"The word sepoy is of Persian origin, and means a soldier; and its practical application to-day is to the native soldiers of India, who were first employed by the French about the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1748 the East India Company organized a battalion of sepoys at Madras, and ten years later this small body had grown to a strength of 14,000. Bengal and Bombay followed the example of Madras, and the native army grew steadily till it numbered 240,000 men of all arms in 1857. Each regiment was nominally 1000 strong, and had twenty-four English officers, besides a full complement of native officers for each company; the natives were not allowed to rise above the rank of captain, through fear that they might turn their knowledge against their masters. The failure of the Mutiny is partly due to this precaution, as the rebels could find no man with sufficient military knowledge to lead them properly. "The regiments were differently composed in the three presidencies. Those of Bengal were mostly high-caste Hindoos; those of the North were Moslems; and those of Bombay and Madras included several classes. The prejudices of caste led to the assemblage of men of one caste only in each regiment, and in this way the revolt was made easy. It was entirely confined to Bengal. Only one regiment in Madras made any trouble; there was none in Bombay, and the troops in the north all remained faithful to England, and aided in suppressing the Mutiny. "The Bramins had long predicted that the English would be overthrown in 1857, the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Plassey; they organized a conspiracy that extended all over Bengal, and told the soldiers that the cartridges they used, and were required to bite when loading their muskets, contained grease from the cow, an animal they hold to be sacred, the object being to deprive them of caste and convert them into Englishmen. Worse yet, the cow's grease was said to be mixed with that of the pig, the latter animal being detested and abhorred as much as the cow is revered. Other stories were told to excite them against their masters; the revolt was so well planned that there was hardly a suspicion of it till the moment of the outbreak; and so secretly was it arranged that even to this day the English have not been able to learn all the facts connected with it.