merely to dismissal. Unfortunately this lenient punishment for mutiny was approved and confirmed by the Commander-in-Chief. The publication of this approval produced the worst effects.
Unfortunately for Lord Canning, himself one of the noblest of men, there was no one about him to tell him that the punishment of disbandment in such times as he was entering upon was no punishment at all. There was not a native regiment in the Bengal Presidency which was not at this period not only ready to disband itself, but to turn with all the fury of men excited by fancied wrongs against the masters they had served. But the truth is there was not a man about him who had penetrated below the surface, who had the wit to see that this disaffection was no ephemeral feeling, to disappear at the bidding of a few hard words. In the language of the Home Secretary, employed when the discontent had become infinitely more pronounced than it was at the beginning of May, it was, in the eyes of his councillors, 'a passing and groundless panic' which required no exceptional action on the part of the Government. When, then, Lord Canning punished a mutinous regiment by disbanding it, when the Commander-in-Chief announced to the army that he considered simple dismissal as a fitting punishment for a native officer caught red-handed in preaching mutiny to his own men, and when, finally, the Governor-General, notifying to the army the doom of the 34th N. I., declared to the sipáhís that similar conduct on their part would subject them to punishment 'sharp and certain,' the plotters in high places must have smiled contemptuously at the conception of sharp and certain punishment entertained by their rulers.
Notwithstanding the belief of the Government that the discontent was local, almost every post brought informa-
