The English battles in India were nearly all fought against odds, occasionally enormous; and in every case, except in some of the battles during the Mutiny, the bulk of the army consisted of native troops. What is the explanation of this phenomenon, unique in history? One main cause clearly was, to quote Colonel Malleson's[89] words: "the trusting and faithful nature, the impressionable character, the passionate appreciation of great qualities, which formed alike the strength and the weakness of those races;" but this description hardly applies to all the multifarious races of India, though doubtless it does to many, and pre-eminently to the people of Bengal, where practically the British dominion was founded. Half of the explanation must be looked for on the other side. Unless the natives of India had been capable of receiving the impression, obviously none could have been made: but the Englishmen who laid the foundation of our Indian empire possessed the requisite qualities for creating it. They made their followers understand that when an Englishman said a thing he meant it, and this in two senses. If he made a statement he believed it to be true; also, and more important, if he gave a promise or declared a purpose, he would fulfil it. Further they taught the natives to understand that when a thing was undertaken, it must be done; difficulties must be vanquished, odds, no matter how great, must be encountered, if such things came into the day's work. The coolness with which they assumed the certainty of success naturally went a great way towards achieving it, and was all-powerful in convincing the natives, ignorant, but by no means stupid, that the English possessed an inexhaustible reserve of strength and resource. Then the English treated their native soldiers well, looked after them more steadily and intelligently than any Indian princes would have cared or known how to do, and taught them to feel that they were invincible. The very strangeness of the Englishman's motives and principles of action made them all the more impressive to men who saw that they were successful. And the fact that the sepoys were assumed by their officers to be capable of great things went far to make them so. Never give in, never mind odds; these were the maxims on which the men of whom Clive is but the most conspicuous, habitually acted; and the results were that these became the accepted rules of conduct for Englishmen in India, and that the native soldiers of whatever race learned to rely implicitly on their officers.