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A History of Our Own Times, From 1880 to the Diamond Jubilee
A History of Our Own Times From 1880 to the Diamond Jubilee Author:Justin McCarthy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXXII. THE SEPOY. On the 23d of June, 1857, the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Plassey was celebrated in London. One object of the celebrat... more »ion was to obtain the means of raising a monument to Clive in his native county. At such a meeting it was but natural that a good deal should be said about the existing condition of India, and the prospects of that great empire which the genius and the daring of Clive had gone so far to secure for the English Crown. It does not appear, however, as if any alarm was expressed with regard to the state of things in Bengal, or as if any of the noblemen and gentlemen present believed that at that very moment Lidia was passing through a crisis more serious than Clive himself had had to encounter. Indeed, a month or so before, a Bombay journal had congratulated itself on the fact that India was quiet " throughout." Yet at the hour when the Plassey celebration was going on, the great Indian mutiny was already six weeks old, had already assumed full and distinctive proportions, was already known in India to be a convulsion destined to shake to its foundations the whole fabric of British rule in Hindostan. A few evenings after the celebration there was some cursory and casual discussion in Parliament about the doubtful news that had begun to arrive from India; but as yet no Englishman at home took serious thought of the matter. The news came at last with a rush. Never in our time, never probably at any time, came such news upon England as the first full story of the outbreak in India. It came with terrible, not unnatural exaggeration. England was horror-stricken by the stories of wholesale massacres of English women and children ; of the most abominable tortures, the most degrading outrages inflicted upon English matrons and maide...« less