Page:Readings in European History Vol 2.djvu/381

 The Expansion of England 343 kinds. ... It is computed there are killed of the enemy about five hundred. Our loss amounted to only twenty-two killed and fifty wounded, and those chiefly blacks. For a hundred years after the battle of Plassey the English steadily extended their power, but in 1857 the terrible mutiny broke out in which the native troops (Sepoys) turned upon their masters. After a fierce struggle the English put down the revolt and banished the last Mogul, who had become a mere figurehead. An English officer who witnessed the mutiny thus describes the conditions which the English faced in extending their control over the motley hordes of India. The great convulsion known as the Indian Mutiny broke out in May, 1857, consequent directly on the excitement and ill feeling engendered in the Bengal army by the well- known cartridge incident. 1 Any such military outbreak would naturally cause much civil disturbance and find numerous supporters outside the army, but the wide range and virulence of the general commotion that ensued were exceptional, and the rising was throughout marked by a variety of phases and by singular episodes, for which the disaffection of the troops and the cartridge incident do not of themselves adequately account. . . . Up to the year 1856, the year before the outbreak, there had been for a whole century a continuous, aggressive ad- vance of the British power, till it completed the ring fence of the empire by the annexation of Oude. During all that time it had either been engaged in actual conflict or had been forming dominant relations with the several races of the country, and had reduced them one after another to sub- jection ; some provinces being brought under its direct administration and others being left as feudatory or vassal states under their native rulers. At the start the old Mogul 1 The troops objected, on religious grounds, to handling a cartridge smeared with animal grease. 372. Review of the Eng- lish progress in India from 1757 to 1857- (By Lieutenant- General Innes.)