Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/814

Rh 778 DALHOUSIE of Berar, ceded by the Nizam for the permanent main tenance of the Hyderabad contingent. In Nagpore and Berar, one day to be united to Bombay, he gave Lancashire the finest cotton field under the British Crown. So also the principality of Sattara and the chiefship of Jhansi reverted to the Indian Government. Writing in 1856 he showed that these four kingdoms and three provinces had raised the revenue of India from 26 to 30 millions sterling a yeai. In the twenty years since, no revenue-paying addition has been made to the empire as Dalhousie left it, for he reached the boundaries fixed by nature. But the income of the 12 provinces of British India, with the 153 native states, which cost the rest of India far more than the small tribute they pay and spend nothing on the people, has risen to 52 millions sterling a year. It has doubled since Lord Dalhousie landed at Calcutta. But, while caring for the people, he was not indifferent to the welfare and good-will of their chiefs. Himself a sincere Christian, while singularly reticent as to his personal faith, and strictly neutral as the ruler of millions of alien and opposed creeds, he thus wrote of the adoption of Christianity by Maharaja Dhuleep Singh, the last of the rulers of the Punjab : &quot; The act was voluntary on the part of the boy, and, under the guidance of God s hands, was the result of his own uninfluenced convictions. It is gratifying to be able to state that his life hitherto has been strictly con sistent with the injunctions of the faith he professes.&quot; So he records the baptism of the Queen s ward, the princess of Coorg, at the desire of her father the ex-raja. And in his time there was passed the Toleration Act, which, completing the good work begun by Lord William Bentinck, removed from the statute book the last traces of the persecution of converts to Christianity, who had suffered the loss of all their goods as a penal consequence. The catalogue of Lord Dalhcusie s reforms is as interest ing as it is long, but we must be content with a mere state ment of those which remind us of Clive s work in his third visit to India. The Civil Service was opened to the com petition of all the natural-born subjects of the Crown, black and white, and at the same time the civil and military services were reorganized in India itself to supply the new territories. In Bengal, the boards which had acted as &quot;screens&quot; for inefficiency were abolished or simplified, and personal government was introduced in a way which made the force of the governor-general s energy and influence felt throughout the empire. The Public Works Department, separated from the military administration, was organized in a style which has enabled it to grapple with the va st needs of the whole Peninsula. A legislative council was created which, far more effectually than the sham introduced by Lord Halifax afterwards, promised to represent both British and native opinion. Bengal, with its sixty millions, received a lieutenant-governor for itself. In a thousand details life was substituted for apathy or obstructiveness, till among all classes the genius and force of the &quot; boy &quot; governor-general were gratefully eulogized as had never before happened in the history of India. There was not a hostile critic. But these were small matters compared with the introduction of the four potent forces of the railway and the telegraph, cheap postage and the primary school. The triumph of physical and educational progress went hand in hand. The quondam president of the Board of Trade felt himself at his old work, but on a vaster scale, and with far more magnificent results. Every word he spoke or wrote, every act that he ordered or sanctioned, told on the civilization of the country. His it was, too, to push on and open the great Ganges Canal which has since saved Hindustan from famine; his to make roads from Delhi through the Punjab, from Simla and the frontier to Tibet, ft; -in Assam to Pegu. Trade and agriculture were ever before him as if he had no other work to do ; cotton and tea, iron and coal, salt and other resources were carefully developed by him; and he created a forest department. When he did not think it politically expedient to make female education a care of the state, any more than even the early missionaries were prepared to attend to it, he supported the Bethune school out of his own pocket. Suttee in native states, and thuggee or strangling in our own, he kept down with an iron hand ; female infanticide, and meriah or human sacrifice, he vigilantly suppressed ; slavery and the slave-trade he made treaties from the Somalee coast of Africa to the Euphrates and the Irawaddy to put down Finally, his care for the British soldier in a tropical climate was matched only by the improvement which he caused in the physical condition of the sepoys. No less a military than a civil administrator, his last act was to send home a series of minutes pressing for a reorganization and an in crease of the army, in language not only unheeded, but deliberately repelled, with consequences which the mutiny soon displayed. Such work as this, following the still greater strain of the Board of Trade during the railway mania, began to show itself even before Lord Dalhousie had completed the usual five years term of service. He recorded, at the time, the bitter pang it was to him to be so ill as not to be able to accompany the first railway train which he officially sent forth in its course Bombay-wards from Howrah, the suburb opposite Calcutta. In 1855 the physicians solemnly warned him to leave, but as Her Majesty s Government laid on him the duty of annexing Oudh, he deliberately accepted the responsibility. &quot; The ministry have asked me to stay, and I will do my duty,&quot; he replied to all remon strances. He had, too, lost his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached a daughter of the marquis of Tweeddale, who had been governor of Madras and was soothed by the arrival of his eldest daughter. The hot season of 1855 he spent in the Neilgherry hills. 1 It was on the 6th March 1858 that he left Calcutta, amid the tears of many, both natives and Europeans, who accompanied the great proconsul, as he was lovingly called, to the Ghaut. He knew he had no more health to look for. Sadly did he write, in his formal reply to the citizens of Calcutta &quot; Nearly thirteen years have passed away since first I entered the service of the Crown. Through all those years, with but one short interval, public employment of the heaviest responsibility and labour has been imposed upon me. I am wearied and worn, and have no other thought or wish than to seek the retirement of which I stand in need, and which is all I now am fit for.&quot; Lord Dalhousie retired not only amid the regrets of the people he had ruled so well, and of the services, civil and military, which he had attached to himself at once by the splendour of his administrative genius and by the kingly fascination of his personal character. He was honoured by Parliament and the Crown, while the press exhausted the terms of eulogy in reviewing the career of one who, like Clive, had proved equally great in peace and in war. The many months spent in Malta before he could brave the rigours of his native climate he devoted to a defence of his whole administration, which, unfortunately, is not now to be found. For already the outburst of the Bengal mutiny had led thoughtless or prejudiced and certainly ignorant persons to demand a victim, and they sought it in the dying governor-general. He could not take his place in the House of Lords and explain his acts and policy 1 The appointment, as his successor, of Lord Canning, his old college companion, gave him great pleasure ; and when, soon after, he vus dying and was told of the eulogy that viceroy had passed on him when opening an extension of the railway to Piajmahal, he smiled say ing, &quot; I always knew Canning was a gentleman..