regarded; but when the crisis at Kánhpur arose, and when those regiments displayed against British officers, their own included, a truculent hatred not surpassed, and scarcely equalled, at any other station, they were remembered.
The annexation of Oudh was felt as a personal blow by every sipáhí in the Bengal army, because it deprived him of an immemorial privilege exercised by himself and his forefathers for years, and which secured to him a position of influence and importance in his own country. With the annexation that importance and that influence disappeared, never to return. English officials succeeded the native judges. The right of petition was abolished. The great inducement to enlist disappeared.
Nor was the measure more palatable to the large landowners. The two officers to whom the Government of India confided the administration of the newly annexed province, Mr Coverley Jackson and Mr Gubbins, had been trained in the school the disciples of which, endeavouring to graft western ideas upon an eastern people, had done their best in the North-west Provinces to abolish landlordism in the sense in which landlordism had flourished in those provinces since the time of Akbar. The result of their revolutionary proceedings was shown, in 1857, by the complete sympathy displayed by the civil districts in the North-west Provinces with the revolted sipáhís. It was shown in Oudh by the rising of the landowners throughout the province.
The causes I have stated had brought the mind of the sipáhí, in 1856, to fever heat. He had lost faith in the Government he served. The action of army Headquarters had deprived him of all respect for his officers. He was ready to be practised upon by any schemer. His mind was in the perturbed condition which disposes
