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18 cynic has observed, is mostly the history of failures. It is easy in such a case to fail. The problems involved in the task of ruling remote and alien populations are complicated, abstruse, subtle, and likely to betray those who solve them carelessly into deplorable mistakes. Such mistakes lie thick in the annals of the Mutiny. Such a mistake, for instance, it was for the rulers of a country such as England — with vast interests to protect in every quarter of the globe, and with two wars on hand — to have so far yielded to the Parliamentary pressure for economy as to cut down its army to a level below the ordinary peace estimates, so that the effort necessary to preserve India left England practically defenceless. Such a mistake, again, was it for the Rulers of India to allow the proportion of English to native troops to sink far below the level which every good authority pronounced to be compatible with safety, and to pigeon-hole in some comfortable bureau alike Lord Dalhousie's demonstrations of danger and his projects for removing it. As it was, the utter defencelessness of the English position in many parts of India — the light-heartedness with which large arsenals, commanding forts, dangerous centres of native disaffection, important European communities, wide stretches of territory had been left without an English soldier, seemed, when once the outbreak had occurred, like the reckless audacity of a race doomed to self-destruction.

Such a mistake, again, was the hasty judgment