Page:Earl Canning.djvu/182

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176
EARL CANNING

by ties of sincere respect and even personal attachment; and there is among all a widely diffused belief that then own interests are best served by the security of British rule.

A few days after the issue of the Queen's Proclamation — as though to give a last poetic touch to its completeness, and in a striking form to typify the collapse of rebellion — the last of the Mughal Emperors, having been tried by a British tribunal and convicted of criminal complicity in the crimes of the mutineers, passed, a State prisoner, through Allahabad, on his journey to Burma, where for the rest of his days he was confined.

The Viceroy's anxieties, however, were not yet at an end. Shortly after the issue of the Royal Proclamation a portion of the British force, hitherto in the Company's employ, startled the authorities by a mutinous demonstration of a somewhat serious order. They contended that, having enlisted for service under the East India Company, they could not be transferred, without their own consent, to the service of the Crown, and they demanded either their discharge or fresh bounty money.

At Allahábád, Meerut and other important cantonments, collisions were with difficulty avoided, and the Government was obliged ultimately to grant discharge to all who desired it, a measure which cost the English army the loss of some 10,000 men and produced a dangerous excitement in the native mind, now fortunately too completely cowed to admit