Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/815

Rh DALHOUSIE 779 to unthinking and excited critics who personally knew nothing of either. In India itself, where the facts were known and he was known, he was defended as, on much less and lower grounds, Warren Hastings had been. So, appealing from his contemporaries to posterity, and moved at the same time by the unauthorized publication of other family papers, he dictated the following addition to his will, which we are permitted to publish for the first time: &quot;Secondly, It is my wish that on my decease the whole of the letters and private papers of every description, wherever found, belonging to me, and not being legal documents connected with the Dalhousie family, should be delivered to my daughter Susan. T enjoin that at her decease, or sooner if she should think fit, all documents, journals, and letters illustrating the history of the Dalhousie family, or the career of those who have been successively its head, shall be delivered to the holder of the title of Dalhousie. And as it has been the practice of my father and of myself to keep a full private journal during our lives, and to preserve papers of personal interest, and as there prevails in these days a mania for giving publicity to the correspondence of public men, however slight may have been their real importance in the annals of the period, or however, valueless may be their written remains, I desire if possible to preserve these papers in privacy within the family to which they refer. I direct, therefore, that when these documents shall be delivered to him who shall then be Lord Dal housie, the delivery of them shall be accompanied by a request from me (to which I am confident he will conform, as to a request issuing from the grave) that no portion of the private papers of my father or of myself shall be made public until at least fifty years shall have passed after my death.&quot; The papers are carefully prsserved in Coalstoun till the year 1910. Lord Dalhousie retired to his old boy home, in Dalhousie Castle, to die, affectionately tended by his daughter, and on the 19th December 1860 he passed peacefully away. He was not forty-nine years old, an age when in England statesmen only begin their career, yet in England and India he had done a life work surpassed by none, if equalled by any of his contemporaries. His marble statue, long opposite Wellesley s in the hall of Government House, Calcutta, now adorns the public institute in the public square, which both bear his name. His portrait by Sir John Watson Gordon, at Coalstoun, recalls the fine head, the brow of massive breadth and height, the large and lustrous eyes, the flexible and sensitive lips, the commanding attitude which made his middle-size look like the tallness of bigger men. The panic which sought to fasten on Lord Dalhousie re sponsibility for the mutiny has long since been pronounced unreasonable. All the charges against the last of the Com pany s governors-general may be summed up in two, political and military, he conquered and annexed many states ; he ignored or misunderstood the condition of the sepoy army. As to the first, the despatch of Lord Canning, already alluded to and he is identified with the opposite, or non- annexation policy, which Lord Dalhousie alone made possible for his successor shows that there was no law or regular usage on the subject. Lord Dalhousie had certainly no passion for annexation, as the Oudh case proves, and each instance must be dealt with on its own merits. It is difficult to obtain reliable evidence to support any statement as to native opinion or feeling, even after the event, and we have none for the assertion that the series of acquisitions of territory had alarmed the native chiefs. But even if it had, we may maintain that it was the governor-general s duty to complete the empire, to care for the people, and to do this at all fair risks. To all such assertions we may reply that it was conquests like the Punjab that saved the empire when the crisis came, that it was annexations like Nagpore and Sattara which removed centres of discontent. Oudh, for which he was not responsible, and little Jhansi, which had a mad ranee, were the only malcontents. All the other native chiefs were loyal, actively or passively. The military argument is still less defensible, and has been abandoned ever since Sir Charles Jackson exposed it. Lord Dalhousie foresaw trouble in India as much as any man has ever done in a country where it is the unforeseen that happens. We have already quoted an instance of this. But these words in his farewell to India might, as has been said, have been written after the mutiny. &quot; We have learned by hard experience how a difference with a native power, which seems at first to be but the little cloud no bigger than a man s hand, may rapidly darken and swell into a storm of war, involving the whole empire in its gloom. We have lately seen how, in the very midst of us, insurrection may rise like an exhalation from the earth, and how cruel violence, worse than all the excesses of war, may be suddenly committed by men who, to the very day in which they broke out in their frenzy of blood, have been regarded as a simple, harmless, timid race, not by the Government alone but even by those who knew them best, who were dwelling among them, and were their earliest victims. Remembering these things, no prudent man will venture to give you assurance of continued peace.&quot; The first authority on the subject, Lord Lawrence, pro nounced the cause of the mutiny purely military, and found it in the greased cartridges. It was social, not political, an assault on caste, not on princes, though doubtless Mahometan and other intriguers took advantage of the mutinous spirit. But the opportunity for the mutiny was found in the reduction of the British garrison, already too low, to a point of danger which had led to Lord Dal- housie s alarmed but unheeded protests. When he wanted more troops to meet the increase of territory he found him self denuded of two cavalry and two infantry regiments for the Crimea. The strength of the white garrison was thus reduced to 22 regiments. That reduction completed what the Afghan policy of the home authorities had begun, by placing success within the grasp of the native army. In 1854 Lord Dalhousie thus wrote: &quot;We are perfectly secure so long as we are strong and are believed to be so ; but if European troops shall now be withdrawn from India to Europe, and if further we should be called on to despatch an army to the Persian Gulf then, indeed, I shall no longer feel, and can no longer express, the same con fidence as before that the security and stability of our position in the East will remain unassailed.&quot; That is prophetic enough. But it is nothing to the nine minutes which, on the last day of his office, he laid before his council and sent home, all of which were pigeon-holed, and two of which cannot be found in the records, In spite of these admirable and earnest state papers, the two infantry regiments sent to the Crimea were not replaced, and five or six of the minimum of thirty-one on the India establishment were in the Persian war, as his excellency had feared. He sought to raise the number to thirty-seven, and to reduce the sepoy force by upwards of 14,000 men, but in vain. Had lie been able to carry out his own military policy as he did in the case of purely political and administrative affairs, is it too much to say that there would have been no mutiny 1 In spite of the passing away of the school of political and military officers whom Lord Dalhousie created, represented now only by the venerable Lord Lawrence, every year s progress in the history of India reveals new reasons for recalling with gratitude and admiration the eight or nine vears administration of the last of the gover- tf nors-general. The detailed events of this period will be found in the volumes of the Friend of India and the Calcutta Review from 1848 to 1856 in clusive. Other and more compact sources are Marshman s History of India, volume iii., Sir Charles Jackson s Vindication of the Marquis of Dalhousie s Indian Administration, and tin; Duke of Argyll s India under Dalhousie and Canning. The &quot;Minute by the Most Noble the Governor-General of India,&quot; dated the 28th of February 1856, was published as No. xiv. of the Selections from the Records of the Government of India in the Home Department in 1856. ln. o8C who are interested in that controversy with Sir Charles Napier,