mph, and suffering innocence to raise
from the dust in the very crisis of its last despairing prostration.
Reader! it is not exaggeration--many a heart will bear witness in
silence that it is _not_--if I should say that men exist, who would
gladly pay down thirty years of life in exchange for powers so
heavenly for redressing earthly wrongs. To the infamous torpor on that
occasion, and the neglect of the fleeting hour that struck the signal
for delivery and vengeance, are due many hundreds of the piteous
outrages that have since polluted Bengal. Do I mean that, if the rebel
capture of Delhi had been prevented, no subsequent outrages would have
followed? By no means. Other horrors would have been perpetrated; but
that first and greatest (always excepting the case of Cawnpore) would
by all likelihood have been intercepted.[63]

[Footnote 63: Here observe there were 2300 admirable British troops,
and about 700 men of the mutineers, who might then have been attacked
at a great advantage, whilst dispersed on errands of devastation.
Contrast with these proportions the heroic exertions of the noble
Havelock--fighting battle after battle, with perhaps never more than
1700 or 1800 British troops; and having scarcely a gun but what he
captured from the enemy. And what were the numbers of his enemy? Five
thousand in the earlier actions, and 10,000 to 12,000 in the last.]

But perhaps his military means were inadequate to the crisis? He had
duties to Meerut, not less than duties of vengeance and of sudden
deliverance for Delhi. True: he had so; and he had means for meeting
all these duties. He had a well-mounted establishment of military
force, duly organized in all its arms. Three-and-twenty hundreds he
had of British, suitably proportioned as to infantry, cavalry, and
artillery--a little army that would have faced anything that Delhi
could at that time have put forward. Grant that Delhi could have
mustered 5000 men: these are three propositions having no doubtful
bearing upon such a fact:--

1. That cheerfully would this little British force have faced any
Asiatic force of 5000 men, which, indeed, it can hardly be necessary
to say, in the face of so large and so transcendent an experience.

2. That the Delhi force, could have reached the amount supposed of
5000 only after a junction with the Meerut mutineers; which junction
it was the main business of the Meerut commander to intercept.

3. That this computation assumes also