greater lustre than throughout this period of 1857-9. From the moment he quitted the pernicious air of Calcutta Lord Canning stood in the van, the far-seeing, courageous, resolute Englishman. Lords Elphinstone and Harris, at Bombay and Madras, were in all respects worthy of their chief. The three Lawrences in the Panjáb, at Lakhnao, and in Rájpútána, upheld the glory of that sister island irrevocably united to Great Britain. Scotland contributed Sir Colin Campbell, Sir Robert Napier, Adrian Hope, Lumsden, killed at the Sikandarabágh, Charles MacGregor, and hosts of kindred warriors. Frere in Sind, William Tayler at Patná, Wynyard at Gorákhpur, Spankie and Dunlop in the Mírath districts, showed what great things Englishmen, untrained to arms, left to their own resources, could accomplish. Their action prevailed all over India. There was scarcely one exception to it. To name every man and his achievements would require a volume exceeding in bulk the present record.
So much, I repeat, for the moral of the Mutiny. One word now regarding its lessons and its warnings. The determining cause of the Mutiny of 1857 was the attempt to force Western ideas upon an Eastern people. This was especially the case in the North-western Provinces, where the introduction of the Thomasonian system unsettled the minds of noble and peasant. It was the case in Oudh, where the same system suddenly superseded the congenial rule of the ex-King. Nowhere else in India was the rebellion more rampant and more persistent than in those provinces. Three hundred years previously the great Akbar had attempted to interfere with the village system, but, after a short experience, he had recoiled. He recognised in good time that custom is nowhere so strong as in India, and that interference with that system would uproot customs as dear as their lives to the children of the
