consideration to be remembered in understanding the character and extent of this vast combination against Christian civilization.
This gave them their opportunity to organize their plans and work up the conspiracy. The Sepoy army, with the “Contingents” at native courts, native police, and, we may also add, the armed followers of the Rajahs and Nawabs who favored the rising, constituted an armed body of men fully five hundred thousand strong—the life and soul of the whole being the native “Bengal Array,” very largely Brahminical. Over these ignorant, superstitious, and fanatical forces, whether as military, commissariat, civil, legal, or financial subordinate officers, were these Mohammedan officials, so that a perfect organization, from Delhi throughout the whole land, was being formed, and it only now needed safe means of communication between the several parts, so that the central conspiracy could receive information or send its arrangements through men whom it could entirely trust, and who were its willing and ready agents. But this, too, was supplied, as we shall see.
The Sepoy army mounted guard upon the forts, the magazines, and the treasuries of India; and when their hour had come, and all was prepared, they held in their own hands the key of the coined millions of the public money, its vast stores of munitions of war, and its strong places. The total of European troops then in India was exactly 45,522, of all arms; but of these 21,156 were away in Madras and Bombay, leaving only 24,366 for the East, center, and Punjab, and more than two thirds of these were off on the Western frontiers and in Burmah, so that in the entire Valley of the Ganges there were but two half regiments, one with Sir H. Lawrence in Lucknow, and the other at Cawnpore.
4. India was then not only without railroads, but was even destitute of common roads, while the rivers were unbridged, and there was every natural difficulty in the way of an army of white men moving through the land, with the heavy impedimenta which they require in such a climate, and in which respect the native troops, being so much less encumbered, so much more at home in the heat, and so well acquainted with the country, had their enemy at
