[19] “Took Kandy in his route.”  This phrase is equivocal, it bears two senses—­the traveller’s sense, and the soldier’s.  But we rarely make such errors in the use of words; the error is original in the Government documents themselves.

[20] Why were they “all-suffering?” will be the demand of the reader, and he will doubt the fact simply because he will not apprehend any sufficient motive.  That motive we believe to have been this:  war, even just or necessary war, is costly; now, the governor and his council knew that their own individual chances of promotion were in the exact ratio of the economy which they could exhibit.

We are anxious that the reader should go along with the short remainder of this story, because it bears strongly upon the true moral of our Eastern policy, of which, hereafter, we shall attempt to unfold the casuistry, in a way that will be little agreeable to the calumniators of Clive and Hastings.  We do not intend that these men shall have it all their own way in times to come.  Our Eastern rulers have erred always, and erred deeply, by doing too little rather than too much.  They have been too long-suffering; and have tolerated many nuisances, and many miscreants, when their duty was—­when their power was—­to have destroyed them for ever.  And the capital fault of the East India Company—­that greatest benefactor for the East that ever yet has arisen—­has been in not publishing to the world the grounds and details of their policy.  Let this one chapter in that policy, this Kandyan chapter, proclaim how great must have been the evils from which our “usurpations” (as they are called) have liberated the earth.  For let no man dwell on the rarity, or on the limited sphere, of such atrocities, even in Eastern despotisms.  If the act be rare, is not the anxiety eternal?  If the personal suffering be transitory, is not the outrage upon human sensibilities, upon the majesty of human nature, upon the possibilities of light, order, commerce, civilization, of a duration and a compass to make the total difference between man viler than the brutes, and man a little lower than the angels?

It happened that the first noble, or “Adikar,” of the Kandyan king, being charged with treason at this time, had fled to our protection.  That was enough.  Vengeance on him, in his proper person, had become impossible:  and the following was the vicarious vengeance adopted by God’s vicegerent upon earth, whose pastime it had long been to study the ingenuities of malice, and the possible refinements in the arts of tormenting.  Here follows the published report on this one case:—­“The ferocious miscreant determined to be fully revenged, and immediately sentenced the Adikar’s wife and children, together with his brother and the brother’s wife, to death after the following fashion.  The children were ordered to be decapitated before their mother’s face, and their heads to be pounded