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138 understanding, dislike or disapproval, may break out in an infectious form, and suddenly convert a tranquil community into a realised chaos. Ignorance, superstition, the wild promptings of heredity, remain — despite a fair exterior of civilisation — tremendous forces. Their combinations can be as little anticipated, as little controlled, as the atmospheric conditions which produce a cyclone.

Amid such surroundings it behoves the ruler to watch carefully, to move slowly; to innovate with cautious reluctance, to turn a deaf ear to the mutterings of ignorance and impatience or the syren song of inexperienced benevolence, and — not least — while busy with his peaceful task, to have, like the Jews of Nehemiah, his weapon near at hand and fit for use.

That there were plenty of malcontents in India delighted to do the British Government an ill turn by encouraging disloyalty, spreading mischievous rumours and raising false hopes, may be taken for granted. But of a conspiracy in the sense of common action, systematically directed towards a common end, there is nothing that deserves the name of evidence. The most searching inquiries failed to produce any direct proof of such a conspiracy.

'It is Sir John Lawrence's very decided impression,' so wrote one who was certainly well qualified to judge, 'that the Mutiny had its origin in the army itself; that it is not attributable to any external or antecedent conspiracy whatever, although it was