The Court of Directors, before the secret dispatch became known to them, adopted courteous language in the following letter of instructions sent to Viscount Canning, referring to an earlier communication:
‘May 5, 1858.
‘1. You will have received, by the mail of the 25th of March, a letter from the secret committee, which has since been laid before us, respecting the policy which it becomes you to pursue towards those natives of India who have recently been in arms against the authority of the British government.
‘2. That letter emphatically confirms the principles which you have already adopted, as set forth in your circular of the 31st of July 1857, by impressing upon you the propriety of pursuing, after the conquest of the revolted provinces, a course of policy distinguished by a wise and discriminating generosity. You are exhorted to temper justice with mercy, and, except in cases of extreme criminality, to grant an amnesty to the vanquished. In the sentiments expressed by the secret committee we entirely concur. While there are some crimes which humanity calls upon you to punish with the utmost severity, there are others of a less aggravated character, which it would be equally unjust and impolitic not to pardon and to forget.
‘3. The offences with which you will be called upon to deal are of three different kinds. Firstly, high crimes, instigated by malice prepense, and aggravated by treachery and cruelty. Secondly, offences the results rather of weakness than of malice, into which it is believed that many have been drawn by the contamination of example, by the fear of opposing themselves to their more powerful countrymen, or by the belief that they have been compromised by the acts of their associates, rather than by any active desire to embarrass the existing government. And, thirdly, offences of a less positive character, amounting to little more than passive connivance at evil, or at most to the act of giving such assistance to the rebels as, if not given, would have been forcibly extorted, and which in many cases it would have been death to refuse to bodies of licentious and exasperated mutineers.
‘4. It is the first only of these offences, the perpetrators of which, and their accomplices, it will be your duty to visit with the severest penalty which you can inflict; and it is, happily, in such cases of exceptional atrocity, that you will have the least difficulty in proving both the commission of the offence and the identity of the offender. In the other cases you might often be left in doubt, not only of the extent of the offence committed, but of its actual commission by the accused persons; and although we are aware that the retribution which might be righteously inflicted upon the guilty may be in some measure restricted by too much nicety of specification, and that, in dealing with so large a mass of crime, it is difficult to avoid the commission of some acts of individual injustice, we may still express our desire that the utmost exertion may be made to confine, within the smallest possible compass, these cases of uncertain proof and dubious identity, even though your retributary measures should thus fall short of what in strict justice might be inflicted.
‘5. As soon as you have suppressed the active hostility of the enemy, your first care will be the restoration of public confidence. It will be your privilege when the disorganised provinces shall no longer be convulsed by intestine disorder, to set an example of toleration and forbearance towards the subject people, and to endeavour by every means consistent with the security of the British empire in the east, to allay the irritation and suspicion, which, if suffered to retain possession of the minds of the native and European inhabitants of the country, will eventually lead to nothing less calamitous than a war of races.
‘6. In dealing with the people of Oude, you will doubtless be moved by special considerations of justice and of policy. Throughout the recent contest, we have ever regarded such of the inhabitants of that country as—not being sepoys or pensioners of our own army—have been in arms against us as an exceptional class. They cannot be considered as traitors or even rebels, for they had not pledged their fidelity to us, and they had scarcely become our subjects. Many, by the introduction of a new system of government, had necessarily been deprived of the maintenance they had latterly enjoyed; and others feared that the speedy loss of their means of subsistence must follow from the same course. It was natural that such persons should avail themselves of the opportunity presented by the distracted state of the country, to strike a blow for the restoration of the native rule, under which the permitted disorganisation of the country had so long been to them a source of unlawful profit. Neither the disbanded soldiers of the late native government, nor the great thalookdars and their retainers, were under any obligation of fidelity to our government for benefits conferred upon them. You would be justified, therefore, in dealing with them as you would with a foreign enemy, and in ceasing to consider them objects of punishment after they have once laid down their arms.
‘7. Of these arms they must for ever be deprived. You will doubtless, in prosecution of this object, address yourself in the first instance to the case of the great thalookdars, who so successfully defied the late government, and many of whom, with large bodies of armed men, appear to have aided the efforts of the mutinous soldiery of the Bengal army. The destruction of the fortified strongholds of these powerful landholders, the forfeiture of their remaining guns, the disarming and disbanding of their followers, will be amongst your first works. But, whilst you are depriving this influential and once dangerous class of people of their power of openly resisting your authority, you will, we have no doubt, exert yourself by every possible means to reconcile them to British rule, and encourage them, by liberal arrangements made in accordance with ancient usages, to become industrious agriculturists, and to employ in the cultivation of the soil the men who, as armed retainers, have so long wasted the substance of their masters and desolated the land. We believe that these landholders may be taught that their holdings will be more profitable to them under a strong government, capable of maintaining the peace of the country, and severely punishing agrarian outrages, than under one which perpetually invites, by its weakness, the ruinous arbitration of the sword.
‘8. Having thus endeavoured, on the re-establishment of the authority of the British government in Oude, to reassure the great landholders, you will proceed to consider, in the same spirit of toleration and forbearance, the condition of the great body of the people. You will bear in mind that it is necessary, in a transition state from one government to another, to deal tenderly with existing usages, and sometimes even with existing abuses. All precipitate reforms are dangerous. It is often wiser even to tolerate evil for a time, than to alarm and to irritate the minds of the people by the sudden introduction of changes which time can alone teach them to appreciate, or even, perhaps, to understand. You will be especially careful, in the readjustment of the fiscal system of the province, to avoid the imposition of unaccustomed taxes, whether of a general or of a local character, pressing heavily upon the industrial resources and affecting the daily comforts of the people. We do not estimate the successful administration of a newly acquired province according to the financial results of the first few years. At such a time we should endeavour to conciliate the people by wise concessions, and to do nothing to encourage the belief that the British government is more covetous of revenue than the native ruler whom it has supplanted.’