Page:The Indian Mutiny of 1857.djvu/446

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The 'Race' the Main Factor in Success.

field, expelled its European rivals from India; that energy and that resolution, far from giving evidence of deterioration in 1857, never appeared more conspicuously. It was a question of race. This race of ours has been gifted by Providence with the qualities of manliness, of endurance, of a resolution which never flags. It has been its destiny to conquer and to maintain. It never willingly lets go. Its presence in England is a justification of its action all over the world. Wherever it has conquered, it has planted principles of order, of justice, of good government. And the Providence which inspired the race to plant these great principles, endowed it with the qualities necessary to maintain them wherever they had been planted. Those principles stood them in good stead in 1857. It was the sense of the justice of England which, in the most terrible crisis of her history in India, brought her the support of the Sikhs, conquered but eight years before; of the princes and people of Rájpútána, rescued from oppression but twenty-nine years before; of that Sindhiá, whose great ancestor was England's deadliest enemy; of the Nizam, our ally since the time of Clive; of Maisur, restored by Marquess Wellesley to its ancient ruler; of Nipal, our nearest independent neighbour. But for the consequences of that sense of the justice of England, we might have been temporarily overwhelmed. Supported by it, the race did the rest. It showed itself equal to difficulties which, I believe, no other created race would have successfully encountered.

So much for the moral of the story. Mistakes doubtless were made, especially in certain details at the outset of the rebellion. Some injustices were committed, mainly by the men who made the mistakes. But, taking it as a whole, there is no epoch in the history of Great Britain in which the men and women of these islands shone with