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54 the mutineers who were soon to seek shelter behind her walls.

Further again to the North-West lay a Province which any one, forecasting the chances of tranquillity, might well have regarded as a likely centre of disturbance. The Punjab, when Lord Canning arrived in India, had been for seven years a portion of the British Empire. Not an hour of those seven years had been wasted by the administrators of the newly-conquered Province, in their task of extending to it the advantages of enlightened government. Under the two Lawrences and the able officials, whom Dalhousie crowded into his favourite acquisition, its prosperity had advanced by leaps and bounds. Yet the history of our connection with the Punjab was full of warning. At the beginning of the century the rising ambition of Ranjít Singh became a menace to Upper India. When in 1806 he crossed the Sutlej, and advanced pretensions to the territory between that river and the Jumna, Lord Minto, abandoning his policy of non-interference, had despatched a mission under Metcalfe and a British force to check the unwelcome intrusion. This combined argument induced the Sikh leader to sign a treaty of perpetual peace with the English, which he faithfully observed. The disorders, which followed on his death, had ended in a Praetorian tyranny. The army governed itself, ruled the State, and assumed a threatening attitude toward the English across the Sutlej. Hardinge massed his forces on the frontier. British victories at