It was thus that the Company came to have an army in its pay and to hold the control over extensive lands and many peoples. It was a position never contemplated when the Company was formed, nor was it a position entirely welcome to its directors. Continual additions had been made to the territories over which its control spread. The most notable perhaps were the addition of Cashmere in 1846, of the Punjab in 1849, and of Oudh in 1856. Farther east even than India, to the Straits Settlements and even to China itself, the authority reached of this vastly overgrown trading concern. Obviously it involved a control which could far better be undertaken directly by the British Government than by a Company acting under its charter. But with that typically British tendency to let things go on as they are going until it is impossible so to let them go any longer, nothing was done to transfer the Company's power to the Crown until the crisis came in the shape of the most formidable rising of a coloured people which the white man ever has {226} been called on to meet in the whole course of taking up his burden. It is that known as the Indian Mutiny--"mutiny," because it was mainly the affair of the native soldiers in the Company's pay. This was in the years 1857 and 1858. It threatened the very existence of the white man in the East, and only a splendid heroism in resistance to heavy odds, and heroic efforts and forced marches to relieve a situation nearly desperate, saved the principal, though scanty, British force from being annihilated. Once more the British wonderfully won through to a final victory, but the events of the war had brought into clear light the long known fact that the government of British India was an affair which demanded the most direct attention of British statesmen, with all the resources at their disposal. The East India Company were relieved of their far too heavy burdens. The Crown took over their responsibilities both in India and in the farther East. The responsibilities of India were not only those which arose from the troubles incidental to a rule over peoples of different race and of religions--the Moslem and the Hindu--which brought them often into collision with each other. There was another trouble which began to menace like a dark cloud on the north-eastern boundary of the country, where lay the independent State of Afghanistan bordering with Persia on its east and with Russia on its north.