silence that it is _not_--if I should say that men exist, who would gladly pay down thirty years of life in exchange for powers so heavenly for redressing earthly wrongs. To the infamous torpor on that occasion, and the neglect of the fleeting hour that struck the signal for delivery and vengeance, are due many hundreds of the piteous outrages that have since polluted Bengal. Do I mean that, if the rebel capture of Delhi had been prevented, no subsequent outrages would have followed? By no means. Other horrors would have been perpetrated; but that first and greatest (always excepting the case of Cawnpore) would by all likelihood have been intercepted.[63] [Footnote 63: Here observe there were 2300 admirable British troops, and about 700 men of the mutineers, who might then have been attacked at a great advantage, whilst dispersed on errands of devastation. Contrast with these proportions the heroic exertions of the noble Havelock--fighting battle after battle, with perhaps never more than 1700 or 1800 British troops; and having scarcely a gun but what he captured from the enemy. And what were the numbers of his enemy? Five thousand in the earlier actions, and 10,000 to 12,000 in the last.] But perhaps his military means were inadequate to the crisis? He had duties to Meerut, not less than duties of vengeance and of sudden deliverance for Delhi. True: he had so; and he had means for meeting all these duties. He had a well-mounted establishment of military force, duly organized in all its arms. Three-and-twenty hundreds he had of British, suitably proportioned as to infantry, cavalry, and artillery--a little army that would have faced anything that Delhi could at that time have put forward. Grant that Delhi could have mustered 5000 men: these are three propositions having no doubtful bearing upon such a fact:-- 1. That cheerfully would this little British force have faced any Asiatic force of 5000 men, which, indeed, it can hardly be necessary to say, in the face of so large and so transcendent an experience. 2. That the Delhi force, could have reached the amount supposed of 5000 only after a junction with the Meerut mutineers; which junction it was the main business of the Meerut commander to intercept. 3. That this computation assumes also the whole of the Delhi garrison to be well affected to the mutineers; an assumption altogether unwarrantable on the _outside_ of Delhi during the 10th and 11th of May. Such were (1) the _motives_ of the commander at Meerut towards a noble and energetic resolution; such were (2) his _means_.[64]