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 case[66] 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