remedy;--having sure
information as to the ringleaders, we are enabled at once to read
their motives in the past, to anticipate their policy in the
future;--having the _persons_ indicated, those who first incited or
encouraged the felonious agents, we can shorten the course of public
vengeance; and in so vast a field of action can give a true direction
from the first to the pursuit headed by our Indian police. For that
should never be laid out of sight--that against rebels whose _least_
offence is their rebellion, against men who have massacred by torture
women and children, the service of extermination belongs of right to
executioners armed with whips and rods, with the _lassos_ of South
America for noosing them, and, being noosed, with halters to hang
them.[65] It should be made known by proclamation to the sepoys, that
_de jure_, in strict interpretation of the principle concerned, they
are hunted by the hangman; and that the British army, whilst obliged
by the vast scale of the outrages to join in this hangman's chase,
feel themselves dishonoured, and called to a work which properly is
the inheritance of the gallows; and yet, again, become reconciled to
the work, as the purgation of an earth polluted by the blood of the
innocent.

[Footnote 65: '_To hang them:_'--But with a constant notification
that, _after_ hanging, the criminals would be decapitated: otherwise
the threat loses its sting. It seems to be a superstition universal
amongst Southern Asiatics, unless possibly amongst the Malay race,
that to suffer any dismemberment of the body operates disastrously
upon the fate in the unseen world. And hence, no doubt, it has arisen
that the gallows is not viewed in the light of a degrading punishment.
Immunity from mutilation compensates any ignominy which might else
attend it. Accordingly, we see in China that the innumerable victims
of the present rebellion, captured in the vast province of Quantung by
the cruel Yeh, were all beheaded by the sword in the blood-reeking
privacies of Canton. And two centuries back, when the native dynasty
was overthrown by the last Tartar invasion, the reigning emperor
(having unlimited freedom of choice) ended his career by a halter:
retiring to his orchard, he hanged both himself and his daughter.]

Who then, again I ask--who are those that, after seven months'
watching of the revolt, appeared, by any plausible construction of
events, to have been the primal movers in this hideous