In writing this short History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 I have aimed at the compilation of work which, complete in itself, should narrate the causes as well as the consequences of a movement unforeseen, undreamt of, sudden and swift in its action, and which taxed to the utmost the energies of the British people. Preceding writers on the same subject, whilst dealing very amply with the consequences, have, with one exception, but dimly shadowed forth the causes. The very actors in the mutiny failed to detect them. Sir John Lawrence himself, writing with the fullest knowledge of events in which he played a very conspicuous part, mistook the instrument for the chief cause. He stopped at the greased cartridge. But the greased cartridge was never issued to the great body of the troops, it indeed to any. There must have been a latent motive power to make of an unissued cartridge a grievance so terrible as to rouse into revolt men whose fathers and whose father’s fathers had contributed to the making of the British Empire in India. The greased cartridge, too, did not concern those landowners and cultivators of Oudh and the North-western Provinces, who rose almost to a man. What that latent motive power was I have described fully, and I believe truly, in this volume.
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