While at Murri and on his way thither he caused a report to be drawn up for the Supreme Government regarding the events of 1857 in the Punjab, awarding praise, commendation, acknowledgment, to the civil and military officers of all ranks and grades for their services, meting out carefully to each man his due. He considered also the causes of this wondrous outbreak, as concerning not only his province but other parts of India, and as affecting the policy of the British Government in the East. He did not pay much heed to the various causes which had been ingeniously assigned in many well informed quarters. Some of these causes might, he thought, prove fanciful; others might be real more or less, but in so far as they were real they were only subsidiary. The affair of the greased cartridges, which has become familiar to History, was in his judgment really a provocative cause. It was, he said, the spark that fell upon, and so ignited, a combustible mass; but the question was, what made the mass combustible? There was, he felt, one all-pervading cause, pregnant with instruction for our future guidance. The Sepoy army, he declared, had become too powerful; they came to know that the physical force of the country was with them; the magazines and arsenals were largely, the fortresses partially, the treasuries wholly, in their keeping. They thought that they could at will upset the British Government and set up one of their own in its place; and this thought of theirs might, as he would remark, have proved correct, had not the Government obtained a mighty reinforcement from England, of which they could not form any calculation or even any idea. It was the sense of power, as he affirmed repeatedly, that induced the Sepoys to revolt. In the presence of such a cause as this, it availed little with him to examine subsidiary causes, the existence or the absence of which would have made no appreciable difference in the result. Neither did he undertake to discuss historically the gradual process whereby this excessive power fell into the hands of the Sepoys. The thing had happened, it ought not to have happened; that was practically enough for him; it must never, he said, be allowed to happen again. He took care that in his Province and its Dependencies, every strategic point, stronghold, arsenal, vantage-ground, even every important treasury, should be under the guardianship of European soldiers. He also provided that at every large station or cantonment, and at every central city, the physical force should be manifestly on the side of the Europeans. Though he reposed a generous confidence in the Native soldiery up to a certain point, and felt gratitude and even affection towards them for all that they had done under his direction, still he would no longer expose them to the fatal temptation caused by a consciousness of having the upper hand.