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EUROPEANS.

I am not sorry that the first topic, which chance brings uppermost, is one which overflows with the wrath of inexhaustible disgust. What fiend of foolishness has suggested to our absurd kinsmen in the East, through the last sixty years, to generalise themselves under the name of Europeans? As if they were ashamed of their British connections, and precisely at that moment when they are leaving England, they begin to assume continental airs; when bidding farewell to Europe, they begin to style themselves Europeans, as if it were a greater thing to take up a visionary connection with the Continent, than to found a true and indestructible nobility upon their relationship to the one immortal island of this planet. There is no known spot of earth which has exerted upon the rest of the planet one-thousandth part of the influence which this noble island has exercised over the human race–exercised through the noblest organs; and yet, behold! these coxcombs of our own blood have no sooner landed on Indian soil, than they are anxious to disclaim the connection. Such at least is the apparent construction of their usage. But mark the illogical consequences which follow. A noble British regiment suddenly, and for no rational purpose, receives a new baptism, and becomes a European regiment. The apologist for this folly will say, that a British regiment does not necessarily exclude Germans, for instance. But I answer that it does. The British Government have, during this very month of September, 1857, declared at Frankfort (in answer to obstinate applications from puppies who fancy that we cannot tame our rebels without their assistance), ‘that the British army, by its constitution, does not admit foreigners.’ But suppose that accidents of aristocratic patronage have now and then privately introduced a few Germans or Swedes into a very few regiments, surely this accident, improbable already, was not more probable when the regiment was going away for twenty years (the old term of expatriation) to a half-year’s distance from the Rhine and the Danube. The Germanism of the regiment might altogether evaporate in the East, but could not possibly increase. Next, observe this; if we must lose our nationality, and transmute ourselves into Europeans, for the very admirable reason that we were going away to climates far remote from Germany, then, at least, we ought not to call our native troops sepoys, but Asiatics. In this way only will there be any logical parity of antithesis. Scripturally, we are the children of Japheth; and, as all Asiatics are the sons of Shem, then we shall be able to mortify their conceit, by calling to their knowledge our biblical prophecy, that the sons of Japheth shall sit down in the tents of Shem. But, thirdly, even thus we should find ourselves in a dismal chaos of incoherences; for what is to become of ‘Jack’? Must our sailors be re-baptised? Must Jack also be a European? Think of Admiral Seymour reporting to the Admiralty as a leader of Europeans! and exulting in having circumvented Yeh by Her Majesty’s European crews! And then, lastly, come the Marines: must they also qualify for children of Europe? Was there ever such outrageous folly? One is sure, in the fine picturesque words of Chaucer, that, ‘for very filth and shame,’ neither admiral nor the youngest middy would disgrace himself by such ridiculous finery from the rag-fair of cosmopolitan swindling. The real origin of so savage an absurdity is this:–Amongst the commercial bodies of the three presidencies in all the leading cities, it became a matter of difficulty often to describe special individuals in any way legally operative. Your wish was to distinguish him from the native merchant or banker; but to do this by calling him a British merchant, etc., was possibly not true, and legally, therefore, not safe. He might be a Dane, a Russian, or a Frenchman; he was described, therefore, in a more generalising way, as a European. But a case so narrow as that–a case for pawnbrokers and old clothesmen–ought not to regulate the usage of great nations. Grand and spirit-stirring (especially in a land far distant from home) are the recollections of towns or provinces connected with men’s nativities. And poisonous to all such ancestral inspirations are the rascally devices of shroffs and money-changers.