William Butler

“ Though the most important of all branches of human knowledge, politics have never engaged the attention of the people of the East. They have never studied the theory and practice of a constitutional government, never conceived any thing like republicanism, never understood emancipation from political servitude, never known a covenant between the subject and the sovereign. They have never had any patriotism or philanthropy, any common spirit and unity for the public weal, or what it is to govern for the good, not of the fewest, but of the greatest, number.”—Travels of a Hindoo, Vol. ”

“ Smoke and flame in an instant enveloped the scene, and amid the deafening shouts of the multitude, I sank senseless upon the earth. I was quickly restored to consciousness, but already the devouring element had reduced the funeral pile to a heap of charred and smoldering timber. The Brahmins strewed the ashes around, and with a trembling hand I assisted my father to gather the blackened bones of my beloved uncle and aunt, when, having placed them in an earthen vessel, we carried them to the Ganges, and with prayer and reverence committed them to the sacred stream. ”

“ Traveling for nearly ten years in a palankeen, alone and unprotected in the hands of the natives, I have slept in their serais and under their trees, often fifty miles from any white man, yet I moved in perfect security, was never molested, and never lost the value of a cent in all my peregrinations. So profound is the confidence in the power of law and the care of the Government, that ladies travel alone in this way every night in the year without hesitation or anxiety. Such is the security of person and property under English rule in India. ”

“ But England had her enemies. The Mohammedans generally, the Fakirs, most of the Brahmins, the Thugs, and the lawless and criminal classes, to a man hate her. These together amounted to millions. Circumstances gave them an imperial name for a rallying cry, a Peishwa's influence and a Sepoy instrumentality for the working power, and they made wonderful use of the peculiar combination. But why did they single themselves out, and in the
name of the people of India, which the immense majority never gave them the slightest authority to use, commence the work of extermination? ”

“ On Christmas day, 1857, I attended Christian worship in the Dewanee Khass—the first ever celebrated there. A crowded audience made its walls resound with the unwonted strains of Christian hymns; and there that day the Gospel was preached and prayer was offered in the blessed Name so long blasphemed beneath that roof. ”

“ What was India a few years ago, and what do we now see around us? We see a marked progress, brought about by Western civilization. We see a nation domineered over by caste and idolatry—a nation of which the men are completely enslaved to custom, and the women kept down and tyrannized over by the men, by dint of sheer physical strength, which they cannot resist—a nation which has long ceased to be progressive, and of which inertia and stationariness is the natural condition. ”

“ I cannot but reflect with grateful interest on the day when the British nation first planted their feet on the plains of India, and on the successive steps by which the British empire has been established and consolidated in this country. It is to the British Government that we owe our deliverance from oppression and misrule, from darkness and distress, from ignorance and superstition. Those enlightened ideas which have changed the very life of the nation, and have gradually brought about such wondrous improvement in native society, are the gifts of that Government ”

“ The Rebellion was Heathenism—vile, selfish, and cruel—trembling for its very existence and goaded to retaliation, rising up in its hour of opportunity against the Christian civilization, whose increasing reforms and enlightenment manifestly knew no limit save the overthrow of every wrong, and the removal of every error, in India. ”

“ No Government ever committed a greater mistake than the East India Company did when it adopted this “neutrality" policy. The result was, it laid itself open to the charge of underhand designs for the overthrow of the popular faith—for the people could not imagine a Government without a religion—and it was consequently disbelieved and distrusted, while the Christian missionaries, who boldly and openly denounced idolatry, and invited the people kindly and candidly to embrace Christianity, were understood, and even trusted, by the masses. ”

“ It is not easy to impart to an American reader a just idea of how far the people of India—nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of them—are from the knowledge of freedom, the appreciation of law, or the rights of constitutional government, as we understand such privileges. One of their own educated men speaks but the simple truth of them when he says:
“The Oriental mind is decidedly wanting in the knowledge of the construction of a civil polity. It has never known, nor attempted to know, any other form of government than despotism. ”

“ This is the patroness of these Thugs, these professional murderers, who, when their victim is in the agonies of strangulation beneath their knees, on the ground, are engaging in acts of prayer—offering to Kalee the life that is passing away—and to this abomination, thus said to feed on the human soul, have the mothers of India for ages immolated their daughters! ”

“ In all lands, but especially in a country like India, with the millions utterly uneducated, and debased in conscience and morals, there are “dangerous classes,” who live by fraud and violence, and who are ever ready for any opportunity of plunder and crime that may occur.
But in India there exists what is not found elsewhere on earth, a class of men whose trade is blood, who follow murder as a profession, and even perform it as a religious duty! The Thugs for centuries have
“Laughed at human nature and compassion.” ”

“ He adds, as to the comparative value of the two civilizations which contended for supremacy in his country, “It may be questioned whether there is not more tyranny in France than in India. The conquered Indian is happy to have no bit in his mouth—to speak out his grievances. It is necessary for us to appreciate correctly the character either of the French or of the Russian. If it be the will of Providence to have a yoke upon the neck of our nation, our nation should, in the ripened maturity of its judgment, discriminate, and prefer the yoke of the English to be the least galling. ”

“ Every man of the group is a murderer, and a murderer, not by the heat of passion, or revenge, or the stimulus of strong drink, but a cool, sober, unexcited trader in human life, whose conscience knows no remorse, because he regards himself as rendering in the act the highest service to his chosen deity!
One day, at Agra, I had the opportunity of seeing these monsters. The English Government have a special police and staff—one of the most perfect detective systems in the world—for the capture of these wretches. ”

“ Had it been different—had patriotism prompted the rebellion—had the natives, as one nation, determined to shake off the yoke of the foreigner, and had they conducted their war like soldiers and brave men, instead of acting the part of cowardly assassins, then indeed might they have enlisted sympathy for their cause among the civilized nations of the earth, and found defenders and advocates among the people of England themselves. ”

“ What a change has the presence of the English magistrate made all over the land, within twenty-five years! Very justly does a native writer remark: “The trader and traveler now pass along the loneliest highway without losing a pin. If a corpse were now discovered in a well, or found by the side of a jungle, it would cause a general uproar in the community, and create a greater sensation than the irruption of a Mahratta horde. The wicked have been weaned from their life of rapine, and taught to subordinate themselves to the authorities of society and the State.” ”

“ Christian women will wish to understand the reasons that could thus so strangely and determinately overcome, in one of their sex—a young and beautiful woman—the love of life, of friends, and of children, and lead her to dare death in one of its most awful forms, in obedience to what she regarded as a supreme duty.
Of suttee, or widow burning, the origin is unknown. But it must be very ancient, for it is alluded to by Diodorus Siculus as being then an established custom. Such a horrid rite should certainly be able to show the highest authority for itself. ”

“ II. Men outside of India, imperfectly acquainted with its people and the condition of the English administration there, had their theory to account for the rebellion, and supposed that it was owing to causes, among which was the preference of the natives for some other rule—say that of the Russians, whose incoming would be hailed by them as a deliverance from a yoke which galled them, and the misrule of which was crushing them down.
Here, too, let the natives speak for themselves. They know their own grievances best, and have no restraint upon their utterance. ”

“ And if, owing to eight hundred years of Mohammedan tyranny and misrule, this great nation has sunk into sloth and lethargy, it has, thank God! not lost its reason, and is able to make a difference between the followers of a religion which inculcates the doctrine that should be propagated at the point of the sword, and that which offers compulsion to none, but simply invites inquiry. ”

“ That there is dissatisfaction is true, but that the rule of Britain should pass away is not the desire of any. It is the dissatisfaction that seeks to prevent arbitrary measures, and to establish a more large-hearted policy. If Russia or Germany depend at all upon our dissatisfaction, they will soon find proof to the contrary. Should there be war with Russia, all the inhabitants of India would zealously come forward to support the Government. ”

“ Dying with her husband, she purifies three generations—her father and mother's side and husband's side. Such a wife, adoring her husband, enters into celestial felicity with him—greatest and most admired ”

“ It cannot be said that we in India have nothing to do with Christ or Christianity. Have the natives of this country altogether escaped the influence of Christianity, and do they owe nothing to Christ? Shall I be told by my educated countrymen that they can feel nothing but a mere remote historic interest in the grand movement I have described? You have already seen how, in the gradual extension of the Church of Christ, Christian missions came to be established in this distant land, and what results these missions have achieved. ”

“ If not at once overwhelmed or suffocated, even though she knows that her attempt to escape will be resisted as a duty by her own friends, who would regard her as an outcast, the victim not unfrequently, when left untied, springs off the burning mass among the spectators and piteously pleads for life. ”

“ It is consistent with all that we know of the divine government to suppose that the Almighty must have taken cognizance of their compromises of his truth, of their patronage of idolatry, of their repression of his Christianity, so as to keep it away from a people who needed it so much. He knew that if such a course was to continue unchecked India could not be saved for long centuries to come. He was resolved that caste and idolatry must be overthrown ”

“ However we may differ with the Christian Missionaries in religion, I speak the minds of this Society, and generally of those of the people, when I say that, as regards their learning, purity of morals, and disinterestedness of intention to promote our weal, no doubt is entertained throughout the land, nay, they are held by us in the highest esteem. European history does not bear on its record the mention of a class of men who suffered so many sacrifices in the cause of humanity and education as the Christian Missionaries in India ”

“ The Government has discouraged the teaching of the Christian religion to certain classes of its subjects, and made the profession of it, in a sense, penal, by placing some who have been turned from idols to serve the living and true God under disabilities to which they were not, before their conversion, liable. And, while allowing the Koran and the Shaster to be freely used, it has forbidden the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, or even the answering of spontaneous inquiries respecting their contents, during school hours, in the educational institutions which it supports. ”

“ The abolition of the diabolical practice of infanticide by drowning children in the Ganges, by the Marquis of Hastings, of the criminal rite of Suttee suicide, by Lord Bentinck, and the passing of other laws for the discontinuance of similar cruel and barbarous usages, equally called for by justice and humanity, by Governors General, (though they existed among us for ages,) never for a moment led us to suspect that our British rulers would interfere with our religion, or weaken the allegiance of any class of subjects in India. ”

“ The uproar was quite alarming to a young man, who felt all the responsibility upon himself in such a fanatical city as Benares, with a population of three hundred thousand people. He long argued the point with the crowd, urging the time that had elapsed, and the unwillingness of the woman, but in vain; until at length the thought struck him suddenly, and he said that the sacrifice was manifestly unacceptable to their god—that the sacred river itself had rejected her, as she had, without being able to swim, floated down two miles upon its bosom, in the presence of them all ”

“ Nothing less than British phlegm, and imperturbability, and constancy, and untiring energy, could have steadily prosecuted the task of consolidating the disjointed masses of India, and casting her into the mold of one compact nation. ”

“ Next to the facts of the great Rebellion, men have sought for the explanation of its origin.
I. The earliest reason to account for it was that put forward by certain members of the British civil service—venerable men, who had long administered the rule of the East India Company, and reflected so exclusively its merely commercial and worldly spirit that they seemed to forget they were Christians, or from a Christian land. They so fully vindicated and illustrated their master's doctrine of “neutrality,” as in effect to discountenance Christianity and favor idolatry. ”