Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎462v] (49/238)

262 Lord Canning and Lord Milner.
by letting by-gones be by-gones, and inducing the popula
tion to return to their rural pursuits. Unless they did that,
he added, famine and pestilence will follow the curse of the
sword. With the same clearness of vision Mr. Gubbins,
who knew Oudh well, saw that the predatory tribes, the
Goojars and Meywatties, who robbed both British and
mutineer convoys and caravans, were more strictly common
rogues than political offenders.
In an old Calcutta Review I have before me a vivid account
of the state of Allahabad, written evidently by a learned and
thoughtful Civil .Servant on duty there. He says every
line of the Five Acts is written in blood. “Two private
individuals and the civil surgeons (Heaven save the mark!)
were invested with this awful authority—gentlemen who
had seen their houses plundered and burnt, and likely to
look on every black man as an enemy to themselves, their
country, and their religion.” The powers of these three
men were soon revoked, but not before they had sent 178
persons to the gallows. The official record seems to me to
confirm these statements. I find one assistant-surgeon
stringing men up for larceny and on mere suspicions that
some money or cloth found on them had been stolen. How
different from the rule laid down by Mr. Farcjuharson,
Judge, of Patna, that as God alone knows the hearts of
men, he would only convict for overt acts and on unmis
takable inference. The cruel impolicy of bloodshed is
more startling when the Civil Servant tells us that no
sign of attachment to the British or their institutions was
visible when the Mutiny began. “ How distasteful our
rule must be to the natives when, after fifty years of
peace, they prefer a yoke which was infamous for rapine
and misgovernment, but which still had a hold on the
affections of the people of Oudh.” No wonder that Clyde
and Canning began to fear that the excesses of some of
these special tribunals might induce the people to band
together against us to save their own lives, thus changing
a mutiny of troops into a civil rebellion, and making it