A Cause of the Sepoy Mutiny
The present Anglo-Indian Empire grew out of the Sepoy Rebellion. The Sepoys were natives of India, formed into military companies and drilled by English officers for the maintenance of peace in India, at least among the various races hitherto almost always at war one with the other; and the Sepoys were necessary, also, for the protection of British interests. There were, at the time of the Sepoy mutiny, two hundred and thirty thousand Sepoys under pay from the East India Company, to forty-five thousand Europeans, and "the Sepoys" had at this time become a proverb for fidelity to those who employed and fed them.
But native superstition finally maddened the Sepoys with fear, and carried them hopelessly beyond restraint or control. The advance of civilization became to them a menace to their race. They could not understand the Iron Horse that swept along the iron tracks which they had been silently laying; the telegraph was still more incomprehensible; and the endeavors of the white men to destroy the system of caste confirmed their worst fears. He, the Hindu, and his children, were in danger of losing their religion and their social position, their place both in this world and in the next. But this was silently borne until the Enfield rifle was introduced, to take the place of the time-worn musket. The cartridges thrilled the dusky legions with horror. In biting off the ends of them the Mohammedan found that he must defile his lips with the fat of abhorred swine; the Hindu found in the lubricating oil an indignity to his venerated cow. The wildest rumors were afloat; confidence in British rule was gone, and every feeling of loyalty and fidelity perished.
The Sepoys, or native soldiers, were soon in open rebellion; and, urged on by aggrieved chiefs, it soon became apparent that every white man, woman and child in India was doomed. British dominion in India was shaken to its foundation. The Governor-General, Lord Canning, recognized the greatness of the peril, and summoning troops from every province, determined to maintain, as long as possible, their position until help could reach them from England. The horrors of that year, 1857, in India can never be told. The British were weak in numbers but mighty in their just cause. Everywhere the mutineers, in the Presidency of Bengal, not content with murder, were destroying telegraphs and railways, and digging up mile-stones and obliterating every trace of "the white man." But General Havelock, a veteran of forty years' service, was marching north; only a few months of life were left to him, but these were sufficient to gain for him a foremost place among those who "die to save their fellow men."
Cawnpore, Lucknow, Delhi! What a chapter of horror to read in the middle of the nineteenth Christian century. When the restoration of English authority was achieved, by such slaughter on both sides as no historian can fully record, the "East India Company" was disbanded, and the government of British India was vested in the Crown of Queen Victoria.
England then bravely resumed her efforts for the elevation of the Indian people and the development of the boundless resources amidst which they live, and she has succeeded; the annual revenue of India in a few years grew to pound 72,000,000 sterling; and the greater portion, in fact all of it, was expended annually in developing the country, in educating the natives, and training them for future self-government.
No wonder that the proclamation giving India a place in the title of Queen Victoria, January 1st, 1877, was received throughout India with great rejoicing.
A writer on India says: "Posterity will look upon the picture of a vast and utterly barbaric population, numbering nearly one-fourth of the human family, subdued, governed, educated, Christianized and led up to the dignity of self-government by a handful of strangers who came from an inconsiderable island 15,000 miles away."