Hope, but the colonists there refused to receive him, and his last of the line of the Grand Moguls had to go begging for a prison. He was finally carried to Rangoon, in British Burmah. On December 20th, 1858, Lord Clyde, who had been Sir Colin Campbell, announced to the Governor-General that "the campaign is at an end, there being no longer even the vestige of rebellion in the province of Oudh ;" and that "the last remnant of the mutineers and insurgents have been hopelessly driven across the mountains which form the barrier between the kingdom of Nepaul and her Majesty's empire of Hindostan." On May 1st, 1859, there was a pubc thanksgiving in England for the pacification of India.

WHILE

CHAPTER XXXVI.

WHILE these things were passing in India, it is needless to say that the public opinion of England was distracted by agitation and by opposing counsels. For a long time the condition of Indian affairs had been regarded in England with something like absolute indifference. India was, to the ordinary Englishman, a place where men used at one time to make large fortunes within a few years; and where lately military and civil officers had to do hard work enough without much chance of becoming nabobs. In many circles it was thought of only as the hated country where one's daughter went with her husband, and from which she had, after a few years, to send back her children to England, because the climate of India was fatal to certain years of childhood. It was associated, in the minds of some, with tiger-hunting; in the minds of others with Bishop Heber and missions to the heathen. Most persons had a vague knowledge that there had been an impeachment of Warren Hastings for something done by him in India, and that Burke had made great speeches about it. In his famous essay on Lord Clive, published only seventeen years before the Indian Mutiny, Lord Macaulay complained that while every school-boy, as he put it in his favorite way, knew all about the Spanish conquests in the Americas, about Montezuma, and Cortes, and Pizarro, very tew even of cultivated

English gentlemen knew anything whatever about the history of England's empire in India. In the House of Com. mons a debate on any question connected with India was as strictly an affair of experts as a discussion on some local gas or water bill. The House in general did not even affect to have any interest in it. The officials who had to do with Indian affairs; the men on the opposition benches, who had held the same offices while their party was in power; these, and two or three men who had been in India, and were set down as crotchety because they professed any concern in its mode of government-such were the politicians who carried on an Indian debate, and who had the House all to themselves while the discussion lasted. The Indian Mutiny startled the public feeling of England out of this state of unhealthy languor. First came the passion and panic, the cry for blood, the wholesale executions. the blowing of rebels from guns; then came a certain degree of reaction, and some eminent Englishmen were found to express alarm at the very sanguinary methods of repression and of punishment that were in favor among most of our fellow-countrymen in India.

It was during this season of reaction that the famous discussions took place on Lord Canning's proclamation. On March 3d, 1858, Lord Canning issued his memorable proclamation; memorable, however, rather for the stir it created in England than for any great effect it produced in India. It was issued from Allahabad, whither the Governor-General had gone to be nearer the seat of war. The proclamation was addressed to the chiefs of Oudh, and it announced that with the exception of the lands then held by six loyal proprietors of the province, the proprietary right in the whole of the soil of Oudh was transferred to the British Government, which would dispose of it in such manner as might seem fitting. The disposal, however, was indicated by the terms of the proclamation. To all chiefs

and landholders who should at once surrender to the Chief Commissioner of Oudh it was promised that their lives should be spared, "provided that their hands are unstained by English blood murderously shed;" but it was stated that "as regards any further indulgence which may be extended to them, and the conditions in which they may hereafter be placed, they must throw themselves upon the justice and mercy of the British Government." Read by the light of literalness, this proclamation unquestionably seemed to amount to an absolute confiscation of the whole soil of Oudh; for even the favored landowners who were to retain their properties were given to understand that they retained them by the favor of the Crown and as a reward for their loyalty. This was the view taken of the GovernorGeneral's act by one whose opinion was surely entitled to the highest consideration from every one, Sir James Outram, Chief Commissioner of Oudh. Sir James Outram wrote at once to Lord Canning, pointing out that there were not a dozen landholders in Oudh who had not either themselves borne arms against us or assisted the rebels with men or money, and that therefore the effect of the proclamation would be to confiscate the entire proprietary right in the province and to make the chiefs and landlords desperate, and that the result would be a “guerilla war for the extirpation, root and branch, of this class of men, which will involve the loss of thousands of Europeans by battle, disease, and exposure." Lord Canning was not ready to admit, even in deference to such authority as that of Sir James Outram, that his policy would have any such effects. But he consented to insert in the proclamation a clause an nouncing that a liberal indulgence would be granted to those who should promptly come forward to aid in the restoration of order, and that "the Governor-General will be ready to view liberally the claims which they may thus acquire to restitution of their former rights."

In truth, it was never the intention of Lord Canning to put in force any cruel and sweeping policy of confiscation. The whole tenor of his rule in India, the very reproaches that had been showered on him, the very nickname which his enemies had given him-that term of reproach that afterward came to be a title of honor-might have suggested to the sharpest critic that it was not likely "Clemency Canning" was about to initiate a principal of merciless punishment for an entire class of men. Lord Canning had come to the conclusion that the English Government must start afresh in their dealings with Oudh. He felt that it would be impossible to deal with the chiefs and people of the province so lately annexed as if we were dealing with revolted Sepoys. He put aside any idea of imprisonment or transportation for mere rebellion, seeing that only in the conqueror's narrowest sense could men be accounted rebels because they had taken arms against a power which but a moment before had no claim whatever to their allegiance or their obedience. Nevertheless, Oudh was now a province of the British Empire in Hindostan, and Lord Canning had only to consider what was to be done with it. He came to the conclusion that the necessary policy of all parties concerned was to make of the mutiny and the consequent reor ganization an opportunity not for a wholesale confiscation of the land, but for a measure which should declare that the land was held under the power and right of the English Government. The principle of his policy was somewhat like that adopted by Lord Durham in Canada. It put aside the technical authority of law for the moment in order that a reign of genuine law might be inaugurated. It seized the power of a dictator over life and property, that the dictator might be able to restore peace and order at the least cost in loss and suffering to the province and population whose affairs it was his task to administer.

But it may be freely admitted that on the face of the pro