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56 and experience in the public measures taken to meet the calamity, was super-added the deeper sorrow of knowing that if the military precautions which he had urged as Governor-General had been adopted by the Home Government, the spread of the Mutiny would, humanly speaking, have been impossible. On this point it will be my duty to speak fully and frankly in a later chapter. Meanwhile it only remained for him to suffer in silence, and to bear with fortitude, but without reply, the popular clamour against him for not having provided the very safeguards which he himself had clearly foreseen to be necessary; and of the necessity for which he had solemnly warned the responsible Ministers in England.

'Of course there are plenty who inculpate me,' he wrote in August, 'and although it is very hard to be incapacitated from defence when one believes oneself to be without blame, I believe that I care less for the blame and the defencelessness than for the misfortunes which lead men to blame, and render defence of my administration necessary. In the meantime the rest of mind which I feel to be essential to my progress towards recovery is gone.'

He chafed at the absence of that swift and stern action in India with which he himself would have crushed the disaffection at the outset. 'This last business at Dinapur,' he writes in August, 'exceeds all powers of imagination. General Lloyd, it is