Page:Sir Henry Lawrence, the Pacificator.djvu/131

122 felt some doubt whether your estrangement was not beginning to be injurious. From the letters of both of you I have received the impression that differences of opinion were becoming more frequent and more acrid, and that equally the existence of them, and the desire on both sides to avoid cause for engaging in them, was leading to questions being tacitly laid aside because you saw no probability of agreeing upon them, when it is very probable that they might have been advantageously mooted and discussed.

'It has for some time been the recorded opinion of the supreme Government that, whenever an opportunity occurred for effecting a change, the administration of the Punjab would best be conducted by a Chief Commissioner, having a Judicial and a Revenue Commissioner under him. But it was also the opinion of the Government that, whenever the change should be made, the Chief Commissioner ought to be an officer of the Civil Service.

'You stand far too high, and have received too many assurances and too many proofs of the great estimation in which your ability, qualities, and services have been held by the successive Governments under which you have been employed, to render it necessary that I should bear testimony here to the value which has been set upon your labours and upon your services as the head of the administration of the Punjab by the Government over which I have had the honour to preside. We do not regard it as in any degree disparaging to you that we, nevertheless, do not consider it expedient to commit the sole executive charge of the administration of a kingdom to any other than to a thoroughly trained and experienced civil officer. Although the Regulations do not prevail in the Punjab, and although the system of civil government has wisely and successfully been made more simple in its forms, still we are of opinion that the superintendence of so large a system, everywhere founded on the