pronounced by English statesmen on Lord Canning's action, and allowed by its publication, at a most critical moment, in India to aggravate the intensity of the crisis. Good sense and right feeling in the end prevailed, but not till grave risk had been incurred, and the difficulty of pacification had been seriously enhanced. It seems hardly credible to us who read of it in cold blood, that responsible politicians should have acted and spoken as they spoke and acted then, and that the head of an English Ministry should, in ignorance of the real facts, have condemned his Sovereign's representative in the presence of a mutinous army and a half-suppressed insurrection. But the dangers of Parliamentary government of dependencies are great, and, in the hot air of a party fight, or the pressure of a party emergency, the interests of England in India, and the claims of those who represent them, are apt to become obscured. Such an episode is a warning how easily the forms of popular Government may lend themselves to rash judgment, violent tone, unjust and ill-considered action, and how seriously the aberrations of a popular assembly may embarrass the fulfilment of an imperial task.
