states under British influence should keep no regular troops but those hired from the Anglo-Indian Government, should refer all disputes with their neighbours to British arbitration, and should enter into no negotiations with foreign powers. Hereby Mornington made himself the re-founder, if the phrase may be used, of our British Empire in the East; but his wars had been costly, and his temper was too imperious to commend itself either to the Directors of the East India Company or to the Board of Control which represented the Imperial Governments authority in India. He was therefore recalled, and was succeeded first by Lord Cornwallis--who died almost immediately--and then for a time by Sir George Barlow, the senior member of the Council. Meanwhile there suddenly burst upon British India an unsuspected and appalling danger. Owing to injudicious interference by officers of the King's service who held high command in the Madras Army, regulations were introduced which ignored the caste marks of the Sepoys. Silently but effectually correspondence was established between the Company's battalions all over the Presidency; and a general insurrection was concerted for the autumn of 1806. Favourable circumstances caused the garrison at Vellore to rise prematurely; when eighteen hundred Sepoys made a general attack upon all the Europeans in the fort, murdered several, and were within an ace of complete success. The situation was saved by Colonel Gillespie of the Nineteenth Light Dragoons, who galloped to the spot with his regiment and two guns, forced an entrance into the fort, rallied the Europeans and destroyed the mutineers almost to a man. They had already succeeded in killing and wounding over two hundred British soldiers, so no mercy was shown to them. The service rendered by Gillespie upon this occasion was beyond estimation great; and it was a matter of extreme good fortune that such a man--ready, energetic and of almost incredible courage--should have been within reach at such a crisis. But for his bravery and promptitude the entire native army of Madras might have mutinied, and the evil might have spread until it threatened the actual existence of the British in India. With her resources strained to the utmost by the struggle with Napoleon England would have found reconquest a difficult matter; and in short, but for Gillespie, the mutiny of Vellore might have altered the whole course of European as well as Indian history.