Part 68 (2/2)

In 1857 there broke out in the armies of the East India Company what is known as the Sepoy Mutiny. The causes of the uprising were various. The crowd of deposed princes was one element of discontent. A widespread conviction among the natives awakened by different acts of the English, that their religion was in danger, was another of the causes that led to the rebellion. There were also military grievances of which the native soldiers complained.

The mutiny broke out at Bengal. At different points, by preconcerted signals, the native regiments arose against their English officers and put them to death. [Footnote: The East India Company at this time had an army of nearly 300,000, of which number not more than 45,000 were English troops. The chief positions in the native regiments were held by English officers.] Delhi and Cawnpore were seized, and the English residents and garrisons butchered in cold blood. Fortunately many of the native regiments stood firm in their allegiance to the English, and with their aid the revolt was speedily quelled.

At the close of the war, the government of India, by act of Parliament, was taken out of the hands of the East India Company and vested in the English crown. Since this transfer, the Indian government has been conducted on the principle that ”English rule in India should be for India.” [Footnote: Within the last two or three decades the country has undergone in every respect a surprising transformation. Life and property are now as secure in India as in England, The railways begun by the East India Company have been extended in every direction, and now bind together the most distant provinces of the empire. All the chief cities are united by telegraph. Lines of steamers are established on the Indus and the Ganges. Public schools have been opened, and colleges founded. Several hundred newspapers, about half published in the native dialects, are sowing Western ideas broadcast among the people. The introduction of European science and civilization is rapidly undermining many of the old superst.i.tions, particularly the ancient system of caste.]

LATER EVENTS: THE ENGLISH IN EGYPT.--It only remains for us to refer to some later matters which are more or less intimately connected with England's Eastern policy.

In 1874 Mr. Disraeli, who had then just succeeded Mr. Gladstone as prime minister, purchased, for $20,000,000, the 176,000 shares which the Khedive of Egypt held in the Suez Ca.n.a.l. This was to give England more perfect control of this all-important gateway to her East India possessions.

In 1878, towards the close of the Russo-Turkish War, England, it will be recalled, interfered in behalf of the Turks, and, by the presence of her iron-clads in the Bosporus, prevented the Russians from occupying Constantinople. In the treaty negotiations which followed, England received from Turkey the island of Cyprus.

In the year 1882 political and financial reasons combined led the English government, now conducted by Gladstone, to interfere in the affairs of Egypt. A mutinous uprising against the authority of the Khedive having taken place in the Egyptian army, an expedition was sent out under the command of Lord Wolseley for the purpose of suppressing the revolt, and by the restoration of the authority of the Khedive to render secure the Suez Ca.n.a.l, and protect the interest of English bondholders in Egyptian securities.

Three years later, in 1885, a second expedition had to be sent out to the same country. The Soudanese, subjects of the Khedive, encouraged by the disorganized condition of the Egyptian government, had revolted, and were threatening the Egyptian garrisons in the Soudan with destruction. Lord Wolseley was sent out a second time, to lead an expedition up the Nile to the relief of Khartoum, where General Gordon, a representative of the English government, was commanding the Egyptian troops, and trying--to use his own phrase--to ”smash the Mahdi,” the military prophet and leader of the Soudanese Arabs.

The expedition arrived too late, Khartoum having fallen just before the advance relief party reached the town. The English troops were now recalled, and the greater part of the Soudan abandoned to the rebel Arabs.

Further complications seem likely to grow out of England's presence in Egypt.

CONCLUSION: THE NEW AGE.

The Age of Material Progress, or the Industrial Age.--History has been well likened to a grand dissolving view. While one age is pa.s.sing away another is coming into prominence.

During the last fifty years the distinctive features of society have wholly changed. The battles now being waged in the religious and the political world are only faint echoes of the great battles of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. A new movement of human society has begun. Civilization has entered upon what may be called the Industrial Age, or the Age of Material Progress.

The decade between 1830 and 1840 was, in the phrase of Herzog, ”the cradle of the new epoch.” In that decade several of the greatest inventions that have marked human progress were first brought to practical perfection.

Prominent among these were ocean steam navigation, railroads, and telegraphs. [Footnote: Ploetz in his _Epitome of History_, instructively compares these inventions to the three great inventions or discoveries-- the magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing--that ushered in the Modern Age.] In the year 1830 Stephenson exhibited the first really successful locomotive. In 1836 Morse perfected the telegraph. In 1838 ocean steams.h.i.+p navigation was first practically solved.

The rapidity with which these inventions have been introduced into almost all parts of the world, partakes of the marvellous.

Within the last fifty years the continents have been covered with a perfect network of railroads, constructed at an enormous cost of labor and capital. The aggregate length of the world's steam railways in 1883 was about 275,000 miles, sufficient, to use Mulhall's ill.u.s.tration, to girdle the earth eleven times at the equator, or more than sufficient to reach from the earth to the moon. The continental lines of railways are made virtually continuous round the world by connecting lines of ocean steamers. Telegraph wires traverse the continents in all directions, and cables run beneath all the oceans of the globe.

By these inventions the most remote parts of the earth have been brought near together. A solidarity of commercial interests has been created.

Thought has been made virtually cosmopolitan: a new and helpful idea or discovery becomes immediately the common possession of the world.

Facilities for travel, by bringing men together, and familiarizing them with new scenes and different forms of society and belief, have made them more liberal and tolerant. Mind has been broadened and quickened. And by the virtual annihilation of time and s.p.a.ce, governmental problems have been solved. The chief difficulties in maintaining a confederation of states widely separated have been removed, and such extended territories as those of the United States made practically as compact as the most closely consolidated European state. England, with her scattered colonies, may now, Professor Seeley thinks, well enough become a World Venice, with the oceans for streets. Furthermore, the steps of human progress have been accelerated a hundred-fold. The work of years, and of centuries even, is crowded into a day. Thus j.a.pan, on the outskirts of the world, has been modified more by our civilization within the last decade or two, than Britain was modified by the civilization of Rome during the four hundred years that the island was connected with the empire.

But a still more important feature of the new epoch is the use of steam engines, electric motors, and machinery in the manufactures and the various other industries of mankind. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the great manufactures of the world were in their infancy. Under the impulse of modern inventions they have been carried to seeming perfection at a bound. New motors and improved machinery have increased incalculably the productive forces of society. This enormous augmentation of the power of production is one of the most significant features of the age.

The history of this wonderful age, so different from any preceding age, cannot yet be written, for no one can tell whether the epoch is just opening or is already well advanced. It may well be that we have already seen the greatest surprises of the age, and that the epoch is nearing its culmination, [Footnote: ”It is probable,” says Professor Ely, ”that as we, after more than two thousand years, look back upon the time of Pericles with wonder and astonishment, as an epoch great in art and literature, posterity two thousand years hence will regard our era as forming an admirable and unparalleled epoch in the history of industrial invention.”

--_French and German Socialism in Modern Times._] and that other than material development--let us hope intellectual and moral development--will characterize future epochs.

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