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154 thanking the Indian services, civil and military, for then- zeal in the suppression of the Mutiny. These ungenerous attacks on the representative of the Sovereign, engaged in a life and death struggle for the maintenance of the English supremacy in the East, can be now remembered only with sorrow that English statesmen should have been guilty of so ignoble a lapse. They stand a warning to politicians not to tempt the ill-informed and hasty suffrage of a popular assembly to expressions of opinion which, however they may gratify the temper of the moment, are soon recognised as unjust, and have to be repudiated by leaders and followers alike with confusion and remorse. The moment of this attempted slight was that at which, more than at any other period of his career. Canning's nobility of character was safeguarding the Empire from a great danger and Englishmen from an indelible disgrace.

In the spring of 1858 Lord Canning encountered another and still more serious controversial tempest. On the fall of Lucknow a Proclamation was addressed to the landholders. Chiefs and inhabitants of Oudh, which became — thanks to Lord Ellenborough's impulsiveness — the topic of a fierce Parliamentary fight. It is worth while to consider it with more attention than such quarrels, for the most part, deserve, because it throws light on Lord Canning's general policy in the pacification of Oudh, and on the difficult problems which, in the task of pacification and reconstruction, he was continually called upon to solve.