when they had gratified their brutal passions, they not unfrequently murdered their innocent and helpless victims, as rewards for their shrieks and cries. And, to crown the whole, when they had plundered a village, and polluted its inhabitants, they set fire to the buildings: thus leaving the unfortunate survivors alike destitute of house, of food, and of purity.

The chief season for their depredations was that, in which the crops were ripe; and thus the husbandmen were robbed of the fruits of their labour, at the time in which they expected to reap them. Every road was comparatively easy to them; as they marched without guns or baggage: and as they carried terror and destruction wherever they marched, so great was the horror they inspired, that one of the villages' of the Deccan, hearing of their approach, unanimously resolved to sacrifice their families, rather than submit to the ravishment of their wives and children. Pindarrees approached; a battle ensued; and the villagers being overpowered by numbers, they set fire to their dwellings, and perished with their neighbours and families in one general conflagration.

The

In one excursion of twelve days, five thousand of these marauders plundered and polluted part of three British provinces. In this assault they robbed six thousand two hundred and three houses; and burnt two hundred and sixty-nine to the ground: one hundred and eighty

1 Ainavale. Vide Dalzell's Dispatch to the Secretary at Madras, March 18, 1816. Letter from Ongole, March 20, 1816.

2 Answer to a Report drawn up by the Madras Government, April 22, 1818.

two persons also were murdered; five hundred and five wounded; and three thousand six hundred and three subjected to the torture. The property lost and destroyed was valued at two hundred and fifty-five thousand nine hundred and fifty-six star pagodas. These bands became, at length, so numerous, that their force consisted of no less than thirty thousand men;" part of whom were in the secret, if not open, service of Scindia; and part in that of Holkar. They were to be heard of in all quarters. The Marquis of Hastings, Governor-general of India, saw ample necessity, therefore, of suppressing, if not entirely destroying, these marauders, who were as dastardly, as they were cruel. By a series of masterly movements, the Pindarree bands were surrounded, and so entirely intersected by a simultaneous movement, at all points, that they were prevented all possibility of escape. The chiefs were, therefore, taken prisoners; and in one campaign annihilated, as it were, from the face of the earth. In this campaign of only three months, conceived in wisdom and executed with vigour, the entire country of Hindoostan was reduced to the authority of the British empire. A dominion more extensive than Aurengzebe possessed, even in the zenith of his power: for it comprizes an extent of country, reaching from the Himalah mountains to the Indus; and from the river Sutlese to the Cape Comorin;-an area containing seventy millions of subjects;

1 Debates, House of Lords, March 2, 1819.

2 House of Commons, March 1, 1819. Major Fitzclarence compares their ravages to those of an army of locusts. Journal, p. 3.

*

all of whom are kept in subjection by thirty thousand British soldiers. If India, therefore, has gained little by the prowess of British arms, it has at least gained this; that a predatory force has been obliterated, of whom it has justly been said in the British parliament,1 that there was no violence, they did not perpetrate; and no degree of human suffering, they did not inflict. Rapine, rape, murder, and every species of atrocity and torture, were the constant results of every enterprize; and the constant attendants of every

success.

CHAPTER III.

To contrast and variety of climate has been attributed the principal lines and shades of national characters. Mons. Denina, in a paper preserved in the memoirs of the Berlin academy; and Tasso, in his parallel between France and Italy; have given it as their decided opinion, that a country, marked with gentle eminences, and gradually rising mountains, are the most remarkable for men of genius, talents, and learning. Vitruvius and Vegetius3 attribute to climate an influence on the temper and constitution of men: to the same influence Servius* refers the subtlety of the Africans, the fickleness of the Greeks, and the poverty of genius in the ancient

1 Debates, House of Lords, March 2; House of Commons, March 1, 1819. 2 Lib. vi.

3 De Re Militari, llb. i. c. 2.

4 In notis Æneid. vi. v. 724.

3

Gauls. That climate has an important influence, and is the principle cause of the difference in national characters, has been also maintained with considerable ingenuity by Montesquieu, in the fourteenth book of his Spirit of Laws. That celebrated writer imagines climate to exercise its principal power over the manners; while Cicero,2 Winklemann, and the Abbé du Bos, with equal plausibility, argue for its influence over the mind. But as great events belong exclusively to no age, great genius belongs exclusively to no nation. Neither is there a virtue exercised, a talent cultivated, or a science improved, that may not be exercised, cultivated, and improved, in the torrid and frigid zones, as well as in the temperate. Absurd, then, is the dogma, which would inculcate, that man may be born in “too high or too low a latitude, for wisdom or for wit." Both these hypotheses may, therefore, justly be doubted; for Greece has produced its Lycurgus: China its Confucius; and Rome its Pliny: France its Fenelon; Spain its Cervantes; Portugal its Camoens; and Poland its Cassimir. England has produced its Newton; Switzerland its Gessner; Germany its Klopstock; Sweden its Linnæus ; and, to crown the argument, Iceland its two hundred and forty poets! This is sufficient for the hypothesis of Du Bos.

Machiavel inclines to the opinion, that, in all ages, men, born in the same country, have the same "leading natures." Vide Discorsi, lib. iii. 2 De Fato, c. 4.

3 Reflections on the Imitation of the Paintings and Sculptures of the Greeks. Fuseli, p. 4, &c.

That climate affects the manners is equally ideal:) for the crimes of the west have been equal to those of the east; and the vices of the south equal to the vices of the north. They differ not in their number, but in their quality: for what is vice in one part of the world is not considered vice in another. Thus the Jews esteem it a sin to eat swine; and the natives of Rud-bår regard it an abomination to eat doves. The use of wine is as strictly forbidden in Turkey; as the possession of more wives than one is in Europe. War in Japan is looked upon with horror; in Europe: it is associated with glory.

The Moors, in some parts of Africa, have such an: abhorrence of a Christian, that they esteem it no more sin to kill one, than any of their animals. In the Tonga Islands1 it is regarded as a slight offence to kill an inferior; to steal; or to commit a rape: provided it is not upon the person of a married woman or, upon a superior. Gargilasso says, in his history of the civil wars of the Spaniards, that fathers in Peru were punished for the crimes of their children. In Bantam2 the king is empowered, upon the death of a father of a family, not only to seize the habitation and inheritance, but the wife and the children. While in the Afghaun : nation, if a man commit a murder, his family is allowed: to compensate it by giving six women with portions and six without, as wives, to the family aggrieved. Other nations are as criminal in their punishments, as offenders themselves. In England, to steal a sheep is 1 Mariner's Account of the Tonga Islands, vol. ii.

2 Montesquieu, vol. v. ch. 14.