Apprehending mutiny among their soldiers, revolt among their subjects, irruption from their Asiatic neighbours, or conquest by some European state, no longer guarded by their own country, but the objects of her just hostility, they would find themselves alone and unprotected in the world. In this friendless situation they could be supported by no generous enthusiasm, the child of patriotism and honour, which could awaken no feeling in their bosom but shame and remorse. Their numbers could only be kept up by adventurers, the refuse of the military profession in Europe. The civil wars, inevitable in such a state of things, would be not so much the consummation of their evils, as a refuge from such intolerable calamities. Happily for the British officers in India, (I speak not paradoxically, but considerately,) no such calamity is probable. They are sure of being haunted by so many "compunctious visitings of nature," from the thoughts of their friends, of their Sovereign, of their beloved country, as to impair that criminal energy necessary for the success of desperate enterprizes. Theirs is not a country, or a state of manners, or a system of religion and morality, which trains men to revolutionary sternness and ferocity. Their failure was, and ever will be, certain. But such convulsions bring dreadful consequences:--the loss of that collective character which was the source of pride to each individual, long regret and remorse, their hearts taught to dread generous and social feeling; and the most distinguished of them, if not condemned to death, still more unhappily abandoned to a dishonourable life. In their native land they will meet little or none of that sympathy which supports the sufferers for a general cause. Their discontent appears to spring only from the most ignoble sources. Those who have not visited India will not easily conceive that a pecuniary retrenchment is chiefly felt (_which it really is_) as a degradation, by an army already sufficiently excluded from the higher rewards of valour: first shut out from military honours, and then from that compensation for them which they had found in the prospect of returning home to the exercise of generous virtue. Last, and worst of all, they find that their more glaring and dangerous guilt has almost effaced the remembrance of that misconduct which produced it, and given popularity and character to those they deem their enemies.