ht be
the particular class of workmen standing at the centre of this
unparalleled conspiracy. I think that we stand in this dilemma:
either, on the one hand, that the miserable sepoys, who were the sole
acting managers, were also the sole contrivers of the plot--in which
case we can look for further light only to the judicial confessions;
or, on the other hand, that an order of agents far higher in rank than
any subaltern members of our army, and who were enabled by this rank
and corresponding wealth to use these soldiers as their dupes and
tools, stood in the background, holding the springs of the machinery
in their hands, with a view to purposes transcending by far any that
could ever suggest themselves to persons of obscure station, having no
prospect of benefiting by their own fullest success. In this case, we
shall learn nothing from the confessions of those who must, upon a
principle of mere self-preservation, have been excluded from all real
knowledge of the dreadful scheme to which they were made parties,
simply as perpetrators of its murders and outrages. Here it is equally
vain to look for revelations from the mercenary workers, who know
nothing, or from the elevated leaders, who know all, but have an
interest of life and death in dissembling their knowledge. Revelations
of any value from those who cannot, and from those who will not,
reveal the ambitious schemes communicated to a very few, are alike
hopeless. In default of these, let us examine if any one incident, or
class of incidents, in the course of these horrors, may not have made
a self-revelation--a silent but significant revelation, pointing the
attention of men to the true authors, and simultaneously to the final
purposes, of this mysterious conspiracy.

Now, it has not escaped the notice of many people that two most
extraordinary classes of outrages, perpetrated or attempted, have
marked a very large majority of the mutinous explosions; outrages that
were in the last degree unnatural, as out of harmony with the whole
temper and spirit of intercourse generally prevailing between the
sepoys and their British officers. The case is peculiarly striking. No
reproach on the character of their manners was ever alleged against
their British officers by any section or subdivision of the sepoy
soldiery. Indeed, the reproach, where any existed, ran in the very
opposite channel. Too great indulgence to the sepoy, a spirit of
concession too facile to their very