etty personal motive. A subordinate officer had
accepted the Nepaul offer, and by that unauthorised acceptance had
intruded upon the prerogative of Lord Canning. The very same
cause--this jealous punctiliousness of exacting vanity, and not any
wish to enforce the severities of public justice--interfered to set
aside the proclamation of Mr. Colvin at Agra. The insufficiency again
of the steps taken as to Nena Sahib speaks the same language. In this
very journal, full six weeks earlier than in the Calcutta
proclamation, the offer of a large sum[67] for this man's head had
been suggested. That offer was never kept sufficiently before the
public eye. But a grosser neglect than this, as affecting the
condition of many thousands, and not of any single villain, was the
non-employment of the press in pursuing the steps of the mutineers.
Everywhere, as fast as they appeared in any strength, brief handbills
should have been circulated--circumstantially relating their defeats,
exposing their false pretences, and describing their prospects. Once
only the government attempted such a service; and blundered so far as
to urge against the sepoys a reproach which must have been
unintelligible both to them and to all native readers.

[Footnote 67: And imperfectly as the offer was advertised, it seems to
have had considerable effect. Apparently it has extinguished the
Nena's power to show himself, and to move about with freedom. He is
now distrustful and jealous--often no doubt with very little reason.]

Again, a question even more practical and instant arises as to the
modes of public vengeance.

1. If, when finally defeated, and in a military sense destroyed, on
some signal field of battle, the mutineers should fly to the hills in
the great ranges, or the jungle, the main fear would arise not from
_them_, but from the weak compromising government, that would show
itself eager to treat, and make what the Roman law calls a
_transactio_, or half-and-half settlement with any body of sepoys that
showed a considerable strength. But, in such a case, besides that the
rebels, having now no Delhi, will have scanty ammunition, our best
resource would be found in the Spanish bloodhounds of Cuba, which we
British used fifty years back for hunting down the poor negro Maroons
in Jamaica, who were not by a thousand degrees so criminal as the
sepoys.

2. That no wrong is done to the Bengal Government by this anticipation
of an eventual compromise, m