Under such circumstances, there could be little doubt of the ultimate success of Government in the measures adopted for subduing the refractory European officers of the army. We shall now examine the dangers by which these measures were likely to be attended. These were numerous, and all of an alarming political magnitude[23]. The greatest, was the shock which was given by this proceeding to that attachment between the European officer and the natives under his command, which, from the first establishment of the Company in India to the present moment, had been looked upon as one of the principal, if not the chief, sources of our strength in India. This body of officers has been hitherto justly considered as the great means by which British India was conquered, and by whose fidelity, knowledge and courage, it was to be maintained. They were comparatively a few persons, through whom a large foreign army was not only disciplined, but attached to the present state. Their station was one of more than ordinary trust, their duties very sacred, and they had for a long period of years been distinguished by the manner in which these had been performed. A part of them had been seduced, and misled into error, and ultimately hurried away, by their passion and resentment against individuals in authority, to the most criminal extremes. They certainly had merited, in the strictness of military law, the most serious punishment; and it was, no doubt, as far as the principles of that law were concerned, most desirable, for the sake of example, that punishment should be inflicted, particularly as those officers had in this instance endeavoured to pervert that complete obedience which their men owed them, into an engine of faction and revolt; and to render the attachment of those under their command, which had been so long considered the safety of their country, its future bane and danger. That any body of officers should have, or conceive they had, the power of furthering their own views or interests by means so desperate, and so entirely subversive of the foundations of all order and government, was, no doubt, an evil of great magnitude: but it should have been recollected, that the connexion between the native soldiers and their European officers is the cherished plant of a hundred years: and before we can account those men wise who laid the axe to its trunk, it must be proved that the existing spirit of insubordination among the European officers was attended with dangers as imminent and as incapable of remedy, as the evil that has been embraced by the deliberate dissolution of this great bond of our strength and safety. Some persons, who refer to a former occasion[24] on which the Indian army are supposed in some degree to have overawed the Government into a redress of their grievances, and viewing only one side of this great question, may argue, that it was rather desirable to adopt a measure