Page:Earl Canning.djvu/146

140 great difficulty in maintaining his ascendancy in Delhi. Náná Sáhib's first act was to persuade the Cawnpur mutineers to return with him to that city instead of joining the common cause; and in Oudh, each of several rebel parties played its own game, regardless of, and often in opposition to, the interests of the rest. In connexion with this branch of the subject, it is satisfactory to remember that no Native State took part against us, though the loyalty of two of them led to the desertion of their armies — that several of them gave us active and valuable help — that, outside the central region of disaffection, the upper classes showed no indication of sympathy with the movement, and in Lower Bengal plainly discountenanced it, and that, though several of the leaders of the movement were, as might have been expected, persons who considered themselves aggrieved by the British administration, their conduct was obviously rather the outcome of individual idiosyncrasy than the natural result of English policy. Nothing that it was in the power of the Government to do, or to refrain from doing, would have made Náná Sáhib anything but a treacherous savage, or have tamed the fierce Maráthá blood that throbbed in the heart of the Rání of Jhánsí.

The circumstance that the North-Western Provinces were overrun by the mutineers, that the Oudh Tálukdárs, en masse, joined the rebel cause, and that Lord Canning thought right, in re-organising the land-revenue system of the Province to do so on a basis