The conspirators having thus divorced the ruling power, as they idly flattered themselves, from all martial resources, doubtless assumed the work of revolution already finished by midsummer-day of this present year. And this account of the course through which that attempted revolution travelled--according to which, not the sepoys, who could have had no ambition such as is implied in that attempt, but Indian princes and rajahs, standing in the background, were the true originators of the movement--finds an indirect justification of its own accuracy in the natural solution which it furnishes to those infernal massacres, which else, as they must remain for ever without a parallel, will also remain for ever without an intelligible motive. These atrocities were exacted from the sepoys by the conclave of princes as tests of their sincerity. Such doubtless was the argument for this exaction, the ostensible plea put forward to the miserable reptiles who were seduced into this treason, by the promise no doubt of sharing in the fruits of the new and mighty revolution. Such pleas were for the sepoy. But for himself and his own secret benefit the princely seducer needed all that he could obtain of such accursed acts, as the means sure and sudden of making the separation between the soldier and the government more and more irreparable. So much for the massacre of his officers: but a different reason availed for the more diabolical outrages upon women and their children. The murder of the _men_ was extorted from the sepoy as a kind of sacrifice. With _them_ the reptile had lived upon terms of humanising intercourse; and, vile as he was, in many cases this must have slowly ripened into some mode of regard and involuntary esteem; so that, in murdering the man, oftentimes a sepoy was making a real (if trifling) sacrifice. But for females he cared nothing at all. And in my opinion they perished on a very different principle. The male murders were levied as pledges for the benefit of the princes, and very distinctly understood to be levied _against_ the wishes of the sepoy. But in the female sacrifice all parties concurred--sepoy and prince, tempted and tempter alike. I require you to murder this officer, as a pledge of your real hostility (which else might be a pure pretence) to the government. But the murder of the officer's wife and child rested on a motive totally different--namely, this:--Throughout Hindostan no feature in the moral aspects of the British nature could have been so conspicuous or so impressive as the tenacity of purpose, the persistency, and the dogged resolution never to relax a grasp once taken. Consequently, had the _men_ of our nation, and they separately from the women, scattered themselves here and there over the land (as they have long done in China, for instance), then, perhaps, the natives, when finding themselves in conflict with this well-known principle of imperishable tenacity,