Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/419

 office, and to his recognition of ‘the large arena of peaceful usefulness’ which lay before him; adding, however, with prophetic apprehension, that he could not forget that ‘in our Indian empire that greatest of all blessings depends upon a greater variety of chances and a more precarious tenure than in any other quarter of the globe,’ and that ‘in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man's hand, but which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin.’ He had not been long at Calcutta when it became apparent that a war was impending, which, though not affecting Indian territory, nor the actual frontier of India, would involve the employment of a portion of the Indian army. Persia, in defiance of an existing treaty, had taken Herat, and, negotiations failing to bring about the evacuation of the place by the Persian forces, the English government in the autumn of 1856 declared war against the shah. The arrangements for the expedition, which was carried to a successful issue early in 1857, under the command of Sir James Outram, were made by Canning, and occupied a good deal of his attention in the latter part of his first year of office. Closely connected with this matter was the question of subsidising the amir of Cabul, and enabling him by grants of money and arms to aid in driving the Persians from Herat. This policy, urged by Herbert Edwardes, was adopted by Canning, at first with some reluctance, but afterwards with a conviction of its wisdom. He showed this conviction by cordial acknowledgments to Edwardes.

Another very difficult question, handed down to Canning by his predecessor, with which he was called upon to deal very shortly after his arrival, was that of an alteration of the conditions of service upon which the sepoys in the native army of Bengal were enlisted—a change which involved the obligation of service beyond the sea. In deciding upon this military reform, which had been pressed upon the attention of the government by the difficulty of providing British Burma with a sufficient force of native troops, but which has since been regarded as one of the causes of the mutiny of 1857, Canning was supported by the commander-in-chief and by his other constituted advisers. His own view on the subject, as stated in his letters to the president of the board of control, was that the system of enlistment for limited service, which had never been adopted in Madras or Bombay, ought not to have been tolerated so long in Bengal; and although there were some persons who were apprehensive of ‘risk in meddling with the fundamental conditions upon which the bargain between the army and the government has hitherto rested,’ there was no real cause for fear on this ground. His only apprehension had been—and that he said had vanished—that ‘the sepoys already enlisted on the old terms might suspect that the change was a first step towards breaking faith with them, and that on the first necessity they might be compelled to cross the sea;’ but there had been ‘no sign of any such false alarm on their part.’

The administration of the recently annexed province of Oudh, which had fallen into incompetent hands, occasioned much anxiety to Canning at that time. The difficulty was met by the supersession of the officiating chief commissioner, and by the transfer to that post of Sir Henry Lawrence, then in charge of our relations with the native states in Rajputána. During this first year of his government, the amount of work which pressed upon Canning was very great; for, while he had to deal with several new and difficult questions of the nature of those just referred to, he had also, like all newly appointed governors-general, to wade through heavy masses of previous correspondence bearing upon the innumerable matters which called for decision. At that time the duty of initiating orders in the business of all the departments devolved upon the governor-general. It was not until a later period, when the work was enormously increased by the events of the mutiny, that Canning, at the instance of Sir Henry Ricketts, introduced the quasi-cabinet arrangement, under which each member of council takes charge of a department, disposing of all details, and only referring to the governor-general matters of real importance, and questions involving principles or the adoption of a new policy.

It would be foreign to the scope of this brief memoir to enter upon any detailed review of the causes or of the incidents of the appalling catastrophe, the mutiny of the Bengal army, which strained to the utmost the energies and resources of the government of India during the second and third years of Canning's administration. Whether the issue of the greased cartridges was the chief cause of the discontent, or panic, or whatever the sentiment may be called, which clearly existed (and this was Lord Lawrence's view), or whether, as was held by many persons well qualified to form an opinion, the mutiny originated in a number of concurrent causes, which are summed up in a single sentence in Sir John Kaye's preface to his ‘History of the Sepoy War:’ ‘Because we were too English the crisis arose,’ to which he added, ‘it was only because we were English that when it