In 1857 the King of the Oude and some of the native princes cunningly devised a plan of undermining the British by means of their Sepoys, and circumstances afforded a singular opportunity for carrying out their design.
A new rifle had been adopted, which required a greased cartridge, for which animal grease was used. The Sepoys were told this was a deep-laid plot to overthrow their native religions. The Mussulman was to be eternally lost by defiling his lips with the fat of swine, and the Hindu, by the indignity offered to the venerated Cow. These English had tried to ruin them not alone in this world, but in the next.
Thrilled with horror, terror-stricken, the dusky soldiers were converted into demons. Mutinies arose simultaneously at twenty-two stations; not only officers, but Europeans, were slaughtered without mercy. At Cawnpore was the crowning horror. After a siege of many days the garrison capitulated to Nana Sahib and his Sepoys. The officers were shot, and their wives, daughters, sisters and babes, 206 in number, were shut up in a large apartment which had been used by the ladies for a ballroom.
After eighteen days of captivity, the horrors of which will never be known, five men with sabres, in the twilight, were seen to enter the room and close the door. There were wild cries and shrieks and groans. Three times a hacked and a blunted sabre was passed out of a window in exchange for a sharper one. Finally the groans and moans gradually ceased and all was still. The next morning a mass of mutilated remains was thrown into an empty well.
Two days later the avenger came in the person of General Havelock. The Sepoys were conquered and a policy of merciless retribution followed.
In that well at Cawnpore was forever buried sympathy for the mutinous Indian. When we recall that, we can even hear with calmness of Sepoys fired from the cannon's mouth. From that moment it was the cause of men in conflict with demons, civilization in deadly struggle with cruel, treacherous barbarism. We cannot advocate meeting atrocity with atrocity, nor can we forget that it was a Christian nation fighting with one debased and infidel. But terrible surgery is sometimes needed to extirpate disease.
Greed for territory, and wrong, and injustice may have mingled with the acquisition of an Indian Empire, but posterity will see only a majestic uplifting of almost a quarter of the human family from debased barbarism, to a Christian civilization; and all through the instrumentality of a little band of trading settlers from a small far-off island in the northwest of Europe.
But there were other things besides famine and wars taking place in the Kingdom of the young Queen. A greater and a subtler force than steam had entered into the life of the people. A miracle had happened in 1858, when an electric wire threaded its way under the Atlantic, and two continents conversed as friends sitting hand in hand.
Another miracle had then just been achieved in the discovery of certain chemical conditions, by which scenes and objects would imprint themselves in minutest detail upon a prepared surface. A sort of magic seemed to have entered into life, quickening and intensifying all its processes. Enlarged knowledge opened up new theories of disease and created a new Art of healing. Surgery, with its unspeakable anguish, was rendered painless by anæsthetics. Mechanical invention was so stimulated that all the processes of labor were quickened and improved.