England remained an interested spectator, but a spectator only, while the French ruler played that curiously calculated game of his, which did so much towards insuring the independence of Italy and its consolidation into one free monarchy.  It was no disinterested game, as the cession of Nice and Savoy to France by Piedmont would alone have proved.  It was daring to the point of rashness; for as a French general of high rank said, there needed but the slightest check to the French arms, and “it was all up with the dynasty!” Yet the “idea” which furnished the professed motive for the Emperor’s warlike action was one dear to English sympathies, and many an English heart rejoiced in the solid good secured for Italy, though without our national co-operation.  There was a proud compensating satisfaction in the knowledge that, when a crisis of unexampled and terrible importance had come in our own affairs, England had perforce dealt with it single-handed and with supreme success.

Those who can remember the fearful summer of 1857 can hardly recall its wild events without some recurrence of the thrill of horror that ran through the land, as week after week the Indian news of mutiny and massacre reached us.  It was a surprise to the country at large, more than to the authorities, who were informed already that a spirit of disaffection had been at work among our native troops in Bengal, and that there was good reason to believe in the existence of a conspiracy for sapping the allegiance of these troops.  Later events have left little doubt that such a conspiracy did exist, and that its aim was the total subversion of British power.  Our advance in Hindostan had been rapid, the changes following on it many, and not always such as the Oriental mind could understand or approve.  Early in the reign, in 1847, an energetic Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, went out to India, who introduced railways, telegraphs, and cheap postage, set on foot a system of native education, and vigorously fought the ancient iniquities of suttee, thuggee, and child-murder.  Perhaps his aggressive energy worked too fast, too fierily; perhaps his peremptory reforms, not less than his high-handed annexations of the Punjaub, Oude, and other native States, awakened suspicion in the mind of the Hindoo, bound as he was by the immemorial fetters of caste, and dreading with a shuddering horror innovations that might interfere with its distinctions; for to lose caste was to be outlawed among men and accursed in the sight of God.

[Illustration:  Lord Canning.]

Lord Canning, the successor of Lord Dalhousie, entered on his governor-generalship at a moment full of “unsuspected peril”; for the disaffected in Hindostan had so misread the signs of the times as to believe that England’s sun was stooping towards its setting, and that the hour had come in which a successful blow could be struck, against the foreign domination of a people alien in faith as in blood from Mohammedan