Eating or tasting beef through the most distant medium is a mortal sin in the eyes of Hindus. Under Hindu rule, when the caste system was enforced by village communities, the vile sinner was driven from his wife, family, kinsfolk, and village by the ban of Brahmanical excommunication. In the days of Mohammedan persecutions, thousands of Hindus were compelled to swallow shreds of beef by tyrants of the stamp of Tippu Sultan of Mysore, in order to force them to become Mohammedans. There was no way of escape. They had no alternative but to accept Islam, marry a Mohammedan wife, and enter a new life and career with a new home and surroundings.[28] [Sidenote: Excitement at Barrackpore.] §5. The ball set rolling from the arsenal at Dumdum soon assumed monstrous dimensions in the cantonment at Barrackpore. The sepoys blindly accepted the conclusion that Her Majesty the Queen and Lord Canning had arranged a secret scheme for converting them all to Christianity. The greased cartridges, they decided, must have been manufactured expressly to destroy their religion; to compel them to become Christians, and to eat beef and drink beer until they became as strong as Europeans, and were able to conquer Persia, Russia, and China. Wild fictions, the outcome of Oriental imaginations which would not have imposed upon a European child, were greedily accepted and talked over as matters of fact, by the ignorant and credulous sepoys. India, it was said, was being bound in iron fetters by railway lines and telegraph wires; and now the poor sepoy was to be cut off from his countrymen and co-religionists, and to become the helpless vassal of his European masters, like the genii who are slaves to magicians and sorcerers. [Sidenote: Fruitless explanations.] These ridiculous stories soon reached the ears of the European officers. General Hearsey, who commanded the Calcutta division, assembled the sepoys on the parade ground at Barrackpore, and reminded them that the British government had never meddled with their religion or caste, and had heavily punished any European officer who had attempted to do so. But his words were thrown away; the brains of the sepoys were too heated, and their convictions too deeply rooted, to be explained away. For months they had been discussing the expedition sent from Bombay to the Persian Gulf to defeat the designs of Russia on Herat; and now there was to be a war with China! The general might say what he pleased, but the British government had obviously manufactured the greased cartridges to destroy the caste of the poor sepoys, to make them eat beef and drink beer until they were strong enough to conquer the world. [Sidenote: Secret incendiarism.]