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of 1844 and 1845. Towards the close of 1847 Lord Dalhousie was sent out to India. Never was there in any country an administration of more successful activity than that of Lord Dalhousie. He introduced cheap postage into India; he made railways; he set up lines of electric telegraph. He devoted much of his attention to irrigation, to the making of great roads, to the work of the Ganges Canal. He was the founder of a comprehensive system of native education. He put down infanticide, the Thug system, and he carried out with vigour Lord William Bentinck's Act for the suppression of the Suttee or burning of widows on the funeral pile of their husbands. But Lord Dalhousie was not wholly engaged in such works as these. During his few years of office he annexed the Punjaub; he incorporated part of the Burmese territory in our dominions; he annexed Nagpore, Sattara, Jhansi, Berar and Oudh. In the Punjaub the annexation was provoked by the murder of some of our officers, sanctioned, if not actually ordered, by a native prince. Lord Dalhousie marched a force into the Punjaub. This land, the land of the five waters,' lies at the gateway of Hindostan, and was peopled by Mussulmans, Hindoos, and Sikhs, the latter a new sect of reformed Hindoos. We found arrayed against us not only the Sikhs but our old enemies the Afghans. Lord Gough was in command of our forces. He fought rashly and disastrously the famous battle of Chillianwallah he was defeated. But he wholly recovered his position by the complete defeat which he inflicted upon the enemy at Goojrat. Never was a victory more complete in itself or more promptly and effectively followed up. The Sikhs were crushed; the Afghans were driven in wild rout back across their savage passes; and Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjaub. He presented as one token of his conquest the famous diamond, the Koh-i-noor, surrendered in evidence of submission by the Maharajah of Lahore, to the Crown of England.

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Lord Dalhousie annexed Oudh on the ground that the East India Company had bound themselves to defend the sovereigns of Oudh against foreign and domestic enemies on condition that the State should be governed in such a manner as to render the lives and property of its population safe; and that while the Company performed their part of the contract, the King of Oudh so governed his dominions as to make his rule a curse to his own people, and to all neighbouring territories. Other excuses or justifications there were of course in the case of each other annexation; and we shall yet hear some more of

what came of the annexation of Sattara and Jhansi. If, however, each of these acts of policy were not only justifiable but actually inevitable, none the less must a succession of such acts produce a profound emotion among the races in whose midst they were accomplished. The populations of India became stricken with alarm as they saw their native princes thus successively dethroned. The subversion of thrones, the annexation of states, seemed to them naturally enough to form part of that vast scheme for rooting out all the religions and systems of India, concerning which so many vague forebodings had darkly warned the land. Many of our Sepoys came from Oudh and other annexed territories, and little reason as they might have had for any personal attachment to the subverted dynasties, they yet felt that national resentment which any manner of foreign intervention is almost certain to provoke.

There were peculiar reasons too why, if religious and political distrust did prevail, the moment of Lord Canning's accession to the supreme authority in India should seem inviting and favourable for schemes of sedition. The Afghan war had told the Sepoy that British troops are not absolutely invincible in battle. The impression produced almost everywhere in India by the Crimean war was a conviction that the strength of England was on the wane. The Sepoy saw that the English force in Northern India was very small; and he really believed that it was small because England had no more men to send there. In his mind Russia was the great rising and conquering country; England was sinking into decay; her star waning before the strong glare of the portentous northern light. Moreover Lord Canning had hardly assumed office as Governor-General of India, when the dispute occurred between the British and Chinese authorities at Canton, and almost at the same moment war was declared against Persia by proclamation of the Governor-General at Calcutta, in consequence of the Shah having marched an army into Herat and besieged it, in violation of a treaty with Great Britain made in 1853. A body of troops was sent from Bombay to the Persian Gulf, and shortly after General Outram left Bombay with additional troops, as Commander-in-Chief of the field force in Persia. Therefore, in the opening days of 1857, it was known among the native populations of India that the East India Company was at war with Persia and that England had on her hands a quarrel with China. The native army of the three Presidencies

taken together was nearly three hundred thousand, while the Europeans were but forty-three thousand, of whom some five thousand had just been told off for duty in Persia. It must be owned that, given the existence of a seditious spirit, it would have been hardly possible for it to find conditions more seemingly favourable and tempting. There can be no doubt that a conspiracy for the subversion of the English government in India was afoot during the early days of 1857, and possibly for long before. The story of the mysterious chupatties is well known. The chupatties are small cakes of unleavened bread, and they were found to be distributed with amazing rapidity and precision of system at one time throughout the native villages of the north and north-west. In no instance were they distributed among the populations of still-existing native States. They were only sent among the villages over which English rule extended. A native messenger brought two of these mysterious cakes to the watchman or headman of a village, and bade him to have others prepared like them, and to pass them on to another place. There could be no doubt that the chupatties conveyed a warning to all who received them that something strange was about to happen, and bade them to be prepared for whatever might befall.

The news of the outbreak at Meerut, and the proclamation in Delhi, broke upon Calcutta with the shock of a thunder clap. For one or two days Calcutta was a prey to mere panic. The alarm was greatly increased by the fact that the dethroned King of Oudh was living near to the city, at Garden Reach, a few miles down the Hooghly. The inhabitants of Calcutta, when the news of the Mutiny came, were convinced that the palace of the King of Oudh was the head-quarters of rebellion, and were expecting the moment when, from the residence at Garden Reach, an organised army of murderers was to be sent forth to capture and destroy the ill-fated city, and to make its streets run with the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Lord Canning took the prudent course of having the king with his prime minister removed to the GovernorGeneral's own residence within the precincts of Fort William. If ever the crisis found the man, Lord Canning was the man called for by that crisis in India. He had all the divining genius of the true statesman; the man who can rise to the height of some unexpected and new emergency; and he had the cool courage of a practised conqueror. Among all the

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distracting counsels and wild stories poured in upon him from every side, he kept his mind clear. He never gave way either to anger or to alarm. If he ever showed a little impatience, it was only where panic would too openly have proclaimed itself by counsels of wholesale cruelty. He could not, perhaps, always conceal from frightened people the fact that he rather despised their terrors. Throughout the whole of that excited period there were few names, even among the chiefs of rebellion, on which fiercer denunciation was showered by Englishmen than the name of Lord Canning. Because he would not listen to the bloodthirsty clamours of mere frenzy, he was nicknamed Clemency Canning,' as if clemency were an attribute of which a man ought to be ashamed. Indeed, for some time people wrote and spoke, not merely in India but in England, as if clemency were a thing to be reprobated, like treason or crime. For a while it seemed a question of patriotism which would propose the most savage and sanguinary measures of revenge. Mr. Disraeli, to do him justice, raised his voice in remonstrance against the wild passions of the hour, even when these passions were strongest and most general. He declared that if such a temper were encouraged we ought to take down from our altars the image of Christ and raise the statue of Moloch there. If people were so carried away in England, where the danger was far remote, we can easily imagine what were the fears and passions roused in India, where the terror was or might be at the door of everyone. Lord Canning was gravely embarrassed by the wild urgencies and counsels of distracted Englishmen, who were furious with him because he even thought of distinguishing friend from foe where native races were concerned. But he bore himself with perfect calmness. He was greatly assisted and encouraged in his counsels by his brave and noble wife, who proved herself in every way worthy to be the helpmate of such a man at such a crisis. He did not for a moment under-estimate the danger; but neither did he exaggerate its importance. He never allowed

it to master him. He looked upon it with the quiet, resolute eye of one who is determined to be the conqueror in the struggle.

Lord Canning saw that the one important thing was to strike at Delhi, which had proclaimed itself the head-quarters of the rebellion. He knew that English troops were on their way to China for the purpose of wreaking the wrongs of

English subjects there, and he took on his own responsibility the bold step of intercepting them, and calling them to the work of helping to put down the Mutiny in India. The dispute with China he thought could well afford to wait, but with the Mutiny it must be now or never. India could not

wait for reinforcements brought all the way from England. Lord Canning knew well enough, as well as the wildest alarmist could know, that the rebel flag must be forced to fly from some field before that help came, or it would fly over the dead bodies of those who then represented English authority in India. He had, therefore, no hesitation in appealing to Lord Elgin, the Envoy in charge of the Chinese expedition, to stop the troops that were on their way to China, and lend them to the service of India at such a need. Lord Elgin had the courage and the wisdom to assent to the appeal at once. Fortune, too, was favourable to Canning in more ways than one. The Persian war was of short duration. Sir James Outram was soon victorious, and Outram, therefore, and his gallant companions, Colonel Jacob and Colonel Havelock, were able to lend their invaluable services to the GovernorGeneral of India. Most important for Lord Canning's purposes was the manner in which the affairs of the Punjaub were managed at this crisis. The Punjaub was under the administration of one of the ablest public servants India has ever had-Sir John, afterwards Lord Lawrence. John Lawrence had from his youth been in the Civil Service of the East India Company; and when Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjaub, he made Lawrence and his soldier-brother-the gallant Sir Henry Lawrence-two out of a board of three for the administration of the affairs of the newly-acquired province. Afterwards 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 the Punjaub. On May 11 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

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