of creed and of ritual practice, is the first step to any serious improvement of the Kandyan people:  it is the conditio sine qua non of all regeneration for this demoralized race.  And what we ought to have promised, all that in mere civil equity we had the right to promise; was—­that we would tolerate such follies, would make no war upon such superstitions as should not be openly immoral.  One word more than this covenant was equally beyond the powers of one party to that covenant, and the highest interests of all parties.

Philosophically speaking, this great revolution may not close perhaps for centuries:  historically, it closed about the opening of the Hundred Days in the annus mirabilis of Waterloo.  On the 13th of February 1815, Kandy, the town, was occupied by the British troops, never again to be resigned.  In March, followed the solemn treaty by which all parties assumed their constitutional stations.  In April, occurred the ceremonial part of the revolution, its public notification and celebration, by means of a grand processional entry into the capital, stretching for upwards of a mile; and in January 1816, the late king, now formally deposed, “a stout, good-looking Malabar, with a peculiarly keen and roving eye, and a restlessness of manner, marking unbridled passions,” was conveyed in the governor’s carriage to the jetty at Trincomalee, from which port H.M.S.  Mexico conveyed him to the Indian continent:  he was there confined in the fortress of Vellore, famous for the bloody mutiny amongst the Company’s sepoy troops, so bloodily suppressed.  In Vellore, this cruel prince, whose name was Sree Wickreme Rajah Singha, died some years after; and one son whom he left behind him, born during his father’s captivity, may still be living.  But his ambitious instincts, if any such are working within him, are likely to be seriously baffled in the very outset by the precautions of our diplomacy; for one article of the treaty proscribes the descendants of this prince as enemies of Ceylon, if found within its precincts.  In this exclusion, pointed against a single family, we are reminded of the Stuart dynasty in England, and the Bonaparte dynasty in France.  We cannot, however, agree with Mr Bennett’s view of this parallelism—­either in so far as it points our pity towards Napoleon, or in so far as it points the regrets of disappointed vengeance to the similar transportation of Sree.

Pity is misplaced upon Napoleon, and anger is wasted upon Sree.  He ought to have been hanged, says Mr Bennett; and so said many of Napoleon.  But it was not our mission to punish either.  The Malabar prince had broken no faith with us:  he acted under the cursed usages of a cruel people and a bloody religion.  These influences had trained a bad heart to corresponding atrocities.  Courtesy we did right to pay him, for our own sakes as a high and noble nation.  What we could not punish judicially, it did not become us to revile.  And finally, we much doubt whether hanging upon a tree, either in Napoleon’s case or Sree’s, would not practically have been found by both a happy liberation from that bitter cup of mortification which both drank off in their latter years.