It is more than probable that Wellington's Indian experience stood him in good stead when in the Peninsula he had to face the task of converting the untrained Portuguese into good troops. Discipline is essentially the same, whatever the race or character of the men to be subjected to it. They have to learn prompt obedience to orders, the habit of relying implicitly on their officers for military guidance, familiarity with the idea that duty must be done first and personal safety left to take care of itself, coolness and presence of mind in encountering danger, even unexpectedly. All this the Portuguese had to learn, but in other respects they were like enough to his English troops, already disciplined to his hand. They were Europeans and Christians, that is to say they recognised more or less the same moral code: they were patriotic, striving with foreign assistance to deliver their homes from the foreign conqueror. They had motives for responding to the call made on them which are intelligible, and cogent, to any European. The native troops that Wellington had learned to employ in India were like them in one important point, their being called on to trust and follow a foreign leader; they were like them also, as the event proved, in capacity to profit by training; but in ideas and habits they were totally different. The British conquest of India is one of the most astonishing, as well as important, things in modern history: and the wonder of it consists mainly in the fact that the English from the first were successful not only in getting their subjects to fight for them, but in transforming them, for military purposes, almost into Englishmen. Men of the most varied types were from time to time brought under the spell. Hindoos with a peculiar and very ancient civilisation of their own, the higher castes regarding themselves as socially and morally the salt of the earth, the lower castes accustomed to permanent and almost degrading inferiority; Mahommedans who had once been conquerors and deemed themselves the born superiors of their former slaves; fierce hill-men very low down in the scale of civilisation; strangest of all, the Sikhs with their national and religious enthusiasm still young,—all alike became the zealous soldiers of their rulers from over the sea. Nor was this all: the sepoys imbibed the military qualities of the men who fought beside them, including the superb tenacity which makes the British soldier always hard to beat.