Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/469

Rh That Lord Dalhousie, who was Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, determined, after mature deliberation, against renewing the precarious experiment of a protected native rulership in the Panjab, must now be acknowledged to have been fortunate; for if there had been a great independent state across the Sutlaj when the Anglo-Indian sepoys revolted, eight years later, the Sikhs might have found the opportunity difficult to resist. Before the commencement of hostilities with the British in 1845 they had made several attempts to shake the loyalty of the native army; nor had the spectacle of the Sikh soldiery overawing their government and dictating their own rate of pay been absolutely lost upon all the British sepoy regiments. The Governor-General's proclamation of 1849, annexing the Panjab to the British crown, carried England's territorial frontier across the Indus right up to the base of the Afghan hills, finally extinguished the long rivalship of the native Indian powers, and absorbed under British sovereignty the last kingdom that remained outside the pale of the Anglo-Indian empire.

After this manner, therefore, and with the full concurrence of the English nation as expressed through its Parliament, successive Governors-General have pushed on during the nineteenth century by forced marches to complete dominion in India, fulfilling Lord Clive's prophecy and disproving his forebodings. The long resistance to universal British supremacy culminated and ended in the bloody but decisive campaigns against the Sikh army. Henceforward all English campaigns