Page:Sir Henry Lawrence, the Pacificator.djvu/154

Rh W. Macnaghten, but it also gave a most vivid description of military mismanagement and blunders in the past, of the dangers to which a repetition of them might lead, and of the measures and attitude which he considered necessary to ensure the public safety.

Necessity of chronic readiness for War.

As we now approach the period of the Mutiny, his views, as shown in the above-mentioned military articles, and especially in his defence of Macnaghten, will help to make clear the motives which prompted his action in this great convulsion. In the Macnaghten case he wrote thus of the dangers in India: —

'Asia has ever been fruitful in revolutions, and can show many a dynasty overthrown by such small bands as, on November 2, 1841, rose against our force at Kábul; and British India can show bow timely energy, as at Vellore, Benares, and Bareilly, has put down much more formidable insurrections. ... Dissension among our enemies has raised us from the position of commercial factors to be lords over emperors. Without courage and discipline, we could not thus have prevailed; but even these would have availed little had the country been united against us, and would now only defer the day of our discomfiture were there anything like a unanimous revolt. The same causes operated for our first success in both India and Afghánistán; and the errors by which we lost the latter may any day deprive us of the former.

'Perhaps our greatest danger arises from the facility with which these conquests have been made; a facility which in both cases has betrayed us into the neglect of all recognized rules for military occupation. Our sway is that of the