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114 the action of the Government, and the reasons for that action, to a large number of regimental native officers. That the native officers present were touched by General Anson's act cannot be doubted. They listened respectfully, and, when the meeting was over, they expressed to Martineau their high sense of the goodness of the Commander-in-Chief, and of the honour he had done them. 'But,' they added, 'it is not a mere question to us of obedience or disobedience. The story has been so generally circulated, and is so generally believed, not only by the sipáhís but by their relations and by villagers all over the country, that the sipáhís cannot use the cartridges without incurring the certainty of social degradation, the consequence of their loss of caste.' They begged Martineau to represent this fact to the Commander-in-Chief. Martineau did so, and General Anson, who recognised more plainly than anyone about him the dangers staring him in the face, suspended the issue of the new cartridges until a special report should have been prepared of the composition of the paper with which they were wrapped.

The secret agents of the vast conspiracy hatched by the Maulaví of Faizábád and his associates had by this time done their work so thoroughly, had roused to a pitch of pent-up madness of which an oriental people are alone capable, the feelings of the sipáhís and the population of the North-western Provinces generally, that it is improbable that, if the Government had even gone the length of withdrawing absolutely the new musket, and the new cartridge with it, the plague would have been stayed. The attempt of General Anson in that direction was undoubtedly the best thing to be done. But, unhappily, his scheme was not given a chance. Lord Canning and his advisers wrote to say that they would