The causes of this rising are traced to distrust and hatred of the British rulers—­feelings that caused a ferment among the Hindus and Mahometans of India, who suspected a design for suppressing their religions.  The natives also became alarmed at the introduction of Western ideas and improvements—­new methods of education, the steam-engine, the telegraph, etc.—­portending to the Indian peoples the substitution of a foreign civilization for their own.  The truth is that in attempting to abolish suttee and other ancient native customs, and to introduce more enlightened practices, the British Government was acting in the interest of general humanity.

The immediate provocation of the great mutiny among the sepoys or native troops in the British East-Indian service is well shown, and the entire story of the revolt is equally well told, by Mr. Wheeler.  This author, while a secretary to the Government of India in the latter part of the nineteenth century, enjoyed peculiar advantages for study and research.  These advantages he turned to account by writing an authoritative and interesting history of the land of his official residence.

Early in the year 1857, it is said, there were rumors of a coming danger to British rule in India.  In some parts of the country chupatties, or cakes, were circulated in a mysterious manner from village to village. [Footnote:  The form of the cake conveyed information that an insurrection was in preparation—­an old custom—­understood by the natives.—­ED.] Prophecies were also rife that in 1857 the East India Company’s raj [rule] would come to an end.  Lord Canning has been blamed for not taking alarm at these proceedings; but something of the kind always had been going on in India.  Cakes of cocoanuts are given away in solemn fashion; and as the villagers were afraid to keep them or eat them, the circulation went on to the end of the chapter.  Then, again, holy men and prophets have always been common in India.  They foretell pestilence and famine:  the downfall of British rule, or the destruction of the whole world.  They are often supposed to be endowed with supernatural powers and to be impervious to bullets; but these phenomena invariably disappear whenever they come in contact with Europeans, especially as all such characters are liable to be treated as vagrants without visible means of subsistence.

One dangerous story, however, got abroad in the early part of 1857, which ought to have been stopped at once, and for which the military authorities were wholly and solely to blame.  The Enfield rifle was being introduced; it required new cartridges, which in England were greased with the fat of beef or pork.  The military authorities in India, with strange indifference to the prejudices of sepoys, ordered the cartridges to be prepared at Calcutta in like manner; forgetting that the fat of pigs was hateful to the Mahometans, while the fat of cows was still more horrible in the eyes of the Hindus.