forgiveness, the misleaders of the soldiery urged them into those atrocities which every nation upon earth has heard of with horror. The mere fact of these atrocities indicates at once the overruling influence of such men as Nena Sahib, determined to place a bar of everlasting separation between the native army and that government which might else have reclaimed the erring men, had their offences lain within the reach of lawful forgiveness. The conspirators having thus divorced the ruling power, as they idly flattered themselves, from all martial resources, doubtless assumed the work of revolution already finished by midsummer-day of this present year. And this account of the course through which that attempted revolution travelled—according to which, not the sepoys, who could have had no ambition such as is implied in that attempt, but Indian princes and rajahs, standing in the background, were the true originators of the movement—finds an indirect justification of its own accuracy in the natural solution which it furnishes to those infernal massacres, which else, as they must remain for ever without a parallel, will also remain for ever without an intelligible motive. These atrocities were exacted from the sepoys by the conclave of princes as tests of their sincerity. Such doubtless was the argument for this exaction, the ostensible plea put forward to the miserable reptiles who were seduced into this treason, by the promise no doubt of sharing in the fruits of the new and mighty revolution. Such pleas were for the sepoy. But for himself and his own secret benefit the princely seducer needed all that he could obtain of such accursed acts, as the means sure and sudden of making the separation between the soldier and the government more and more irreparable.
So much for the massacre of his officers: but a different reason availed for the more diabolical outrages upon women and their children. The murder of the men was extorted from the sepoy as a kind of sacrifice. With them the reptile had lived upon terms of humanising intercourse; and, vile as he was, in many cases this must have slowly ripened into some mode of regard and involuntary esteem; so that, in murdering the man, oftentimes a sepoy was making a real (if trifling) sacrifice. But for females he cared nothing at all. And in my opinion they perished on a very different principle. The male murders were levied as pledges for the benefit of the princes, and very distinctly understood to be levied against the wishes of the sepoy. But in the female sacrifice all parties concurred—sepoy and prince, tempted and tempter alike. I require you to murder this officer, as a pledge of your real hostility (which else might be a pure pretence) to the government. But the murder of the officer's wife and child rested on a motive totally different—namely, this:—Throughout Hindostan no feature in the moral aspects of the British nature could have been so conspicuous or so impressive as the tenacity of purpose, the persistency, and the dogged resolution never to relax a grasp once taken. Consequently, had the men of our nation, and they separately from the women, scattered themselves here and there over the land (as they have long done in China, for instance), then, perhaps, the natives, when finding themselves in conflict with this well-known principle of imperishable tenacity, would be liable to a sentiment of despair, as in a contest with fate. And that sentiment would paralyse the Hindoos when entering upon a struggle for unrooting the British from Hindostan. But here suddenly, Woman steps in to aid the Hindoo. For the Briton, it is notorious, would never loosen his hold, more than his compatriot the bull-dog. But that scene which a man had faced steadily upon his own account, he shrinks from as a husband or a father. Hence the sepoy attacks upon women and children.
From hurried writing, it is to be feared that I may have done slight justice to my own views. Let me conclude this head therefore by briefly resuming.
The argument for tracing back the great conspiracy to the discontented rajahs is—that otherwise, and supposing the mutiny raised for objects specially affecting the sepoys, they would not have massacred their officers. They must have desired to leave an opening for pardon in the event of failure. That crime was exacted to compromise the native army effectually with the government. But this in many ways was sure to operate ruinously for the sepoy interests, and could therefore have found a sufficient motive only with the native princes.
But the female sacrifice was welcome to all parties. For no doubt they represented the British officer as saying:—So long as the danger affected only myself, I would never have relaxed my hold on India; but now, when the war threatens our women and children, India can no longer be a home for us.
Another urgent question concerns the acts of the Bengal Government. Many unfounded charges, as in a case of infinite confusion and hourly pressure, must be aimed at the Governor-General: the probability of such charges, and the multiplied experience of such charges, makes reasonable men cautious—in fact, unduly so; and the excess of caution reacts upon Lord Canning's estimation too advantageously. Lord Dalhousie is missed; his energy would have shown itself conspicuously by this time. For surely in such a case as the negotiation with Bahadoor Jung of Nepaul, as to the Ghoorkas, there can be no doubt at present, though a great doubt, unfairly indulgent to Lord Canning, was encouraged at first, that most imbecile oscillation governed the Calcutta counsels. And it is now settled that this oscillation turned entirely upon a petty personal motive. A subordinate officer had accepted the Nepaul offer, and by that unauthorised acceptance had intruded upon the prerogative of Lord Canning. The very same cause—this jealous punctiliousness of exacting vanity, and not any wish to enforce the severities of public justice—interfered to set aside the proclamation of Mr. Colvin at Agra. The insufficiency again of the steps taken as to Nena Sahib speaks the same language. In this very journal, full six weeks earlier than in the Calcutta proclamation, the offer of a large sum67 for this man's head had been suggested. That offer was never kept sufficiently before the public eye. But a grosser neglect than this, as affecting the condition of many thousands, and not of any single villain, was the non-employment of the press in pursuing the steps of the mutineers. Everywhere, as fast as they appeared in any strength, brief handbills should have been circulated—circumstantially relating their defeats, exposing their false pretences, and describing their prospects. Once only the government attempted such a service; and blundered so far as to urge against the sepoys a reproach which must have been unintelligible both to them and to all native readers.
Again, a question even more practical and instant arises as to the modes of public vengeance.
1. If, when finally defeated, and in a military sense destroyed, on some signal field of battle, the mutineers should fly to the hills in the great ranges, or the jungle, the main fear would arise not from them, but from the weak compromising government, that would show itself eager to treat, and make what the Roman law calls a transactio, or half-and-half settlement with any body of sepoys that showed a considerable strength. But, in such a case, besides that the rebels, having now no Delhi, will have scanty ammunition, our best resource would be found in the Spanish bloodhounds of Cuba, which we British used fifty years back for hunting down the poor negro Maroons in Jamaica, who were not by a thousand degrees so criminal as the sepoys.
2. That no wrong is done to the Bengal Government by this anticipation of an eventual compromise, may be judged by the assertion (resting apparently on adequate authority), that even at this hour that government are making it a subject for deliberation and doubt—whether the sepoys have forfeited their pensions! Doubtless, the Delhi and Cawnpore exploits merit good-service pensions for life!
3. Others by millions, who come to these questions in a far nobler spirit, fear that at any rate, and with every advantage for a righteous judgment, too many of the worst sepoys laden with booty may find means to escape. To these I would suggest that, after all, the appropriate, worst, and most hellish of punishments for hellish malefactors, is mortification and utter ruin in every one of their schemes. What is the thrust of a bayonet or the deepest of sabre-cuts? These are over in a few moments. And I with others rejoiced therefore that so many escaped from Delhi for prolonged torment. That torment will be found in the ever-rankling deadly mortification of knowing that in all things they and their wicked comrades have failed; and that in the coming spring, and amongst the resurrections of spring, when all will be finished, and the mighty storm will have wheeled away, there remains for the children of hell only this surviving consciousness—that the total result has been the awakening of our Indian Government, and the arming it for ever against a hideous peril, that might else have overwhelmed it unprepared in an hour of slumbering weakness. Such a game is played but once; and, having failed, never again can it be repeated.
