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our officers, sanctioned, if not actually ordered, by a native prince. Lord Dalhousie marched a force into the Punjaub. This land, the "land of the five waters," lies at the gate-way of Hindostan, and was peopled by Mussulmans, Hindoos, and Sikhs, the latter a new sect of reformed Hindoos. We found arrayed against us not only the Sikhs, but our old enemies the Afghans. Lord Gough was in command of our forces. He fought rashly and disastrously the famous battle of Chillianwallah. The plain truth may as well be spoken out without periphrasis: he was defeated. But before the outcry raised in India and in England over this calamity had begun to subside, he had wholly recovered our position and prestige by the complete defeat which he inflicted upon the enemy at Goojrat. Never was a victory more complete in itself, or more promptly and effectively followed up. The Sikhs were crushed; the Afghans were driven in wild rout back across their savage passes; and Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjaub. He presented, as one token of his conquest, the famous diamond, the Koh-i-Noor, surrendered, in evidence of submission by the Maharajah of Lahore, to the Crown of England.

Lord Dalhousie annexed Oudh, on the ground that the East India Company had bound themselves to defend the sovereigns of Oudh against foreign and domestic enemies, on condition that the State should be governed in such a manner as to render the lives and property of its population safe; and that while the Company performed their part of the contract, the King of Oudh so governed his dominions as to make his rule a curse to his own people, and to all neighboring territories. Other excuses or justifications there were, of course, in the case of each other annexation; and we shall yet hear some more of what came of the annexation of Sattara and Jhansi. If, however, each of these acts of policy were not only justifiable but actually inevitable, none the less must a succession of such acts produce a profound emotion among the races in whose midst they were accomplished. Lord Dalhousie wanted one quality of a truly great man; he lacked imagination. He had not that dramatic instinct, that fine sympathetic insight, by which a statesman is enabled to understand the feelings of races and men differing wholly in education, habits, and principles from himself. He ap

peared to be under the impression that, when once a ruler had established among whatever foreign people a system of government or of society better than that which he found existing there, he might count on obtaining their instant appreciation of his work, and their gratefulness for it. The Sovereign of Oudh was undoubtedly a very bad ruler. His governing system, if it ought to be dignified by such a name, was a combination of anarchy and robbery. The chiefs of Oudh were reivers and bandits; the king was the head reiver and bandit. But human nature, even in the West, is not so constituted as to render a population always and at once grateful to any powerful stranger who uproots their old and bad systems, and imposes a better on them by force of arms. "A tyrant, but our masters then were still at least our countrymen," is the faithful expression of a sentiment which had embarrassed energetic reformers before the days of Lord Dalhousie. The populations of India became stricken with alarm as they saw their native princes thus successively dethroned. The subversion of thrones, the annexation of States, seemed to them, naturally enough, to form part of that vast scheme for rooting out all the religions and systems of India, concerning which so many vague forebodings had darkly warned the land. Many of our Sepoys came from Oudh and other annexed territories; and, little reason as they might have had for any personal attachment to the subverted dynasties, they yet felt that national resentment which any manner of foreign intervention is almost certain to provoke.

There were peculiar reasons, too, why, if religious and political distrust did prevail, the moment of Lord Canning's accession to the supreme authority in India should seem inviting and favorable for schemes of sedition. The Afghan war had told the Sepoy that British troops are not absolutely invincible in battle. The impression produced almost everywhere in India by the Crimean war was a conviction that the strength of England was on the wane. The stories of our disasters in the Crimea had gone abroad, adorned with immense exaggerations, among all the native populations of Hindostan. Any successes that the Russians had had during the war were in Asia, and these naturally impressed the Asiatic mind more than the victories of France and England which were won farther off. Intelligent and quick-witted

Mohammedans and Hindoos talked with Englishmen, Eng lish officers in India, and heard from them the accounts of the manner in which our system had broken down in the Crimea, of the blunders of our Government, and the shortcomings of our leaders. They entirely misinterpreted the significance of the stories that were so freely told. The Englishmen who spoke of our failures talked of them as the provoking and inexcusable blunders of departments and individuals; the Asiatics who greedily listened were convinced that they heard the acknowledgment of a national collapse. The Englishmen were so confident in the strength and resources. of their country, that it did not even occur to them to think that anybody on earth could have a doubt on the subject. It was as if a millionnaire were to complain to some one in a foreign country that the neglect and blunder of a servant had sent his remittances to some wrong place, and left him for the moment without money enough to pay his hotel bill, and the listener were to accept this as a genuine announcement of approaching bankruptcy. The Sepoy saw that the English force in Northern India was very small; and he really believed that it was small because England had no more men to send there. He was as ignorant as a child about everything which he had not seen with his own eyes; and he knew absolutely nothing about the strength, the population, and the resources of England. In his mind Russia was the great rising and conquering country; England was sinking into decay; her star waning before the strong glare of the portentous northern light.

Other impulses, too, there were to make sedition believe that its opportunity had come. Lord Canning had hardly assumed office as Governor-General of India, when the dispute occurred between the British and Chinese authorities at Canton, and a war was imminent between England and China. Troops were sent shortly after from England to China; and although none were taken from India, yet it was well known among the native populations that England had an Asiatic war on her hands. Almost at the same moment war was declared against Persia by proclamation of the Governor-General at Calcutta, in consequence of the Shah having marched an army into Herat and besieged it, in violation of a treaty with Great Britain made in 1853. A body of

troops was sent from Bombay to the Persian Gulf, and shortly after General Outram left Bombay with additional troops, as Commander-in-Chief of the field force in Persia. There

fore, in the opening days of 1857, it was known among the native populations of India that the East India Company was at war with Persia, and that England had on her hands a quarrel with China. At this time the number of native soldiers in the employment of England throughout Northern India was about one hundred and twenty thousand, while the European soldiers numbered only some twenty-two thousand. The native army of the three Presidencies taken together was nearly three hundred thousand, while the Europeans were but forty-three thousand, of whom some five thousand had just been told off for duty in Persia. It must be owned that, given the existence of a seditious spirit, it would have been hardly possible for it to find conditions more seemingly favorable and tempting. To many a temper of sullen discontent the appointed and fateful hour must have seemed to be at hand.

There can be no doubt that a conspiracy for the subversion of the English government in India was afoot during the early days of 1857, and possibly for long before. The story of the mysterious chupatties is well known. The chupatties are small cakes of unleavened bread-" bannocks of salt and dough," they have been termed; and they were found to be distributed with amazing rapidity and precision of system at one time throughout the native villages of the north and north-west. A native messenger brought two of these mysterious cakes to the watchman, or headman, of a village, and bade him to have others prepared like them, and to pass them on to another place. The token has been well described as the fiery cross of India, although it would not appear that its significance was as direct and precise as that of the famous Highland war-signal. It is curious how varying and unsatisfactory is the evidence about the meaning of these chupatties. According to the positive declaration of some witnesses, the sending of such a token had never been a custom, either Mohammedan or Hindoo, in India. Some witnesses believed that the chupatties were regarded as spells to avert some impending calamity. Others said the native population looked on them as having been sent

round by the Government itself as a sign that in future all would be compelled to eat the same food as the Christians ate. Others, again, said the intention was to make this known, but to make it known on the part of the seditious, in order that the people might be prepared to resist the plans of the English. But there could be no doubt that the chupatties conveyed a warning to all who received them that something strange was about to happen, and bade them to be prepared for whatever might befall. One fact alone conclusively proves that the signal given had a special reference to impending events connected with British rule in India. In no instance were they distributed among the populations of still-existing native States. They were only sent among the villages over which English rule extended. To the quick, suspicious mind of the Asiatic, a breath of warning may be as powerful as the crash of an alarm-bell or the sound of a trumpet. It may be, as some authorities would have us to believe, that the panic about the greased cartridges disconcerted, instead of bringing to a climax, the projects of sedition.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF PLASSEY.

THE news of the outbreak at Meerut, and the proclamation in Delhi, broke upon Calcutta with the shock of a thunder-clap. Yet it was not wholly a shock of surprise. For some time there had been vague anticipations of some impending danger. There was alarm in the air. There had long been a prophecy known to India that the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Plassey would see the end of English rule in Hindostan; and now the hundredth anniversary was near. There is a fine passage in Sir Henry Taylor's "Philip van Artevelde," in which Van Ryk says to the hero of the drama:

"If you mark, my Lord,

Mostly a rumor of such things precedes
The certain tidings;"

and Philip musingly answers:

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