districts of territory to become depopulated and waste; and have oppressed to the last degree the unhappy ryots or cultivators of the soil. Under their rule, it appears that out of the twenty dollars a year, the most the miserable ryot can obtain from his holding, eighteen go to the Company and its agents, European or native. Whole districts suffer frequently from famine, and deaths by want, by starvation, may be counted by millions. I cannot find that for this horrible oppression and suffering, England has given any compensating advantages. She has done nothing to bring them within the pale of European civilization,--nothing to Christianize them, or to elevate them in the scale of moral beings. As far as the accounts we have seen can be relied on, English rule has been an unmixed evil to the great mass of the Hindoo population. Let who will govern India, she cannot be worse governed than she has been by the British East India Company. For the sake of India herself, we can see no reason why it is desirable that she should continue under Great Britain,-a nation that has had, since the Reformation, no mission either to Christianize or to civilize any barbaric nation. She has bravery, energy, enterprise, mechanical skill, but she has no heart, no power to work on the nobler elements of the human soul. Her touch, as a government, is pollution, her embrace is death.

In common with others, we are of course shocked at the atrocities of the Hindoo mutineers, their cruelty, their horrible barbarities towards the unfortunate Europeans, men, women, and children, who fall into their hands. But they are only wreaking a terrible vengeance on their oppressors, and the English are only reaping the fruits of their century of bad faith, misrule, oppression, and torture. Let any man read the authentic and proved accounts of the various tortures to which the unhappy ryots have been subjected by the agents of the Company, to wring out from famished poverty the rupee it has not-tortures of the most painful and revolting kind, inflicted on Hindoo women as well as men, and he will see in the atrocities over which he shudders only an infliction on the English of a small portion of that barbarism which they have themselves practised or suffered to be practised upon the helpless natives. Great Britain professes to be a Christian nation, and must

be judged by a Christian standard. So judged, her own conduct in India has been more atrocious than that of the natives. Whoever reads the calls for vengeance on the natives, and threats of vengeance held out in the London Times, and other English journals, can hardly fail to regard the Christian Englishman as a greater barbarian than the pagan Hindoo. We can conceive nothing worse than for a hundred and fifty millions of human souls to be subjected to the absolute domination of a trading company, or to be governed by the trading interests of a foreign nation, and while we lament the horrible fate of the innocent victims of Indian hate and vengeance, we cannot but think that if the Hindoos were Englishmen, the atrocities over which we shudder would be still greater. England in India is not England in Europe.

If the question of right had not in our trafficking age grown obsolete, we might demand by what right the English hold India, or wherefore they dispute the authority of the Emperor of Delhi, the heir of the Mogul, in whose name the British East India Company have always, unless a change has very recently taken place, professed to govern India. The company gained its foothold in India, as a trading company under the sanction of the Emperor of India, whose authority it acknowledged; and it was in his name that it interfered in political affairs, and exercised political power. It has no rights in India, but those acquired from the emperor, except such as it may have acquired by fraud and violence. Having abused its rights, the descendant of the Mogul Emperor has, as against the British, the right, if able, to expel them from the country, and to resume the exercise of his authority, usurped and abused by a trading company. A trading company can have no rights of sovereignty, and Great Britain, though she has exercised, has never formally claimed the sovereignty of India. That sovereignty has remained, technically, where it was, in the puppet maintained at Delhi. If that puppet chooses to be a puppet no longer, but henceforth to act the part of a real sovereign, what right has the company, or even Great Britain, to object, or to call his assertion of his rights and the summoning of his subjects to his support, a mutiny, or a revolt ?

The rights, whatever they may be, that a Christian na

tion or a civilized nation may have over a barbarous nation, Great Britain cannot plead, for she has proved herself in relation to Hindostan neither the one nor the other. She has been simply a trading company, in relation to Hindostan, simply an invader, and the Hindoos have a perfect right, by all laws, human and divine, to expel her from their territory, if they can. The right and the law is clearly on their side, and Great Britain has not even the shadow of a right against them.

But it is not to be expected that considerations of this kind will have any weight. Modern nations regard right only in so far as it is coincident with their ambition, or their view of their own interest. Great Britain will not withdraw from India; she will maintain herself there as long as she can, and she will put forth all her energy to suppress what she is pleased to call "the mutiny of the Sepoys." If all her neighbors remain quiet, if no one among them seizes the opportunity to settle some old score, she will, we doubt not, succeed, and wreak a vengeance on the unhappy Hindoos that will establish her character for cruelty and barbarity down to the end of the world. Yet if the socalled mutineers can prolong the struggle for a twelvemonth from this date, the position of England will have greatly changed in Europe and America. She will find herself embarrassed on all sides, and obliged to use a less haughty tone than has for some time been her wont. Yet when we consider the wonderful vitality of England, and the power through the industrial and mercantile system she exerts over all nations and nearly all individuals, we shall not be surprised to see her emerge from her present difficulties stronger and more imperious than ever. The world with its present passions and interests, knows not how to dispense with the modern industrial and mercantile system, ruinous to the real virtue and happiness of the people as it may be. It is the reigning order, and even they who dislike it cannot live without it, and are obliged to conform to it. The world, which does not and cannot appreciate the superiority of the spiritual to the temporal, nor take any very broad and comprehensive views even of the temporal, cannot spare Great Britain, or suffer her to be eclipsed. Her downfall would carry with it the downfall of the whole credit and funding system, that ingenious device for taxing

posterity for the benefit of the present generation. Stock gambling would fall, the whole system of fictitious wealth would disappear, and the greater part of modern shams and illusions. The downfall of Great Britain would produce a universal convulsion, and produce effects of hardly less magnitude than the downfall of ancient Rome. The emancipated nations would not know how to use their newly recovered liberties. The keystone would be struck from the arch of the modern world. The crash some day must come, but no nation is ready for it, and the nations most hostile. to Great Britain, will rather labor to sustain her in order to prevent the catastrophe, than to hasten her downfall. Trade as yet is sovereign, and as commerce is likely for some time to come to be substituted for religion, and the trader for the Christian missionary. It would be exceedingly imprudent to hazard a prediction that the power of England has culminated. The devil will not readily let go the grip he has through the system we condemn on the modern world. Great Britain represents the City of the World, as Rome represents the City of God, and as the complete triumph of the City of God will not take place before the Last Day, we can hardly believe that Great Britain will experience any serious reverses, and we shall not be surprised to find even her. enemies uniting to guaranty her a new lease of power. Whoever studies England thoroughly will discover in her few seeds of decay; she has a young vigor, and is at present the most living nation, to all appearances, on the globe, with the exceptions, if exceptions they are, of Russia and our own country. We confess to having misjudged her, and we think very differently of her vitality and power from what we did before the Russian war. She will fall one day, but she will bring down the whole City of the World with her when she does.

In the mean time we hope our government will avail itself of the present opportunity to settle in a just and honorable way the Central American questions, and to assert and secure our national independence. We do not believe in taking advantage of a nation's embarrassments to wring from it hard or unjust terms, and however low Great Britain might fall, we should regret to see any thing more than strict justice insisted upon by our government; but as justice cannot be obtained from her in her prosperity, we

can see nothing wrong or dishonorable in seeking it from her in her hour of adversity. We say we hope, yet that is too strong a word. Even the shadow of Great Britain, notwithstanding all our big talk, overawes our government and paralyzes its energies. We cannot expect it to assert American interests against her in earnest till it is too late, till the moment comes when in order to conciliate our trading and planting interests and avoid the calamities of war, we must yield our rights, or, at least, surrender to her every advantage. We know no instance in which British diplomacy has failed to triumph over ours. We have fought with England, but we have never since the war of the Revolution proved ourselves independent of her. The only administration we can remember since Madison's that did not consult British more than American interests was the late Pierce administration, so brutally decried by the British presses of this country. In general our administrations have so much to do in providing for a successor, and in settling the pretensions of parties and partizans, that they have no time or ability to look after the real interests of the nation. This is a great and growing evil, the consequences of which are every day becoming more and more manifest. What will become of us it is difficult to foresee, if Providence does not in mercy interfere in our behalf. Our character as one of the great nations of the world is daily sinking rather than rising, and it is, out of our own country, little honor to be known as an American. Individual Americans may be well treated abroad, but the American character commands very little respect. We are considered, except in democratic circles, a nation without principle, without honor,-in a word, a nation of traders and filibusters. However, we set all this down to envy or hatred of us on account of our republicanism, and so long as stocks are up, cotton at advance, and trade is brisk, we flatter ourselves that we are fulfilling the mission God gave us, and setting the world a glorious example of a free people, of a model republic, worthy of the admiration, the envy, and the imitation of the world. It were far better for us to see our faults and attempt to amend them. We write, it may be, in a desponding tone. We cannot do otherwise, for we read each morning the New York Herald as a sort of necessary evil, and recollect that it is the most