ilisation. The spirit
of fierce reaction that lay behind the Mutiny stands nowhere more
frankly revealed than in the _History of the War of Independence of
1857_, written by Vinayak Savarkar, one of the most brilliant apostles
of a later school of revolt, who, as a pious Hindu, concludes his
version of the Cawnpore massacre with the prayer that "Mother Ganges,
who drank that day of the blood of Europeans, may drink her fill of it
again."

The revolt failed except in one respect. It failed as a military
movement. It had appealed to the sword and it perished by the sword. But
it is well to remember that the struggle, which was severe, would have
been, to say the least, far more severe and protracted had not a large
part of the Indian army remained staunch to the _Raj_, and had not
Indian troops stood, as they had stood throughout all our previous
fighting in India, shoulder to shoulder with British troops on the ridge
at Delhi and in the relief of Lucknow. It failed equally as a political
movement, for it never spread beyond a relatively narrow area in Upper
and Central India. The vast majority of the Indian people and princes
never even wavered. British rule passed through a trial by fire and it
emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified. For it was purged of
all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities.
The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete
sovereignty. Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after
Plassey that the Crown should assume direct sovereignty over the whole
of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing
too heavy for the mere trading corporation that the East India Company
then still was. The Company had long ceased to be a mere trading
corporation. Transformed into a great agency of government and
administration, it had risen not unworthily to its immense
responsibilities. But the time had come for the final step. The Company
disappeared and the Crown assumed full and sole responsibility for the
government and administration of India. The change was in effect more
formal than real. The Governor-General came to be known as the Viceroy,
and the Secretary of State in Council took the place of the old
President of the Board of Control. But the system remained as before one
of paternal despotism in India, to be tempered still by the control of
Parliament at home.

Only in one respect had the reactionary forces at the b