the Proclamation the Lieutenant-Governor could not be gainsaid. There was no better authority in Calcutta, or out of it, on such a point. No one in the Provinces, where Hindustáni is the vernacular, ever misunderstood it. That is enough proof of its true meaning, if it were possible that proof is still wanting. The version sent to Lord Canning, it will be remembered, was but an English translation. It had been drafted in the midst of 'a thousand distractions,' Mr. Colvin said. The English translation was incorrect; but the vernacular text was the real issue, and that offered no loophole to guilty Sepoys.
But what of the onus probandi, the absence of any power of detention? Mr. Colvin must have felt when he read those words, how little the Governor-General could have realized what was passing at that moment in Upper India. It was not a time when men were trusting their lives to points of law, but defending them at the point of the bayonet. No Sepoy would have ventured to give himself up who was not prepared to furnish proof and to face detention. Certainly, no guilty Sepoy would have risked his neck on the chance of escaping through the verbal meshes of a Proclamation. Such a fear could only have found expression in a distant Council-Chamber, uninformed as to local feeling. To those who were in the midst of the mutinies, the idea was unimaginable. There are times when an ounce of local knowledge is worth a wagon-load of eminent capacity. Unfortunately, there was no one at hand to point out that
