than other people. We credit them not only with lofty purpose and good faith, but with insight into motives, with calculation of consequences, and with some prevision of events. We applaud their political sagacity when they come up to this standard, and we cease to believe in them when they signally fail. Even a caput lupinum may be wise after the event, and we all know what is proverbially said to be the master or teacher of fools. Why, it may be asked, when General Hewitt had mismanaged matters at Meerut, was General Lloyd allowed to retain the command at Dinapore? And why, if disarmament had been successfully carried out at more than one station by the Punjaub authorities, was the same measure not resorted to by those of Calcutta in regard to native regiments in Behar, while we had English bayonets near Patna ? We admit that had this been done, as it easily might have been, history would not have had to record the splendid defence of Arrak by its garrison of civilians and Sikhs. But Lord Lawrence and his subordinates did not wait for 'to-morrow's light.' They acted boldly on the occurrences of to-day, and their success in crushing rebellion or in anticipating it suggests the enquiry why policy should change with the latitude, or why what was done on the banks of the Ravi or the Jhelum should have been unattempted on the banks of the Ganges. The country would not record its belief in the firmness and diplomacy of Lord Granville at the present moment, if it thought that he was waiting for some revelation of the future, independent of that which can be gathered from his own insight into character and his power of drawing correct inferences from the position of Cabinets and the course of events.

We are unable to accept, in the literal or the broad sense which the

words imply, the author's statement that in parts of the Empire other than the Punjaub there might be seen something almost amounting to fusion between the Hinduised Mahometan, and the Mahometanised Hindu.' The Hindu may ape the dress and imitate the manners of Englishmen, but between Hindu and Mahometan there is, in all parts of India, still as wide a gulf as ever. Not a year passes in which the peace of a great city or a populous mart is not endangered by some riot about a mosque near which a pig has been slaughtered, or a temple into which beef has been thrown; and were it not for the staff of the policeman and the presence of the English magistrate, there would be broken bones and bloody heads on both sides. That Mahometan chiefs or landholders may have Hindus for their agents and managers, and vice versâ; that men of different creeds may, under our levelling rule, meet on the same council and sit on the same committee; and that, like Shylock, the one may buy, sell, talk, and walk with the other, is all very true. But the Hindu makes no proselytes from other sects, and the Mussulman still preaches the spread of his own creed by sword and fire. The angularities which Mr. Kaye alludes to are still, we think, sharp and protruding; and union by the social board or the altar is just as far off as it was in the days of Akbar or Shah Jehan.

observe, is not the Oriental equivalent for fisherman. The Temple of Hurdeo is the Temple of Siva, the destroyer in the Hindu Triad, from Hara, an epithet of that deity. We believe that Mr. Kaye himself is perfectly well aware of this, but the collocation of words used by him might lead the unwary to think that fisherman is the translation of Hurdeo. We suspect that, as so often happens all over India, a temple to Hur, Hara, or Siva, had been erected at the expense of a fisherman, or of a number of persons of that caste, in a fit of piety, or on some lucky windfall.

But, with these criticisms, we are ready to give all praise to Mr. Kaye for the spirit in which he writes, for the honesty of his endeavours, for his dispassionate estimate of characters and measures, for his general fidelity and liveliness, and for his high moral tone. By no writer have the heroism, the endurance, the energetic lives, and the noble deaths of Englishmen and Englishwomen, been so worthily commemorated. Nowhere is there a trace of exultation such as might escape from the lips of one who was telling the story of unsuspecting confidence requited by foul treachery, and who might rejoice in any retribution which overtook a host of incarnate fiends. Stories of mutilation (which, indeed, disappeared before the investigation of the late excellent Lady Canning, who herself saw every lady that passed through Calcutta from the Upper Provinces) are mentioned by Mr. Kaye only to be discredited; and the same fate in Mr. Kaye's hands attends the report of writings said to have been discovered on the

walls of the slaughter-house at Cawnpore. They were bungling forgeries made by excited soldiers. The extraordinary inconsistency of the mutineers, and instances of their romantic attachment and even chivalrous courtesy, are well brought out in contrast to their deeds of ferocity and violence. Due praise is given to the princes who adhered to our cause, from the Sikh chiefs down to the Afghan pensioner Jan Fishan Khan, whose name, it may readily be conceived, was speedily metamorphosed in the English ranks into John Fisher. And in his earnestness not to palliate retribution exacted by young men of hot blood and ardent imagination, Mr. Kaye even condescends to quote such a work as the Travels of a Hindu, by Bholanath Chundra, a writer who never went near the scene of the mutiny when it was raging, who is singularly inaccurate in his account even of places which he has visited, and who writes just as a Bengali might be expected to write.

We take leave of Mr. Kaye with a feeling of gratitude that the events of the great mutiny have found an historian who writes in a spirit worthy of the fine corps to which he belonged, of the noble services. whose ability in civil or political administration he is daily criticising and reviewing, of that literature to which he devotes such hours as can be spared from the pressure of official duties; and we may safely anticipate that no rash annalist will rush in upon the ground which he has trodden with so firm and dignified a step, and that the history of the great mutiny will not be rewritten.

S.

VOL. III.-NO. XIV. NEW SERIES.

S

NOT

OTWITHSTANDING the rapid and triumphant progress of legislation for Ireland during the past two years, we strongly suspect that the power is hardly yet in existence which will draw the conflicting elements of Irish life into harmony, or soothe into repose its endless agitations. It takes a long period to school a people so divided by fortune as well as tradition into a sense of civil responsibility. For we find, on the side of the Catholic population, that the spirit which the Penal Laws first exasperated has continued to act, though with diminished power, long after the original stimulus has been withdrawn; while, in the case of the Orangemen, once described by Sydney Smith as the feræ natura of the country, they are as strongly wedded as ever to their old creed of Protestant ascendency, but so deeply exasperated at the course of recent legislation, that, in spite of all their boasted loyalty, they have shown a disposition to coquet even with anarchists who would overturn the very foundations of society. We all know how the progress of statesmanship and the tide of circumstances have carried all parties alike from the positions they once occupied; even the old Tory party, once the object of Orange worship, having become as extinct as the Jacobites, who are nowhere now to be found except in the pages of lady novelists. The Orangemen themselves have not been wholly proof against the unbounded energy of social change which is everywhere so apparent; but they have not become either more liberal or more wise, for they still imagine that they should be allowed by the State to arrogate to themselves superior privileges, on the false or insolent plea of superior loyalty, or on the ground of a purer religious faith

than that professed by their fellow. subjects. There is unfortunately no class of people in these kingdoms less accessible to reason. Their dullness is so impassive and impregnable that all the weapons of controversy are quite thrown away upon them; and we suspect that we are undertaking a perfectly useless experi ment in attempting to convince them by argument of the folly of their principles and conduct. The unconquerable pertinacity of opinion which has always distinguished them in the face of the most overwhelming proofs is certainly less honourable in debate than in war.

The Orangeman believes that the whole progress of the last forty or fifty years is a mistake, and he declines to accept the reforms, either political or ecclesiastical, of this fruitful period. He can look back over the seventy-five years of his history without the slightest fear of being reproached with the recollection of a single generous or liberal deed done by Orangemen; for no measure of toleration or liberality was passed during that long period that did not meet with his unreserved resistance, his career having been one of consistent but ineffectual effort to continue all the unjust and obsolete distinctions of law, to secure in the hands of a single class a monopoly of power and profit, and to restrict and abridge the existing liberties of the people, to the utter sacrifice of national interest and feeling. O'Driscoll, the Irish historian, has made the remark, that most political associations profess to have views embracing the general interests of the country, and extending to the mass of the people, but the objects of the Orange Society were purely and professedly selfish. The observation is a just one, and involves in itself a severe condemnation

Bishop Walmsley, under the abovementioned title, that the year 1825 would be signalised by the simultaneous disappearance of Protestantism and the English rule from Ireland. So deeply had the prophecy influenced the Protestant mind, that Archbishop Magee, of Dublin, advised the Government to make no concessions to the Roman Catholics till the fatal year was passed. The agitation for Catholic Emancipation caused the Society to be reorganised in 1828, after it had been dissolved for three years. Lord Mandeville, a leader of the Orangemen, testified before a Committee of the House of Commons, in 1835, that the Society contained 160,000 members in December 1831; but four years later the numbers had risen to 220,000, which represents about the present strength of the organisation. The rapid increase in this short period is easily explained. This was the time of the great Parliamentary agitation on the Irish Church, when ten of its bishoprics were lopped off, and a great effort was made to appropriate its surplus revenues to national purposes; and also the time of the foundation of the National System of Education, which took the education of the country out of the hands of the Episcopal clergy, and committed it alike to the clergy and people of all denominations. It was, therefore, a period of uncommon excitement. The Protestants were, besides, greatly alarmed, especially during the summer of 1832, by mysterious fiery signals, usually lighted turf, which were carried by night from one Catholic house to another over the whole country. The same signals were remembered to have preceded the 1641 massacre. In the year 1836 the leaders of the Orange Society voluntarily dissolved it in deference to the express wish of the Crown. Twelve years of tranquillity followed; but, in 1845, the Maynooth Grant was en

larged, to the great indignation of the Ulster Protestants, and Lord Roden took the responsibility of reorganising the Society in the autumn of that year. The bloody conflict of Dolly's Brae took place in 1849. The Government superseded Lord Roden and two others in the commission of the peace for their share in that disgraceful affair; but, after a very short period, the fury of the Orange party subsided. During the year or two following these events Ulster was the scene of a powerful agitation among the tenant-farmers to secure from the Legislature the recognition of their well-known Tenant-Right custom, which their landlords were then gradually undermining by capricious increments of rent, or by wholesale spoliation through ejectments; and a portion of the Orangemen entered into the movement with extraordinary energy and spirit. This movement temporarily demoralised the Society. But the Papal aggression came in 1851, and drove the Orangemen back under their natural leaders. The vitality of the Society has known almost no decline since that period, in consequence of the progress and demands of the Ultramontane party in Ireland. Dr. Cullen became Archbishop_of Dublin in 1852, and also Papal Delegate, an office which gave him a controlling power over the whole Catholic clergy; and we need hardly say that it has been his special mission-to use the words of Mr. James Lowry Whittle, a Liberal Catholic-'to develop, if not create, Ultramontane opinion' in Ireland. The policy of Dr. Cullen has ever since been used by the Orangemen as a justification of their existence.

Before we proceed to enquire how far the Orange Institution has succeeded, or is likely to succeed, in resisting Romish or Ultramontane encroachments, it is only proper to remark briefly upon the strange and all but inexplicable perversity of