The reviewer appears resolved to deny every fact that can even palliate the guilt of the officers of the Madras army. He terms their desire to submit to Lord Minto a difference in point of form, "a saving to their pride, not to their consciences;" and he is amused with the assertion, that the love of their country had a decided operation in defeating their guilty proceedings. The man who reasons thus coolly upon such events, has probably never witnessed a scene at all resembling that of which he treats; or he would have discovered, that when passion seizes that ground which reason has abandoned, men act more under the influence of feelings than forms; and with minds deluded, but not debased, they make a vain attempt to reconcile the most opposite principles of conduct, and fall, _self-subdued_, by those virtues which are implanted too deeply in their hearts to be eradicated by the sudden action, however violent, of a guilty but transient impulse. The able writer in the review conceives that he has at once discovered the chief cause of the late disturbances, and the best apology for the Company's officers concerned in them, in the constitution of the Company's service, and the habits of those that belong to it. The atmosphere they imbibe is calculated, in his opinion, to relax all just ideas of subordination; and they are, he infers, predisposed, from such causes, to an opposition to the authority placed over them. Some disposition to resistance may no doubt be found in every community, civil as well as military, that ever existed; and to the existence of this universal and natural feeling every excellence of human government may be traced. But let us suppose that this disposition had, from local circumstances and other causes, attained such a degree among the Company's officers in India, as to threaten the public tranquillity; what does this prove? It is, _if true to the extent stated in the review_, not an excuse for those who produced that crisis which has been described; but an eulogium, and a very high one, upon the wisdom and vigour of those rulers of our Indian possessions, who have not only repressed this disposition to opposition, but have rendered those to whom it is ascribed the instruments of the advancement of the interests and glory of their country: and a reflecting man would probably find much more to admire, than condemn, even in that case[35] which is triumphantly brought forward to prove this assertion. When events led a wise and moderate Governor-General[36], and an able and politic Indian minister[37], to prefer a course which certainly made many and important sacrifices of ordinary maxims of rule, but which led to a quiet and just settlement of all complaints; to the pursuit of a severe, inflexible system, which (anxious only for its own character) defends a principle at the hazard of a state: most persons, when they contemplated the great end, would at least pardon the means by which