If there were real grievances in India as regards our rule, it must have been common in all the Presidencies. But in Madras there was only unrest, never real danger. In Bombay, save in one case, at Kolapore, the same conditions obtained; but the whole region of the Ganges between Lower Bengal and the Punjaub was the scene of general revolt, general massacre in most instances of the European troops. There were more than forty military stations where revolt occurred. In many of them the European army speedily regained the ascendancy. But three centres stand out among the dreadful details of the dismal story--Cawnpore, Lucknow, and Delhi; and the last was, as far as there was a centre at all, the focus of the whole Mutiny. The insurrection was without plan, and was a complete surprise. Had it been otherwise, had the mutineers made common cause, had less delay been given to the British to concentrate their strength in India, from other neighbouring colonies and from home, the end might have been more distant, the struggle more prolonged, but the final result would have been none the less assured. Fortunately, the great semi-independent states remained either quiescent, or offered active help; on the other hand, the method first adopted of disbanding the mutinous regiments, and therefore instigating them in one sense to reinforce the Delhi centre, where arms were numerous, only strengthened the insurrection. Stronger men in the beginning, like Napoleon’s “whiff of grape shot,” might have nipped the whole thing in the bud. If the few mutineers had been shot down first, and then told, as far as the rest went, to lay down their arms, “the beginning of wisdom” might have grown somewhat more rapidly into the souls of those who, influenced by example, hysteria, religious mania, and drugs, also began to think of revolt. Nothing is more catching than such epidemics. When, at one time, sundry British soldiers thought it would be an out-of-the-common act to shoot their officers on parade, the stupid, wicked idea spread, until the authorities were wise enough to put the hysteria down by the summary method of speedy trial and death.