It seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which the Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom of Oudh by the East India Company—­characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as “the most unrighteous act that was ever committed.”  In the spring of 1857, a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons, and it grew day by day and spread wider and wider.  The younger military men saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take hold of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not in authority.  Old-men were in the high places of the army—­men who should have been retired long before, because of their great age—­and they regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence.  They loved their native soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them to revolt.  Everywhere these obstinate veterans listened serenely to the rumbling of the volcanoes under them, and said it was nothing.

And so the propagators of mutiny had everything their own way.  They moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, and made his heart burn for revenge.  They were able to point to two facts of formidable value as backers of their persuasions:  In Clive’s day, native armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, they were weak against Clive’s organized handful of well-armed men, but the thing was the other way, now.  The British forces were native; they had been trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by the British, all the power was in their hands—­they were a club made by British hands to beat out British brains with.  There was nothing to oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiers scattered about India, a force not worth speaking of.  This argument, taken alone, might not have succeeded, for the bravest and best Indian troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or strong; but the agitators backed it with their second and best point prophecy—­a prophecy a hundred years old.  The Indian is open to prophecy at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy.  There was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of Clive’s which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power would be overthrown and swept away by the natives.

The Mutiny broke out at Meerut on the 10th of May, 1857, and fired a train of tremendous historical explosions.  Nana Sahib’s massacre of the surrendered garrison of Cawnpore occurred in June, and the long siege of Lucknow began.  The military history of England is old and great, but I think it must be granted that the crushing of the Mutiny is the greatest chapter in it.  The British were caught asleep and unprepared.  They were a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations.  It would take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falter or stop to count the odds, but with English resolution and English devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, through good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may read of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly.