ish administrators in dealing with beliefs and
types of character wholly unlike their own. They were unable to realise
that a belief which seemed to them so childish could have any depth, and
they accordingly produced a Mutiny that for a time shook the English
power in India to its very foundation.

The horrors of Cawnpore--which were due to a single man--soon took away
from the British public all power of sanely judging the conflict, and a
struggle in which no quarter was given was naturally marked by extreme
savageness; but in looking back upon it, English writers must
acknowledge with humiliation that, if mutiny is ever justifiable, no
stronger justification could be given than that of the Sepoy troops.

Many of my readers will remember an exquisite little poem called 'The
Forced Recruit,' in which Mrs. Browning has described a young Venetian
soldier who was forced by the conscription to serve against his
fellow-countrymen in the Austrian army at Solferino, and who advanced
cheerfully to die by the Italian guns, holding a musket that had never
been loaded in his hand. Such a figure, such a violation of military
law, will claim the sympathy of all, but a very different judgment
should be passed upon those who, having voluntarily entered an army,
betray their trust and their oath in the name of patriotism. In the
Fenian movement in Ireland, one of the chief objects of the conspirators
was to corrupt the Irish soldiers and break down that high sense of
military honour for which in all times and in many armies the Irish
people have been conspicuous. 'The epidemic' [of disaffection], boasts
a writer who was much mixed in the conspiracies of those times, 'was not
an affair of individuals, but of companies and of whole regiments. To
attempt to impeach all the military Fenians before courts martial would
have been to throw England into a panic, if not to precipitate an
appalling mutiny and invite foreign invasion.'[33]

I do not quote these words as a true statement. They are, I believe, a
gross exaggeration and a gross calumny on the Irish soldiers, nor do I
doubt that most, if not all, the soldiers who may have been induced over
a glass of whiskey, or through the persuasions of some cunning agitator,
to take the Fenian oath would, if an actual conflict had arisen, have
proved perfectly faithful soldiers of the Queen. The perversion of
morals, however, which looks on such violations of military duty as
praiseworthy, has n