[Sidenote: INDIA CONQUERED BY INDIAN SOLDIERS.]
It would be a great mistake to suppose that India had been conquered for England by its own people. If they had been left to themselves, no part of it would now belong to us. The small European force has always been the backbone of our armies; but in every battle native soldiers have formed the great majority. The French gave us the example of employing native soldiers to place their country under European rule. In the dissolution of the Mogul Empire, thousands of warriors were ready to fight the battles of any one, European or native, who would pay them well. The example of the French was followed by the English, till India, from Cape Comorin to the mountains of the north and the north-west, came under their sway, to an extent and with a completeness and firmness of grasp never reached by the Muhammadan power in its palmiest days. Each Presidency--Bengal, Madras, and Bombay--has had its own native army, in 1857 amounting altogether to 240,000 men. In the Bengal army, by far the largest of the three, there has never been a single native of Bengal Proper. It has been entirely composed of north countrymen, to a large extent of Brahmans, and Chhatrees the old fighting caste of India, who have entered our service on account of its good pay and good treatment, though alien from us in everything by which one people can be alien from another. Many of the native soldiers have been Muhammadans, who are intensely averse to us on both religious and political grounds. Under the influence of friendly intercourse and good offices performed to each other, a kindly feeling often sprung up between officers and men; but as a body they were mercenary troops fighting for strangers, and the history of the world furnishes abundant instances of such an army being as formidable to their employers as to those against whom they have been employed. In the course of time our native soldiers were more and more trusted; important places were garrisoned by them, military stores were entrusted to them; and nothing was more natural than that in the more ambitious of their number the thought should spring up that the time had arrived for expelling the stranger, and seizing the power within their grasp. In thus acting they could make themselves sure of the sympathy of their countrymen.