edge of the sword.

So then you have, in these two great populations, Indian and Highland--
in the races of the jungle and of the moor--two national capacities
distinctly and accurately opposed. On the one side you have a race
rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the gift
of it; on the other you have a people careless of art, and apparently
incapable of it, their utmost effort hitherto reaching no farther than
to the variation of the positions of the bars of colour in square
chequers. And we are thus urged naturally to enquire what is the effect
on the moral character, in each nation, of this vast difference in
their pursuits and apparent capacities? and whether those rude chequers
of the tartan, or the exquisitely fancied involutions of the Cashmere,
fold habitually over the noblest hearts? We have had our answer. Since
the race of man began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever
been done by it so significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial
degradation, as the acts the Indian race in the year that has just
passed by. Cruelty as fierce may indeed have been wreaked, and
brutality as abominable been practised before, but never under like
circumstances; rage of prolonged war, and resentment of prolonged
oppression, have made men as cruel before now; and gradual decline into
barbarism, where no examples of decency or civilization existed around
them, has sunk, before now, isolated populations to the lowest level of
possible humanity. But cruelty stretched to its fiercest against the
gentle and unoffending, and corruption festered to its loathsomest in
the midst of the witnessing presence of a disciplined civilization,--
these we could not have known to be within the practicable compass of
human guilt, but for the acts of the Indian mutineer. And, as thus, on
the one hand, you have an extreme energy of baseness displayed by these
lovers of art; on the other,--as if to put the question into the