(From the New York Irish News.)
When money is easy and sales increasing, when "gallant allies " are loyal and colonists submissive, there is no happy family so serene and self-possessed as the British Lion, the English Bull-dog, and Mr. John Bull. But we trust that our gentle readers may never hear the roaring of the British Lion, the howling of the English Bull-dog, and the bellowing of John Bull, when these animals are denied their feed by Chinese Commissioners or Indian Rajahs. Yet it is a unique characteristic of the Englishman that when he is thirsting for human blood, and ravening for plunder, he proclaims himself the champion of civilization, kisses the cheapest edition of the Bible, and declares himself a meek Christian, so help him God!
While he gloats over the pictures and the graphic details of Chinese and Hindoo tortures and indignities on women and children, furnished by the very best artists and reporters, he swears that " Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will repay"—these murderers, mutilations, tortures, and violations.
Let it be recorded and remembered, and never forgotten, in all disputes about Anglo-Indian affairs, that the English introduced no Christian virtue, but only English vice, into India, and that they adopted none of the Indian virtues, but only copied, and perpetuated, and rendered worse, the worst vices of the Mongol tyrants.
The following is a short catalogue, taken from the Minutes of the Parliamentary Committee upon Indian Affairs in 1855, of the modes of torture employed to collect the taxes of the East India Company :—
" Squeezing the thighs, and of women the breasts, with an instrument like a lemon-squeezer,called the Kittee; placing men under the noon-day sun, their bodies bent nearly double, the head being tied down with heavy stones placed on their necks or on their backs ; squeezing the tips of their fingers ; twisting the ears ; tying up by the legs, with the head hanging downwards ; twisting a rope tightly round the entire arm or leg, so as to impede circulation ; lifting up by the moustache; suspending by the arms while tied behind the back; searing with hot irons ; placing scratching insects, such as the carpenter beetle, on the most sensitive parts of the body ; dipping in wells and rivers till the party is half suffocated; beating with sticks ; prevention of sleep ; nipping the flesh with pinchers ; putting pepper or red chilies in the eyes ; quartering a peon on the defaulter, who is obliged to pay him daily wages; pinches on the thighs; slaps ; blows with fist or whip ; running up and down ; making a man sit on the soles of his feet with brickbats behind his knees ; putting a low-caste man on the back ; striking two defaulters' heads against each other, or tying them together by their back hair ; placing in the stocks ; tying the hair of the head to a donkey's or buffalo's tail; placing a necklace of bones or other degrading or disgusting materials, round the neck." Two or three methods, too horrible and too indecent for publication, are omitted.
We shall take next week to prove, by the most overwhelming mass of historic evidence that the old Anglo-Saxons treated their wives and children in the most savage manner, and that even the present generation of English-women have in cities, hamlets, facturies, and coal-pits, been reduced to a lower state of brutal degradation than any, even the most savage, nation on the face of the earth. We need not recall the horrors of the American War of Independence, the bounty on scalps, the disembowelling of American mothers, &c,
A fair review of Dr. Lingard's " History of the Anglo-Saxon Church " will show that the Christians were confined chiefly to the few in the higher class trained and educated by Irish or Italian priests, and that during the savage periods of the Heptarchy and 'the Danish rule, the nation, en masse, were Pagan tyrants and slaves, From the Norman invasion to the accession of the Tudors—during that period of civil wars, perfidies, and brutalities—the English made very little advance. Macaulay clearly proves that after the Reformation the English, particularly the ruling class, became Atheists. Throughout all the reigns, from Henry VIII. to William III., there was such a display of hypocrisy in the pulpit, immodesty on the stage, brutality in the camp, such grotesque fanaticism in the field, such corruption and perfidy in the Court, so many changes in religion, principles rejected and new ones adopted, these rejected and others adopted, these again rejected and the old ones restored, and cast aside by the servile Parliaments and the enslaved multitude of England, that men lost regard for every thing but what appeared expedient or profitable. In Celtic Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, there was always more or less sincerity. But in mongrel England there is no faith in Eternal Truth, no honor excepting among the few friends of humanity. The English Democrats are chiefly of Welsh, Scotch, or Irish blood—the O'Connor's, Jones's Frost's, Williams's, &c.
The Deists of France and America believe in a God, and are by nature more or less honorable. The Pagan Romans would suffer death rather than violate their pledged word. All nations have their virtues and their vices. But England alone shall be recorded in the page of history as " Perfidious Albion, the Nation of Liars."
John Bull's perfidy and hypocrisy are so well established—he has become such a "thunderer "—that no sane man can believe one word of his newspaper reports. There is not a State in Europe, America, or Asia, that would value one straw the word of an English nobleman on oath. There is much talk about "greased cartridges" and torturing English tax-gatherers. But the Brahmins loath the English, and are maddened by their presence, because they, the English, are impostors ; not merely merciless armed thieves, but hypocrites, who have a thousand times proved themselves devoid of all honor.
The rage of war passes away, but perfidy, hypocrisy, and slander are never forgotten—never forgiven ; and justly so, because these crimes poison the roots and the very life-knot of human society. Hence the opinion actually prevails in Spain and Italy, that the English have no souls, only the vital principle common to the man and the wolf and the hog. Hence the French, and other nations with a faith in God, despise Englishmen with an inexpressible loathing. The more the Englishman boasts of his Bible, his fair-play, and blunt honesty, the more contemptible rascal he becomes, because everybody knows that his Bible is a pretext to cover Atheism ; his fair-play, perfidy; his blunt honesty, slander, and rapacity.
English falsehood has been the source of Irish hatred. The Irish can forgive robbery and murder, but not perfidy. There are no words in the English language of sufficient force to express Irish contempt for Englishism. It may be compared to the rage and horror a mother might feel for the serpent or the hog that has devoured her only child. But this does not express it, because the animal after committing the outrage could not turn round and vent abuse upon the race of the child it had devoured. England not only conquers but slanders, and no one in this country but an Irishman, or an exterminated Highlander, can appreciate the ungovernable hatred and fury of the insulted and robbed Hindoos, Brahmins and Rajahs of lndia, against what are called the " Christian dogs." The reader versant in diplomatic affairs knows that England's success has originated less in the prowess of her arms than from the snares of her duplicity. At home England's Church and State rest, not upon loyalty and religion, but upon the two forces of malignity and mendacity, debasing and dividing the pauperised and enslaved masses. As Clarendon and his class are diplomatic cheats, so Whately and his class are clerical wolves, who eat their daily meal and give thanks to God. The English Church extracts, with the bayonet, out of the Catholic Irish, more revenue than the aggregate income of all other churches in Europe. And this enormous robbery is sustained by a regular course of lying, every Sunday and holiday, throughout the year.
The Bible readers of England almost invariably prefer the Judaism of the truculent Pharisees before the true spirit of the Prophets, and the charity which is the soul of Christ. The ethics of Exeter Hall are not so Christian as the doctrines of the Indian Brahmins. The British Registrar's Report on Religious Worship (Census 1851), p. 97, says that " The myriads of our labouring population, really as ignorant of Christianity as were the heathen Saxons at St. Augustine's landing, are as much in need of missionary enterprise to bring them into practical acquaintance with its doctrines." The English preachers know all this, but they go out with their young wives to India because it is a better robbing ground, and they induce John Bull to "promote the Gospel among the heathens," by imparting to his dull mind a hazy idea that reading the "Bible" makes people buy printed cottons—"warranted fast colors." But on the soil of India itself John Company puts his Atheism into practice without any disguise. He finds it expedient to subsidise all religions; good or bad, Brahminism, Buddhism, Mahomedanism—even, the Car of Juggernaut, until lately—also Protestantism in all its forms ; but not of course where Buddha would be offended and where Buddha has power to take or refuse cottons. Catholicity is the only religion positively discountenanced in India.
We do not throw all the blame on the English bishops and parsons. The monstrous falsehoods retailed about popery, or the United States for example, are swallowed by honest John Bull because he loves scandal. It may seem paradoxical to say that the English people, with some noble exceptions, are a nation devoid of truth. Yet such is the fact. There is an intimate relation between all the animal propensities and vices. There never was a glutton who was not also a thief, a liar, and something worse. The false tongue ministers to the voracious palate. The insatiable great Anglo-Saxon stomach necessarily originates an unscrupulous character.
The English love a lie, evidently for its own sake. The wholesale falsehoods poured out on France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, this Republic, China, India, whenever any of them have a difficulty with England, is only the practice of systematic lying in which the people are trained daily by the Press and the Pulpit. Every Sunday, the church-goers listen with delight to the preacher's bombast about the Christianity of England, every one knowing that it is the most Pagan country in Europe ; and they chuckle when the Rev. " thumpers" declare that "Papists hate the Bible, worship idols, believe that money can procure remission of sins," &c., &c. The preachers (who live upon the robbery of Catholics) know, and the congregation know, that these assertions are untrue. But still, from Sunday to Sunday, and year to year, they are repeated and rolled through the mouth as sweet morsels of profitable falsehood.
We heartily sympathise with the gentle Hindoo and the exalted Brahmin, whose very name has become suggestive of virtue, contemplation, poetry the most sublime, philosophy most pure, clear, and deep. Many rays of eternal truth, expressed in the transcendant language of an Isaiah, a Job, or a Solomon, are preserved in the ancient songs of the Vedas, and we bow with respect to the men who have cultivated the philosophy of Mysticism—the effort to rise to intimate communion with God.
But no humane heart can sympathise with the Bengal Tiger,—that is, the Mahomedan Mongols, the Indian Orange lords, the colleagues hitherto of the British Lion in plundering the unfortunate people. We sympathise with the Mongol only in as far as he is now opposed to a worse brute. We hate England as we hate the remorseless wolf : we hate her particularly for her hypocrisy, and we join in the popular cheer for the dog or devil that takes the wolf by the throat. We cannot credit all the English accounts of Sepoy atrocities ; but yet we believe that the old mongrel conquerors of India introduced all the atrocities and foul superstitions that have become strangely mingled with the ancient and comparatively pure ethic and admirable discipline of the Brahmins, just as the Anglo-Saxon savages perpetuated a large element of truculent fanaticism and sensuality through the Christian dispensation in England.
The old Saxon ideas, that Paradise is a slaughter-house and scene of gluttony, where revellers drink beer out of human skulls, and eat fat pork, raw and reeking, cut from a live pig ; the worship of the hellish old Scratch, the institutions of infanticide, and the public sale of women and children,—all these have come down through English history along with the "Bible," just as the bloody and obscene rites of the Mongol have mixed in with the Vedas.
We abhor Nana Sahib, if he has perpetrated a fraction of the atrocities laid at his door. But those Anglo-Americans who are always quoting the extension of British dominion, as an instance of Divine Providence, may allow that Providence led the British farther and farther northward in India, until they came in contact with a race as treacherous and brutal as themselves. Providence may have brought together the lion and the tiger, the mongrel Saxon and the Mongol invader, that they may destroy each other. We do not wonder that the Mahomedans show no mercy to the merciless, no pity to the heartless, no quarter to the base, bloody, and brutal " English Kaffirs." We can believe the English for once, when they swear that the rebels shall meet the most awful vengeance—when Delhi is taken.
There is no doubt that if these Asiatics be cunning, treacherous, false to treaties, and solemn oaths, suborners of spies and assassins, bribers and corruptors, fierce in the fight and merciless to prisoners of war, they are a people fit to contend with the English. Had the Irish known the English character when there was an Irish army, there would be no English Lieutenant with his breeding sows and prize bullocks this day on the green sod.
England prospered as long as she, without any principle of her own, could traffic on the good faith of mankind. But her character being known, she goes down to her Father of Lies.
Up to the present time, English writers have given a very high character to the Hindoos, and although these Saxe-Gotha hirelings now slander a race that were civilised, thousands of years, while the Saxons were named savages, we know what honorable and gallant soldiers who served in India, men like Major French of Galway, would say of the Hindoos. These Indians are sincere. They practice what they believe ; they are most temperate in eating and drinking of any nation in the world. The high-caste never touch flesh or wine. They are affectionate and gentle, yet fierce as tigers when aroused. That brave and true old Celt, General Sir Charles Napier (hated and persecuted by John Bull, because he was generous and true), sat in the Theatre Royal, Dublin, one night, and the gods proposed a cheer for the Sikhs. Sir Charles stood up, spoke, and complimented these Indians as a brave and gallant foe.
On the contrary, the Hindoos have had reason to hate and abhor the English as cruel fiends, liars, carnivorous gluttons, libertines, gamblers, and cheats. What is worse than murder? Is there anything else? Yes innocent slander, and perfidious hypocrisy of the rude "English traits and something on them" have rendered "the Kaffirs" utterly infamous in Hindoo eyes.
We believe that "greased cartridges," taxes, atheism, and " Russian intrigue," were only very secondary causes in producing the present Indian war. John Company had stomach for more than the taxes. He has sustained his dominion hitherto by dividing the plunder with the old hereditary tyrant, these Rajahs, princes, and potentates. But after organising a great army, and being deceived by the lying missionaries of Exeter Hall, who always boast of their success in order to get, money, honest John began to think that he might, by a coup d'etat, seize all the plunder for himself, and at the same time get rid of these native chiefs, always dangerous as centres of nationality. Accordingly conspiracies were soon hatched and discovered, after the method long practised in Ireland, and, strange to say, the men who received most revenue, and who had the greatest interest in keeping quiet, were found to be the " arch-traitors," and were incontinently—as the vulgar English say—" clapped in quod." When the Queen of Oude was in England, vainly endeavoring to get admission to the royal presence of Victoria, to complain of John Company's falsehood and dishonesty, the lawful king of Oude found himself penniless and in durance vile, while a score of others were either incarcerated, or suspected, or like Nana Sahib, insulted and cheated out of their inheritance.
Then came the crisis—the expected revolt. We say expected, because the five British regiments intercepted on their way to China were evidently never intended for China. But John miscalculated the amount of Christianity among his mercenaries, and it turned out that much as the Hindoo and Mahomedan had been made to hate each other, their hatred of the bloated bully absorbed every other feeling, and so the last blow at Indian nationality is likely to be the death of John Company.
The Hobart Town Daily Mercury 1858, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3246087
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