Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/813

Rh DALHOUSIE 777 the corn-law debates in the House of Lords fell upon the wearied official. The defeat of Sir Robert Peel at the end of June 184:6 gave him no respite, for Lord John Russell asked him to remain in office, and again the Whig premier offered the young Conservative peer the office of governor- general of India, from which Lord Hardinge was returning after the first Sikh war. Never, since Olive, had any man so young been called to bear such vast responsibilities, and yet, like CKve, he nearly doubled the empire, and adorned his rule with the blessings of peaceful and material reform. Lord Dalhousie waa only thirty-five years of age when, on the 12th January 1848, he assumed at Calcutta that high office which he held for upwards of eight years, or almost as long as the period during which Lord Hastings had been led by troublous times to fill it. Had he remained a cabinet minister, it is not difficult to predict what he might have become in the annals of British statesmanship, but he had even higher work to do in India. Lord Hardinge, guided throughout his policy by the good and great Henry Law rence, had left the Punjab nominally at peace under a Sikh regency, but really seething with discontent and con fusion. To use Lord Dalhousie s own words in reviewing the situation, the spirit of the whole Sikh people was influenced by the bitterest animosity against us, chief after chief deserted our cause, nearly the whole army and council of regency were openly arrayed against us, the Sikhs courted an Afghan alliance, and the question was no longer one of policy but of national safety. Moolraj, at Mooltan had, in April, murdered the British officers Vans Agnew and Anderson ; Herbert Edwardes had in June shown how disaster could be retrieved ; by September General Whish was before Mooltan with an avenging force ; and on the 5th October the governor-general announced, at a military ball at Barrackpore, a general war against the Sikh Sirdars. Proceeding to the spot like another Clive he conquered, annexed, and reorganized the Punjab in six months. The crowning victory of Gujerat, on the 21st February 1849, followed by the fall of Mooltan, avenged the drawn battle of Chi llian walla, and on the 29th March the Punjab became a British province. Borrowing from administra tive experiments on a small scale in Tenasserim and Sind, the governor-general created that non-regulation system, under which military officers and civilians combined have ever since brought up to the ordinary level of our civilized administration the warlike peoples of Northern and the more savage tribes of Central and Eastern India. In the brothers Henry and John Lawrence, assisted by Sir Robert Montgomery and Sir Donald Macleod, Lord Dalhousie found men to work out his plans with such success as to convert the Punjab into the base from which, in 1857, Delhi was taken and the empire was reconquered. He returned to the capital by Bombay, the Straits Settlements, and Burmah, surveying the coast-line of the magnificent dependency which he had thus carried up to its natural boundaries, to the Himalayas from the sea. The experience he thus gained was soon to be used. The king of Upper Burmah violated the treaty of Yandaboo by a gross outrage on certain British traders in the port of Rangoon, and refused atonement. Quoting Lord Wellesley s maxim, that an in sult offered to the British flag at the mouth of the Ganges would be resented as promptly and as fully as at the mouth of the Thames, after every peaceful effort had failed, the Government of India fought the second Burmese war ; and, as reparation was still scorned, took possession of the king dom of Pegu, thus uniting the territories of Arakan and Tenasserim taken in the first war into what is now the compact and prosperous coast province of British Burmah. From that time, in 1852, the completed empire has been it peace, save for the Mutiny and little frontier campaigns. Its consolidation now became the great work of the young and triumphant governor-general, who showed on as great a scale as history can present, in a few years, that peace has greater victories than those of war. While in the minute review of his 8 years administration Lord Dalhousie devotes 177 paragraphs to these, he records in only 3 the conquest of territories and populations as large as those of France. With the foresight and caution that marked all his statesmanship he thus closes the narrative of his wars : &quot; Experience frequent, hard, and recent experience has taught us that war from without or rebellion from within may at any time be raised against us, in quarters where they were the least to be expected, and by the most feeble and unlikely instruments.&quot; The rising of the tribe of Sonthals, a non-Aryan race of simple and now half-Christianized savages in the Rajmahal hills, duo to the oppression of Hindu usurers and landlords, illustrated this. But the mutiny, to which we shall afterwards allude, has still more light thrown on it by this warning. Lord Dalhousie made additions to those portions of the empire under direct British administration, however, not only by conquest but by annexing native states which lapsed to the suzerain power on the failure of natural and even adopted heirs, or, as in the case of Oudh, for outrage ous and hopeless misrule. No part of his policy has been more misrepresented than this. His own narrative of it, written as simple history and long before it was attacked, bears the stamp of the unflinching honesty which was the basis of his nature, the sympathy with the people and horror of oppression which influenced all his career, and the strict regard for justice which made his Government the strongest India ever had, before or since. He has been charged with the lack of imagination ; but he had that as Cromwell had it, where he cared for the many rather than for the self-seeking and self-pleasing few. The question i.f twofold Is it the duty or the right of the paramount power (1) to escheat states the chiefs of which persist in anarchy that not only ruins their own people but threatens their neighbours, or (2) to allow states to lapse when the chiefs leave no natural heirs and have refused to adopt a successor 1 The first was illustrated in the case of the kingdom of Oudh, which for the crimes of its kings, committed in spite of all warnings, was ordered to be annexed by the British Cabinet contrary to the recom mendation of Lord Dalhousie, who would have again tried the policy that failed after the first Sikh war. The second is the real point at issue in his case. Now the despatch of the 30th April 1860, in which Lord Canning urges the concession to the 153 Hindu and Mahometan princes who actually govern their estates of a distinct law of adoption and feudatory right, is based on the fact that no such law or certain usage was in existence before. Lord Dalhousio acted for the good of the natives and for the interests of the British Government, solely as their trustee, when he annexed states according to what has been called the doc trine of lapse. His regard for purely historic claims which could not affect the happiness of the people for evil is shown by his refusal to carry out the consent of the court of directors to extinguish the dynasty of Timur on the death of the king of Delhi. He rather perpetuated the titular sovereignty by recognizing the grandson of the king as heir-apparent, on the two conditions that he should reside at the Kootub palace, outside Delhi, and &quot; should as king receive the governor-general at all times on terms of perfect equality.&quot; To the two kingdoms of the Punjab and Pegu, won by conquest, and to the kingdom of Oudh, annexed for misrule worse than that of the Ottoman Turks, Lord Dalhousie hence added the fourth of Nagpore, &quot;in the absence of all legal heirs,&quot; refusing to bestow the territory in free mft upon a stranger. So also he added the province VF. 98