Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/389

 LAWRENCE 371 my father ! without thy son and servant 1 &quot; To this the pope replied with a prophecy that in three days Lawrence the Levite should follow Sixtus the priest. At the same time Lawrence was directed to distribute the church treasures among the poor, and so prevent them from falling into the hands of the persecutor. When under the cruel punishment to which he was at last condemned for his steadfastness, he is said to have triumphed over the tyrant by the famous ironical speech &quot;Assatus est ; jam versa et mauduca.&quot; The fact of the martyrdom of St Lawrence seems to be well established, the most probable date being August 10, 258. The earliest extant mention of the event occurs in the writings of St Ambrose. Lawrence and his martyr dom have been favourite subjects for artistic treatment. Nuremberg, Genoa, and the Escorial are under his patron age. LAWRENCE, JOHN LAIRD MAIR LAWRENCE, BARON (1811-1879), viceroy and governor-general of India, was born at Richmond, Yorkshire, 24th March 1811. His father, Colonel Alexander Lawrence, volunteered the forlorn hope at Seringapatam in presence of Baird and of Welling ton, whose friend he became. His mother, Letitia Knox, was a collateral descendant of John Knox. To this couple were born twelve children, of whom three became famous in India, Sir George St Patrick, Sir Henry (noticed below), and Lord Lawrence. Irish Protestants, the boys were trained at Foyle College, Derry, and at Clifton, and received commissions from their mother s cousin, Mr Huddleston, who had been the friend of Schwartz in Tanjore. In 1829, when only seventeen, John Lawrence landed at Calcutta ; he mastered the Persian language at the college of Fort William, and was sent to Delhi, on his own application, as assistant to the collector. The position was the most dangerous and difficult to which a Bengal civilian could be appointed at that time. The titular court of the pen sioner who represented the Great Mogul was the centre of that disaffection and sensuality which found their oppor tunity in 1857. A Mussulman rabble filled the city. The district around, stretching from the desert of Rajpootana to the Jumna, was slowly recovering from the anarchy to which Lord Lake had given the first blow. When not administering justice in the city courts or under the village tree, John Lawrence was scouring the country after the marauding Meos and Mohammedan freebooters. His keen insight and sleepless energy at once detected the murderer of his official superior, William Fraser, in 1835, in the person of the nawab of Loharu, whose father had been raised to the principality by Lake, and the assassin was executed. The first twenty years, from 1829 to 1849, during which John Lawrence acted as the magistrate and land revenue collector of the most turbulent and backward portion of the Indian empire as it then was, formed the period of the reforms of Lord William Bentinck. To what is now the lieutenant-governorship of the North-Western Provinces Lord Wellesley had promised the same permanent settle ment of the land-tax which Lord Cornwallis had made with the large landholders or zemindars of Bengal. The court of directors, going to the opposite extreme, had sanctioned leases for only five years, so that agricultural progress was arrested. In 1833 Mertins Bird and Thomason introduced the system of thirty years leases based on a careful survey of every estate by trained civilians, and on the mapping of every village holding by native subordinates. These two revenue officers created a school of enthusiastic economists who rapidly registered and assessed an area as large as that of Great Britain, with a rural population of twenty-three millions. Of that school John Lawrence proved the most ardent and the most renowned. Intermitting his work at Delhi, he became land revenue settlement officer in the district of Etawah, and there began, by buying out or getting rid of the talukdars, to realize the ideal which he did much to create throughout the rest of his career a country &quot; thickly cultivated by a fat contented yeomanry, each man riding his own horse, sit ting under his own fig-tree, and enjoying his rude family comforts.&quot; This and a quiet persistent hostility to the oppression of the people by their chiefs formed the two features of his administrative policy throughout life. It was fortunate for the British power that, when the first Sikh war broke out, John Lawrence was still collector of Delhi. The critical engagements at Firozshdh, following Mudki, and hardly redeemed by Aliwal, left the British army somewhat exhausted at the gate of the Punjab, in front of the Sikh entrenchments on the Sutlej. For the first seven weeks of 1846 there poured into camp, day by day, the supplies and munitions of war which this one man raised and pushed forward, with all the influence acquired during fifteen years of an iron yet sympathetic rule in the land between the Sutlej and the Jumna. The crowning victory of Sobraon was the result, and at thirty-five Law rence became commissioner of the Jalandhar Doab, the fertile belt of hill and dale stretching from the Sutlej north to the Indus. The still youthful civilian did for the newly annexed territory what he had long before accomplished in and around Delhi. He restored it to order, without one regular soldier. By the fascination of his personal influence he organized levies of the Sikhs who had just been defeated, led them now against a chief in the upper hills and now to storm the fort of a raja in the lower, till he so welded the people into a loyal mass that he was ready to repeat the service of 1846 when, three years after, the second Sikh war ended in the conversion of the Punjab up to Peshawar into a British province. The marquis of Dalhousie had to devise a government for a warlike population now numbering twenty-three millions, and covering an area little less than that of the United Kingdom. The first results were not hopeful (see next article), and it was not till John Lawrence became chief commissioner, and stood alone face to face with the chiefs and people and ring fence of still untamed border tribes, that there became possible the most success ful experiment in the art of civilizing turbulent millions which history presents. The province was mapped out into districts, now numbering thirty-two, in addition to thirty-six tributary states, small and great. To each the thirty years leases of the north-west settlement were applied, after a patient survey and assessment by skilled officials ever in the saddle or the tent. The revenue was raised on principles so fair to the peasantry that Ranjit Singh s exactions were reduced by a fourth, while agricultural improvements were encouraged. For the first time in its history since the earliest Aryan settlers had been overwhelmed by successive waves of invaders, the soil of the Punjab came to have a marketable value, which every year of British rule has increased. A stalwart police was organized ; roads were cut through every district, and canals were constructed. Commerce followed on increasing cultivation and communications, courts brought justice to every man s door, and crime hid its head. The adven turous and warlike spirits, Sikh and Mohammedan, found a career in the new force of Irregulars directed by the chief commissioner himself under the governor-general, while Dost Mohammed kept within his own fastnesses, and the long extent of frontier at the foot of the passes was patrolled. In the brilliance of his later services to his country, this, the first, which alone rendered those possible, has not yet received justice. Seven years of such work prepared the lately hostile and always anarchic Punjab under such a pilot as John Lawrence not only to weather the storm of 1857 but to