Northern Bengal had slipped out of the hands of the Mussulmans. Mussulmans none of them, however, admitted it. They played hide and seek with the true state of things in this matter, 'and said that some plunderers were creating much disturbance and that they were about to suppress them. One does not know how long this game would have gone on had not Providence placed Warren Hastings in the office of the Governor-General at Calcutta. Hastings was not a man to play with his convictions,—if he had known the game, the British Empire in India would have been nowhere to-day. So a second General, named Major Edwards, presently arrived on the scene with a new army to suppress the Children.
Edwards saw, it was no warfare on European lines. The enemy had no army, no cities, no forts,—yet everything was under them. Whenever the British army encamped at any place, that place, was under the British sway for that day. The next day so soon as the British army left, "Hail, mother" were sung in that neighbourhood. The Major could not make out whence the Children emerged like an army of ants any night and how they burnt the village which may have fallen under British sway or killed small parties of British soldiers wherever they could find them. On enquiry he came to learn however that they had built a fort at Padachinha and were keeping their magazine and treasury
