"Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento:
Hæ tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem;
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos."
But that policy which suited the temper of the Senate of old Rome
was not exactly of a nature to please the Directors of a Joint Stock
Company. It was very well for statesmen and generals to look for their
reward in the pages of history. It behoved City men to keep an eye on
the fluctuations of the Share list.
Thus it happened that, ever since the beginning of the last quarter
of the eighteenth century, Cawnpore had been a first-class military
station. In the spring of 1857 it had attained an importance to
which the events of the following summer gave a fatal shock. The
recent annexation of Oude was an additional motive for keeping a
strong hold on Cawnpore: for that city commanded the bridge over
which passed the high road to Lucknow, the capital of our newly
acquired province. At that time the station was occupied by three
regiments of sepoys, the First, the Fifty-third, and the Fifty-sixth
Bengal Infantry. The Second Cavalry, and a company of artillerymen,
brought up the strength of the native force to three thousand men. Of
Europeans and persons of European extraction, there were resident at
Cawnpore more than a thousand. There were the officers attached to
the sepoy battalions; sixty men of the Eighty-fourth regiment of the
British line; seventy-eight invalids belonging to the Thirty-second
regiment, then quartered at Lucknow, and destined to pass through
the most fearful trial from which ever men emerged alive; fifteen of
the Madras Fusileers; and fifty-nine of the Company's artillerymen:
in all, some three hundred soldiers of English birth. Then there
were the covenanted civilians, the aristocracy of Indian society;
the lesser officials attached to the Post-office, the Public Works,
and the Opium Departments; the Railway people; the merchants and
shopkeepers,--Europeans some, others half-castes, or, as they would
fain be called, Eurasians. There, too, (alas!) were the wives and
little ones of the men of all these classes and grades, and in no
slender proportion; for among our countrymen in India the marriage
state is in special honour. There likewise were a great number of
half-caste children belonging to the Cawnpore school, who were soon to
buy at a very dear price the privilege of having been begotten by an
European sire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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