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118 what it feeds on. Revenge is an intoxicating cup. The less sober of the English ministers of vengeance were becoming intoxicated. There was excess, there was violence, there was indiscriminating retaliation. To men in this temper Lord Canning's calm and judicial mood was profoundly distasteful. He felt, and showed that he felt, some contempt for personal terrors, to which he was constitutionally a stranger — something more than contempt for the ruthless mood which such terrors engender. But those who inferred from Lord Canning's cold exterior that thinner blood throbbed in his veins than in their own, judged him wrongly. He was stirred by passions as human as theirs. The first news of the insurrection convinced him that signal punishment ought to be inflicted on the Meerut mutineers and their fellow-rebels, now masters of Delhi. 'No amount of severity,' he wrote to the Lieutenant-Governor at Agra in May, 1857, 'can be too great.' 'I should rejoice,' he writes in the same month to the Commander-in-Chief, 'to hear that there had been no holding our men, and that the vengeance had been terrible.' But a calmer, more equitable mood had replaced in Lord Canning's mind the first hot rush of indignation. He was determined to discriminate, and to compel the tribunals to which, in the first moments of emergency, dangerously large powers of life and death had been entrusted, to do the same. His Proclamation to this effect, issued in July, roused a storm of indignation. A great journal in England, after much contemptuous derision of the