Chapter 58

Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do.
This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty
without pain.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

It seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which the
Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom of
Oudh by the East India Company--characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as
"the most unrighteous act that was ever committed." In the spring of
1857, a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons,
and it grew day by day and spread wider and wider. The younger military
men saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take hold
of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not in
authority. Old-men were in the high places of the army--men who should
have been retired long before, because of their great age--and they
regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence. They loved their
native soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them to
revolt. Everywhere these obstinate veterans listened serenely to the
rumbling of the volcanoes under them, and said it was nothing.

And so the propagators of mutiny had everything their own way. They
moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier
the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, and
made his heart burn for revenge. They were able to point to two facts of
formidable value as backers of their persuasions: In Clive's day, native
armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, they
were weak against Clive's organized handful of well-armed men, but the
thing was the other way, now. The British forces were native; they had
been trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by the
British, all the power was in their hands--they were a club made by
British hands to beat out British brains with. There was nothing to
oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiers
scattered about India, a force not worth speaking of. This argument,
taken alone, might not have succeeded, for the bravest and best Indian
troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or
strong; but the agitators backed it with their second and best point
prophecy--a prophecy a hundred years old. The Indian is open to prophecy
at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy. There
was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of
Clive's which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power would
be overthrown and swept away by the natives.

The Mutiny broke out at Meerut on the 10th of May, 1857, and fired a
train of tremendous historical explosions.