Page:Sir Henry Lawrence, the Pacificator.djvu/171

162 left Rájputána for Lucknow. He stopped for a few days at Agra on his way, and gave his friends there to understand very clearly in how serious a light he viewed the progress of the disaffection both in the people generally and in the army. 'You Brahmans,' he said to his civilian friends, 'will be shut up in the Fort before we meet again.' But, whatever the ill-feeling in the army might be, he attributed its spread not to the normal working of the exciting cause — the cartridge scare — but to the use made of it by the discontented and ambitious spirits in the army; three out of every hundred being, in his opinion, dangerously disposed.

His opinion was thus, on May 1, expressed to Lord Canning: —

'The oldest and best Hindus are easily moved, but if bad feeling extended to open mutiny, the Muhammadans would soon become the most energetic and violent of mutineers. I will watch for differences of feeling between the two creeds. Whatever may be the danger of the native press, I look on it that the papers published in our own language are much the most dangerous. Disaffected native editors need only translate, as they do, with or without order of admiration or exclamation, editorials on the duty of annexing native States, or the imbecility, if not wickedness, of allowing a single jágír, or of preaching the Gospel (even by commanding officers), to raise alarm and hatred in the minds of all connected with native principalities and jágírs, and among the above will be found the large majority of the dangerous classes. ...

Such then was the state of feeling in the army