Lord Lawrence. John Lawrence had from his youth been in the civil service of the East India Company; and when Lord Dalhouse annexed the Punjaub he made Lawrence and his soldier-brother-the gallant Sir Henry Lawrencetwo out of a board of three for the administration of the affairs of the newly-acquired province. Afterward Sir John Lawrence was named the Chief Commissioner of the Punjaub, and by the promptitude and energy of himself and his subordinates the province was completely saved for English rule at the outbreak of the mutiny. Fortunately the electric telegraph extended from Calcutta to Lahore, the chief city of tha Punjaub. On May 11th the news of the outbreak at Meerut was brought to the authorities at Lahore. As it happened, Sir John Lawrence was then away at Rawul Pindee, in the Upper Punjaub; but Mr. Robert Montgomery, the Judicial Commissioner at Lahore, was invested with plenary power, and he showed that he could use it to advantage. Meean Meer is a large Military cantonment five or six miles from Lahore, and there were then some four thousand native troops there, with only about thirteen hundred Europeans of the Queen's and the Company's service. There was no time to be lost. It the spirit of mutiny were to spread, the condition of things in the Punjaub would be desperate; but what did the condition of things in Punjaub involve? The possible loss of a province ? Something far greater than that. It meant the possibility of a momentary collapse of all British authority in India. For if any one will take the trouble to cast a glance at a map of India, he will see that the Punjuab is so placed as to become a basis of operation for the precise military movements which every experienced eye then saw to be necessary for the saving of our Indian Empire. The candle would have been burning at both ends, so far as regards the north-west provinces, if the Punjaub had gone with Delhi and Lucknow. While the Punjaub held firm it was

like a barrier raised at one side of the rebellious movement, not merely preventing it from going any further in that direction, but keeping it pent up until the moment came when the blow from the other direction could fall upon it. The first thing to be done to strike effectively at the rebellion was to make an attack on Delhi; and the possession of the Punjaub was of inestimable advantage to the authoritles for that purpose. It will be seen, then, that the moment was critical for those to whose hands the administration of the great new province had been entrusted. There was no actual reason to assume that the Sepoys in Meean Meer intended to join the rebellion. There would he a certain danger of converting them into rebels if any rash movement were to be made for the purpose of guarding against treachery on their part. Either way was a serious responsibility, a momentous risk. The authorities soon made up their minds. Any risk would be better than that of leaving it in the power of the native troops to join the rebellion. A ball and supper were to be given at Lahore that night. To avoid creating any alarm, it was arranged that the entertainments should take place. During the dancing and feasting Mr. Montgomery held a council of the leading officials of Lahore, civil and military, and it was resolved at once to disarm the native troops. A parade was ordered for daybreak at Meean Meer; and on the parade-ground an order was given for a military movement which brought the heads of four columns of the native troops in front of twelve guns charged with grape, the artillerymen with their port-fires lighted, and the soldiers of one of the Queen's regiments standing behind with loaded muskets. A command was given to the Sepoys to pile arms. The had immediate death before them if they disobeyed. They stood literally at the cannon's mouth. They piled their arms, which were borne away at once in carts by European soldier, and all chances of a rebellious

movement were over in that province, and the Punjaub was saved. Something of the same kind was done at Mooltan, in the Lower Punjaub, later on; and the province, thus assured to English civil and military authority, became a basis for some of the most important military operations by which the mutiny was crushed and the sceptre . India restored to the Queen.

Within little more than a fortnight from the occupation of Delhi by the rebels, the British forces under General Anson, the commander-in-chief, were advancing on that city. The commander did not live to conduct any of the operations. He died of cholera almost at the beginning of the march. He had lived long enough to come in for much sharp censure. The temper of the time both in England and in India expected men to work by witchcraft rather than wit, and Anson was furiously denounced by some of the principal English journals because he did not recapture Delhi without having even to march an army to the neighborhood of the city. He was described as a "holiday soldier who had never seen service either in peace or in war His appointment was denounced as "a shameless job," and a tribute altogether to "the claims of family and personal acquaintance." We cannot venture now to criticise the mode of General Anson's appointment; and he had not time to show whether he was any better than a holiday soldier. But it would appear that Lord Canning had no poor opinion of his capacity, and was particularly impressed by his coolness and command of temper. He died, however, at the very outset of his march; and we only refer now to the severe attacks which were made upon him to illustrate the temper of the nation, and the manner in which it delighted to hear itself addressed. We are always rebuking other nations for their impatience and fretfulness under difficulties. It is a lesson of no slight importance for us to be reminded that when the hour of strain and pressure comes we are found to be in most ways very like our neighbors.

The siege of Delhi proved long and difficult. Another general died, another had to give up his command, before the city was recaptured. It was justly considered by Lord Canning and by all the authorities as of the utmost importance that Delhi should be taken before the arrival of great reinforcements from home. Meanwhile the rebellion was breaking out at new points almost everywhere in these northern and north-western regions. On May 30th the mutiny declared itself at Lucknow. Sir Henry Lawrence was Governor of Oudh. He endeavored to drive the rebels from the place, but the numbers of the mutineers were overwhelming. He had under his command, too, a force partly made up of native troops, and some of these deserted him in the battle. He had to retreat and fortify the Residency at Lucknow, and remove all the Europeans, men, women, and children thither, and patiently stand a siege. Lawrence himself had not long to endure the siege. On July 2d he had been up with the dawn, and after a great amount of work he lay on a sofa, not, as it has been well said, to rest, but to transact business in a recumbent position. His nephew and another officer were with him. Suddenly a great crash was heard, and the room was filled with smoke and dust. One of his companions was flung to the ground. A shell had burst. When there was silence the officer who had been flung down called out, " Sir Henry, are you hurt ?" At first there was no answer. Then a weak voice was heard to reply in just the words that Browning had put into the mouth of the gallant French lad similarly questioned by the great Napoleon. "I am killed," was the answer that came faintly but firmly from Sir Henry Lawrence's lips. The shell had wounded him in the thigh so fearfully as to leave surgery no chance of doing anything for his relief. On the morning of July 4th he died calmly and in perfect submission to the will of Providence. He had made all Dossible arrangements for his successor, and for the work to

be done. He desired that on his tomb should be engraven merely the words, "Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty." The epitaph was a simple, truthful summing up of a simple, truthful career. The man, however, was greater than the career Lawrence had not opportunity to show in actual result the greatness of spirit that was in him. The immense influence he exercised over all who came within his reach bears testimony to his strength and nobleness of character better than any of the mere successes which his biographer can record. He was full of sympathy. His soul was alive to the noblest and purest aspirations. "It is the due admixture of romance and reality," he was himself accustomed to say, "that best carries a man through life." No professional teacher or philosopher ever spoke a truer sentence. As one of his many admirers says of him, "What he said and wrote, he did, or rather he was." Let the bitterest enemy of England write the history of her rule in India, and set down as against her every wrong that was done in her name, from those which Burke denounced to those which the Madras Commission exposed; he will have to say that men, many men, like Henry Lawrence, lived and died devoted to the cause of that rule, and the world will take account of the admission.