Thus time went on until that eventful year of 1857, when the British power in India was to receive its most perilous shock. For a long time there had been a great and continually increasing discontent in India. Complaints were made that the treaties with native princes were not kept, that extortion was practised by which officials grew rapidly and mysteriously wealthy, looking upon India as a field for the acquisition of riches, and that the natives were treated by the governing powers with deep contempt, while every license was granted to the soldiery. The hidden cause of the discontent, however, lay in the deep hatred felt by the natives, Hindu and Mussulmen alike, for the dominant race of aliens to whom they had been obliged to bow in common subjection; and the fanaticism of the Hindus caused the smouldering elements of discontent to burst out into the flames of insurrection. A secret conspiracy was formed, in which all classes of the natives participated, its object being to overthrow the dominion of the English. It had been prophesied among the natives that the rule of the foreign masters of India should last only for a hundred years; and a century had just elapsed since the triumph of Clive at Plassey. [=The Greased Cartridges=] Small _chupatties_, cakes of unleavened bread, were secretly passed from hand to hand among the natives, as tokens of comradeship in the enterprise. This conspiracy was the more dangerous from making its way into the army, for India was a country governed by the sword. A rumor ran through the cantonments of the Bengal army that cartridges had been served out greased with the fat of animals unclean to Hindu and Mussulman alike, and which the Hindus could not bite without loss of caste, the injunction of their religion obliging them to abstain from animal food under this penalty. After this nothing could quiet their minds; fires broke out nightly in their quarters; officers were insulted by their men; all confidence was gone, and discipline became an empty form. [=The Old Emperor Akbar=] The sentence of penal servitude passed upon some of the mutineers became the signal for the breaking out of the revolt. At Meerut, on the Upper Ganges, the Sepoys broke into rebellion, liberated their comrades who were being led away in chains, and marched in a body to Delhi, the ancient capital of India and former seat of the Mogul empire. Here they took possession of the great military magazine and seized its stores. Those among the British inhabitants who did not save themselves by immediate flight were barbarously put to death; and the decrepit Akbar, the descendant of the Moguls, an old man of ninety, who lived at Delhi upon a pension granted to him by the East India Company, was drawn from his retirement and proclaimed Emperor of Hindostan by the rebels, his son, Mirza, being associated with him in the government. [=The Frightful Massacre at Cawnpore=]