Page:Earl Canning.djvu/142

136 the Governor-General. The responsibility was Lord Canning's; and to him, too, his countrymen's gratitude is due for a result which restored the endangered prestige of British arms, and settled conclusively the question of British supremacy in the East.

Mutinous symptoms came to light wherever native troops were quartered, over a vast local area in Upper and Central India, from the garrisons on the Indus frontier to cantonments on the confines of Assam and across the Bay of Bengal— from the foot of the Himalayas to the capital of the Deccan and the towns which skirt the Western Gháts. The enormous extent of the struggle, its terrible vicissitudes, its dark spots of agony, reverse or mistake, the awful possibilities which beset it, its splendid successes, its long array of noble acts of heroic self-sacrifice, will leave it, so long as Englishmen prize their countrymen's best achievements, among the most fascinating chapters of our military annals.

Its causes are still to a large extent shrouded in the same mystery as hid it from contemporary onlookers. At the best the diagnosis must be imperfect; for many things about the patient's condition and temperament are hidden from us. In such cases it is only presumptuous sciolism which would profess to explain the sequence of events, to indicate the course by which this or that disaster might have been avoided, or to criticise those, to whose hands the conduct of the crisis fell, from the standpoint of superior sagacity. The Mutiny transcended experience. It baffled skill; it