Chapter IV: Part I (3)

[10] I heard this plan mentioned by an officer high on the staff, the day before I sailed for Masulipatam, and protested against its principle, as directly contrary to that on which I had been desired to act, and indeed to every effort of conciliation. The Governor, to whom I immediately stated this fact, appeared to me to accord in my opinion; but, a few days after my departure, he was induced to adopt this measure, and to provoke disobedience to authority.

[11] The following are the sentiments of Colonel Close upon this subject, as expressed in his letter to Major Barclay under date the 24th of July, 1809, and published in the correspondence laid before the House of Commons:

"It is generally admitted as a sound maxim, not to hazard the giving of an order unless there be a fair ground of presumption that it will be obeyed. From the apparent circumstances of the time, the orders sent to Masulipatam were perhaps fairly hazarded; but, after those orders had been disobeyed, to send orders to Hyderabad for the march of a battalion, might have been regarded as a measure in some degree exceptionable. The officers, who have opposed the orders sent for the purpose, are now more forcibly tied together than before. The extreme of their proceedings is increased, and their danger and fear seriously heightened. Their impulse to act is become more violent; and accordingly the loss to the public cause must be in proportion to all these augmentations. But this is not all. If the measure of moving the battalion was meant to be useful, in having an experimental effect, Hyderabad was assuredly the very place at which the experiment should not have been made; confusion could not be so hurtful any where else."

Those who know the delicacy of this superior man will judge, from this extract, what must have been the strength of his feelings upon the subject.

[12] The trial of Lieutenant-Colonel Innes, and the removal from the general staff of some officers obnoxious to the malecontents, were among the demands in this paper.

[13] Lord Minto has, in his letter to the secret committee, noticed this feeling, as forming a strong and operative principle of action in the minds of these infatuated men.

[14] Vide Appendix.

[15] The names of the principal of these officers, Colonel Clarke, Colonel Rumley, Colonel Floyer, Major Russel, and Captain Noble, will be received by all parties as full evidence of the truth of this assertion.

[16] July, 1809.

[17] Emissaries of a similar character were at and before this period sent to all the native corps.

[18] Government could not have supposed men very deep in guilt, upon whose solemn assurance that they would fulfil the obligation of their commissions such reliance was to be placed. It was evident, that had they cherished any serious designs against their country, or any of its constituted authorities, they would not have hazarded the failure of their schemes by stickling at the little additional guilt that would have attended the breach of any test so forced upon their acceptance; they would have signed, and watched the opportunity of accomplishing their plans. But of this there was no apprehension: they were acknowledged, at the moment this pledge was presented, to be men of honour, and alive to all the obligations that word implies. And can it be argued that men, with such feelings, were not to be fixed in their duty, or reclaimed to it, by other means than such as _almost imposed opposition as a point of honour_, as by it only they could avoid the reproach of having been trepanned, alarmed, and coerced into a promise to perform that duty which they owed to the state they served.

[19] Captain Moodie, the commanding officer, and almost all the officers of the first battalion of the 6th regiment, were among this number, though that corps had, up to this date, been remarkable for never having joined in any one of the guilty or objectionable measures of the army. It was a sense of their past conduct that made such treatment more insufferable.

[20] The senior Company's officer at this meeting was Colonel Clarke, commanding the artillery, who was known to be exempt even from suspicion of any share whatever in the violent proceedings of a part of the army, and had been recently selected on that ground to command at the Mount. Was it not natural that a sense of his own conduct should have led this honourable officer to reject with indignation a proposition made in a mode so insulting to his feelings as a man and an officer.

[21] To many of this class it must have been an agreeable release from the rigid obligations of their commission. It offered a temporary retirement from their duty to the state; and, in doing so, changed in some degree the _character of that duty_. By signing the test they became volunteers against men whose guilt they had to a certain extent shared, and had no longer, to support their minds in so trying a situation, that plea of indispensable necessity which their commission imposed.

[22] This was the substance of the order that I recommended to be issued at this period, the principle of which has been so arraigned by the Government of Fort St. George. A copy of this order is inserted in the Appendix.

[23] I might fill a volume if I were to enter into any general reasoning on the vital wound given to military subordination by this measure. The relation of the private soldier to the subaltern has been well termed the key-stone of the arch: an army may survive any other change; but to disturb that relation, is to dissolve the whole: here begins the obedience of the many to the few. In civil society, this problem appears of difficult solution: but there, it is the obedience of the dispersed and disarmed many; it is rare, and in well regulated communities almost unfelt. In military bodies it is the hourly obedience, even to death, of the armed and embodied many. The higher links which bind subalterns to their superiors, and these to one chief, are only the obedience of the few to the fewer, and these fewer to one. These relations are easily intelligible. Honour, and obvious interest, are sufficient to account for these: and any injury they sustain can be repaired. But the obedience of the whole body of soldiers to their immediate officers, is that which forms an army, and cannot be disturbed without the utmost danger of total destruction. It was upon this act of the French Assembly that Burke observed, "They have begun by a most terrible operation; they have touched the central point, about which particles that compose armies are at repose; they have destroyed the principle of obedience in the great essential critical link between the officer and the soldier, just where the chain of military subordination commences, and on which the whole of that system depends." Sir George Barlow, it has been forcibly remarked, could discover no other mode of suppressing a _rebellion_ of officers than by exciting a _mutiny_ of _soldiers_.

[24] 1794 and 1795.

[25] There can be no doubt of the truth of the observation which a great and well-informed statesman formerly made upon this question. "The European character in India" (Lord Melville observes in one of his letters to the Court of Directors) "cannot be raised too high. If the natives should be accustomed to look upon persons in the British service with indifference and contempt, they will rapidly annihilate our Empire there, and with it the very few Europeans by whom that country is held in subjection." If this is true of Europeans in general, and our Indian subjects, with what particular force must it apply to the relations between the sepoy and his European commander?

[26] The most violent even among the officers were so alarmed at the evil this impression must produce to their country, that they carefully avoided, till the last extremity, any mention of it to the natives under their command: not, I am satisfied, from any fear of failing in their efforts to debauch them from their duty, but from a deep sense of the danger of such a communication: and those who believe that the defeat of this confederacy through the means adopted will for ever prevent the occurrence of a similar evil, should recollect, that it is just as likely to have an opposite effect, and to render that evil, if brought on by similar causes, far more dangerous. The European officers may, in their next quarrel with their local Government, be taught by this failure to league with the native officers, and to hold out advantages to them that will secure their most zealous co-operation; and such a conspiracy would lose India. It is dangerous even to hold an opinion that this Empire can be preserved by any means but the action of a wise, temperate, and just Government, which, though firm and powerful, must rule its British subjects with the greatest attention to those habits and principles which are, from the form and character of the constitution under which they are born, inherent in their nature, and which can never be disregarded or offended without a danger of sedition or convulsion.

[27] As a proof of this, the following fact will suffice. At the period the test was promulgated, a direct correspondence, in the native language, was opened by the chief civil and military officers of Government with the native officers. This was equally maintained with those corps, the European officers of whom remained firm in their duty, as others; and a respectable Company's officer, who had signed the test, and was commanding a corps at Madras, (on his senior subahdar bringing him letters of this description, which he had received,) made a representation of the circumstance; but was reprimanded for doing so, and told it was a general rule, from which it was not deemed proper to make any deviation. If it had been desirable to make any communications in the native languages to the men, such could assuredly have been forwarded to the European officer in command, and the principles of military discipline observed; but an observance of the general rule was the point to which _importance was attached_, even in a case where the operation was _admitted_ to be baneful, and consequently where the more _limited_ that was, the better for the public interests.

[28] Burke.

[29] These are not sentiments formed on a contemplation of the result of the disturbances. I presented a similar picture of their situation to the deluded officers at Masulipatam, and circulated a letter containing all the substance of these reflections to the army previous to the occurrence of any deliberate opposition to Government. Vide Appendix: Letter to Lieutenant-Colonel McLeod.

[30] Lord Minto.

[31] Vide Lord Minto's dispatch.

[32] General Maitland, late Governor of Ceylon.

[33] These words have been, in the course of the discussion regarding the disturbances at Madras, as they were during their existence, greatly distorted from their simple and plain meaning. _Concession_, I conceive, is to grant the original and substantial objects of the demands made by the mutinous army. To have restored the tent contract, to have promised an effort to obtain an equalization of their allowances with the officers of Bengal, would have been concessions: but if the exercise of a generous clemency, in pardoning those who had offended in a moment of general insanity, and to have held out hope to others of even deeper guilt, be deemed _concessions_ which a Government _cannot make_, there can be no such thing as conciliation _in act_: and as to the profession of kindness and consideration, when the conduct observed by the ruling power is inflexible and severe in its measures, it can have no effect but that of aggravating men's feelings into greater crime.

[34] The whole power was in the commanding officers of the sepoy battalion, and the native officers had much greater influence than the European subalterns of the corps: _the latter were not even attached to companies_. It has been the labour of near twenty years to supersede the effects of this system, which was deemed bad, and to transfer the influence formerly enjoyed by the native officers to the European: and the eagerness with which the native officers grasped at a prospect of reviving their power, though it might have had a favourable operation for Government under that desperate expedient to which they had resort, must have given rise to dangerous feelings, and produced jealousy and distrust in that important link between the European and native officers, where complete confidence and cordiality is most essential to our safety.

[35] Disturbances in Bengal in 1794 and 1795.

[36] Lord Teignmouth.

[37] Lord Melville.

[38] William the Third, and Demosthenes.

[39] See the letters to Lord Wellesley and Sir A. Wellesley, p. 64, 65.