Chapter LII, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 8 page 4

Here, then, was the field for reduction, and a fine rich field it was. By dint of great resolution and an unsparing pen, in 1864 there were 30,000 fewer European, and, perhaps, 100,000 fewer native troops. Still it was a subject of serious reflection to statesmen, that India should require and receive from us 70,000 or 80,000 British soldiers to hold a land, which we once held with 50,000 at the outside. It was obvious that from this point of view our Indian empire weakened our force and diminished our weight in Europe; and that so long as we felt it needful to keep 80,000 soldiers in India, we could not again take that part in European questions which we had taken up to that time. As to the native army, which, after all, we could not do without, it was composed mainly of Sikhs and Punjabees, and it was believed to be organised on sounder principles than the rotten Bengal machine which exploded in 1857. But there were not wanting those who anticipated a Sikh mutiny.

One other great change must not be forgotten. In 1858-9 Lord Canning made a royal progress throughout the north-west, even into the farthest Punjab. He held durbars, and rewarded the faithful native princes, some with gifts of honour, some with fair speeches, others with more solid gifts of territory. During this progress he hinted here and there the coming change of policy - the concession of the right of adoption to all the princes of India. At a later period this momentous concession was made in a formal shape. What did it mean? It meant the renunciation of the policy of annexation, nothing more nor less, and it gave assurance that the native states would in future be maintained as a part of our internal policy. Lord Dalhousie had made annexation a system. He had annexed four kingdoms and five territories. It is assumed that, had he remained to carry out his policy, India would have been one homogeneous military monarchy. This is doubtful; but it is not doubtful, it is certain, that when he retired the whole fabric fell with a crash. The mutiny and insurrection rooted up the fundamental principle of the Dalhousie system of foreign policy. The native states allowed to survive broke the force of the revolt. The Cis-Sutlej states enabled Sir John Lawrence to retake Delhi. Bikaneer and Bhawulpore and Jeypore were stumbling-blocks in the way of the enemy. The loyalty of Scindia, Holkar, and the Nizam saved Bombay and Madras from the fate of the north-west. Rewah served to curb Kour Singh. The minor rajahs and ranees, in many places, furnished material support and aid. " It is to Lord Canning's credit," says an able writer, " that he perceived not only the changed position of affairs, but the mode in which that change might tend to consolidate the supremacy of the Crown. A diplomatist of less acumen would have guaranteed the states as independent powers. Lord Canning took from them the last vestige of independence; called them openly feudatory princes; compelled the proudest to retire backwards from the chair of the Viceroy, and then guaranteed their rights as barons of the empire. The concession was accepted with delight." The concession was the right to adopt an heir, when they had no issue, a privilege which secured the continuance of the state as an entity. Thus we have gone back to the period before Lord Dalhousie ruled, or rather we have adopted, with considerable emphasis, a new principle - that native states are desirable. The working of this principle is the more easy in India because there the princes have never claimed independence in the European sense. They have always been taught to look up to a paramount power, and the British Viceroy, far more effectually than the Great Mogul ever played that part, is, indeed, a paramount lord. And now, having glanced at some of the larger results of the mutiny, it may be useful to the reader that we should wind up our narrative by a review of the series of wonderful events which have been described.

No true Englishman can read the story of the Indian Mutiny without a feeling of chastened exultation, and of pride in his kindred. There were not, all told, women and children included, a hundred thousand Europeans in the land, and this handful was taken by surprise. There were fewer soldiers of the dominant race than usual in the country. There was a new ruler. There was the greatest confidence in the natives. Men were looking forward to a new era of material wealth - of increased trade, of internal improvements such as would surpass the boasted works of the greatest of native rulers - canals, railways, roads, telegraphs, steamships. The native army had succeeded in inspiring its officers with a trust in its loyalty which the worst symptoms could not shake. It is true that for many years the more sagacious observers, and the more profound statesmen - a Jacob, a Thomasson, a Metcalfe, a Lawrence, a Napier - had spied out the danger, and had discerned in the pampered Sepoy, in the rotten Hindostanee army, our greatest, our only real enemy in India. But the warnings of these men were unheeded by the multitude; and those who recognised their truth thought it better to shut their eyes to the facts - to make believe that danger there was none, rather than grapple with it, vast as it was, and effect a radical cure. The Bengal Sepoy was outwardly obedient. He came clean and smart to parade, and looked every inch a soldier; he mounted guard after his slovenly fashion; he escorted treasure; he moved hither and thither at the word of command - what more could be required at his hands? The surface was as smooth as glass. Underneath there were at work the elements of a general overthrow. The Europeans in India were literally living on a thin crust, which barely covered a sea of raging fire.

But even when little tongues of flame broke here and there through the crust, when the Berhampore and Barrackpore Sepoys defied authority and attempted murder, those were few indeed who believed in the portents as indications of a hidden lava flood. Nor did they awake when, night after night, the flames of cantonments lighted up the midnight sky. On went the routine of existence: the magistrate sat in his court, the collector went his rounds, the railway contractor was busy with his plate-layers; there was feasting and dancing and sporting among the hills and jungles. Not a letter went to England asking for succour; not a steamer dashed forth to collect soldiers. The civilians at Calcutta did not believe in the existence of widely-spread disaffection in an army whose fundamental military virtues they had destroyed. Lord Canning, misled by their statements, was made to share their blindness. Hence it was that the fiery symptoms were disregarded, and that their eyes were not opened until the crust broke under their feet, and the liquid fire boiled forth, flooding the land from Calcutta to Peshawur from the mountains of Central India to the spurs of the mighty Himalayas.

Yet, although the scattered groups of Europeans were surprised, almost in their sleep, there was no faltering or paltering so far as individuals were concerned. In the whole north-west there was only one General Hewitt; and he erred from want of brains, not want of courage. Challenged to fight for existence, although they were outnumbered often by thousands to one, surrounded, smitten treacherously, surprised and astounded by the revolt of a subject race, the Anglo-Saxons sprang to the contest with a promptitude, and maintained it with a resolution, never surpassed in the annals of any people. For a month there was a riot of blood in the land. Wherever there were Bengal Sepoys there murder stalked abroad, there treachery unmasked its hideous face. The Meerut massacre was the signal to a whole army, long prepared to revolt, that the hour had struck. From the depths of Rajpootana, from the plains of Bundelcund, from the northern slopes of the Vindaya ranges, from the great cities on the Lower Ganges, from the fertile plains watered by the rivers of Oude, in rapid succession came the dread responses. A puppet Emperor of India was set up in the Palace of Delhi, and a debauched Mahratta dreamed of the restoration of the glories of Sivajee. The mutiny of the army gave an opportunity to every intriguer and pretender. In that short month British authority was swept away from the face of the land between Allahabad and Delhi, and those who had a few weeks before obeyed a white man without a murmur had now slain the men, and insulted the women, and butchered the children, and hunted th® fugitives without mercy. Yet, it must be acknowledged that many natives befriended the fugitives, and that many more were eager to serve their European rulers. It was not the artisans and the peasantry who committed the atrocities we have described - it was, first, the Sepoys, then the budmashes; that is, the criminal classes of India. So for a month a soldiery false to its oaths, and a scoundrel population, revelled in the novel sensation of lordship and mastery, and power to gratify the thirst for blood which seizes on all mobs, and especially Asiatic mobs, suddenly freed from the iron grip of authority.

But not for a month, not for a day, were treachery and mutiny allowed to go unchecked in one Indian Government. The men of the Punjab took the initiative. Instead of allowing themselves to be disarmed, they disarmed the Sepoys. There are few greater instances in history of the triumph of moral courage. By force of character they overcame. By clear, prompt decisions, invincible will, unfaltering effort, and a vigilance that took no rest, they rose up masters from the very beginning; and when terror reigned in Bengal; when the revolters submerged the whole of Oude, except Lucknow Residency; when Wheeler was helpless in Cawnpore; when the Government of the north-west took shelter in the fort of Akbar at Agra; when no Englishman could stir outside a fort and live, from the deserts of Bikaneer and Guzerat to the frontiers of Behar, the leaders of the Punjab were not only masters in their own land, but they had an army in the field, to overawe, and disarm, and destroy, and their energy it was which pushed on the Commander-in-Chief to the ridge in front of Delhi.

And the mastery they had won they retained. Reducing a rotten old army to impotence was not their only exploit - they raised another, and raised it from among the people so recently conquered, and among the tribes whose turbulence it was their duty to curb. We have seen how they acted. Serene, cheerful, incessantly active, indomitable - they coerced the bad, convinced the doubtful, encouraged the timid, struck down the hostile, and upheld the whole fabric of British power. Well might Lord Canning say that Sir John Lawrence was the saviour of India. Upon him fell suddenly a vast responsibility, and he proved equal to the burden. But how heartily and ably he was assisted by a Montgomery, a Nicholson, an Edwardes, a Corbett, a Cotton, a Hodson, with what unflinching pluck Ricketts and Spankie, and Dunlop, and Cooper, and a host of others, wrought in and sometimes beyond their several spheres of duty, the reader of these pages has seen for himself. It was these Punjab heroes, and the troops they flung into the contest before Delhi, who inflicted the first, and, as it proved, the deadly blow to the mutiny and the revolt; for they not only took Delhi, captured the old king, and slew his sons, but a force from the victorious Punjab army actually saved Agra, and marching to Cawnpore, took part in the relief of Lucknow.

The great achievements of the Punjab rulers were not at first appreciated. July and August were periods of gloom so intense, the British had suffered such agonies m Oude, in the Doab, in Central India, such insults in Benares and Allahabad, there had been so many massacres, such a flood of calamity, that the really great successes of Lawrence, and Wilson, and Barnard seemed small. The public mind was overpowered by the horrors of Jhansi and Cawnpore, and the steam arising from those bloody orgies hid the bright and steady flame of steadfast heroism burning in the Punjab and around Delhi. In the midst of the darkness there appeared a new light. Heralded by the stern and daring Neill, Henry Havelock shot out, like a meteor, from Allahabad, and his deeds filled the public with astonishment and exultation. None who remember their arrival will forget how the heart of England bounded with delight when telegram after telegram came in, telling of battle after battle and victory after victory, and how a little column of Englishmen, raked together from Persia and Madras, worked its fiery way under a July sun from Allahabad to Cawnpore, guided by a skilful soldier. The defeats of Nana Sahib gave more real satisfaction than the fall of Delhi, because the crimes of the depraved Lord of Bithoor were at once the lowest and most heinous which man can commit. But Havelock was arrested in his brilliant career, not because he could not beat his foes, but because his gallant soldiers - each of whom had wrought as if he were conscious that the honour of his country, and the safety of his countrymen, with their wives and children, depended on him - wasted away before the double scourge of battle and disease.

The war seemed to languish. The Calcutta Government had put forth all its strength. There were no more soldiers at hand. The strife went on before Delhi; the garrison of Lucknow resisted its tens of thousands of foes; the British flag floated there and at Agra, Saugor, Neemuch - tiny rocks amid a turbulent and circumambient sea. These little bands were surrounded by enemies thirsting for their blood. Help, except in themselves and in the God they worshipped, there seemed to be none.

Yet help came. The Governors of Ceylon and the Mauritius spared their troops; while Sir George Grey, at the Cape of Good Hope, acting with his usual selfishness, would spare none. England had sent out soldiers to coerce China, and these, arrested in mid ocean, were turned aside and directed to India. Lord Elgin, going to Canton, gave up his men and his ships, and soon the red-coats and blue-jackets were toiling and fighting under the burning sun of India, with a heartiness and a personal interest in the cause never surpassed in history. Sir Colin Campbell, who had started from home at a moment's notice, arrived in Calcutta. The soldiers and sailors were hurried up the Ganges. Obstructed for a moment, in consequence of the folly of General Lloyd at Dinapore, they at length reached the camp of Havelock. Havelock, superseded by Outram, was, by the chivalrous self-denial of the Bayard of India, allowed to retain command. He crossed the Ganges, and broke the forces of the enemy in the field; but plunging into Lucknow and storming on to the Residency, he arrived and saved his comrades, their wives and little ones, yet only to find the waves of insurrection close upon his track, and hold him fast.