regiments by no means certain; and that, with a view to this consideration, the General in command at Dinápur, though empowered to stop some of the troops on the march up country, if he decided it to be necessary to disarm the Sepoys, had hesitated to do so: and, thirdly, that, after all, the Dinápur regiments did not mutiny till they had been almost driven to do so by the weak and clumsy measures which the local authorities unfortunately adopted for disarming them.
As to the next ground of complaint, the restriction of the liberty of the press, the petitioners complained especially of the 'aggravation of an inherently odious measure by the weak and wanton confounding of loyal subjects with the seditious and rebellious,' in other words, by the extension of the rules to European as well as to native newspapers. The answer was that the measure was not aimed solely at sedition, but at the prevention of intelligence which, for the special reasons of the moment, it was not expedient to divulge, and of attacks calculated to inflame disaffection at a crisis when it was all-important to guide public feeling in the right direction. In these aspects the English press was as much in need of supervision as the native. The only instance in which, under the Act, a licence had been withdrawn from any English newspaper, and that only for a few days, was 'one on which an important measure of the Government was stigmatised in language directly and obviously calculated to weaken
