Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/114

106 Government he carried to a degree which one might have expected to find in a disciple of Hobbes, but hardly in a man of such popular sympathies and of such commanding powers as his. It was these notions of public duty which helped him to put up with occasional rebukes from his chief, which, if they had come from any other quarter, would have made him turn and rend his assailant.

'But Lord Dalhousie was much too great a man not to wish his subordinates to speak their minds frankly to him. This John Lawrence always did. There was not a step which Lord Dalhousie took in the Punjab, not an appointment he made, not an expression he dropped, which John Lawrence, if he was unable to approve of it, did not, with all his "heroic simplicity," fasten upon and controvert. This done, if he could not succeed in modifying his chief's views, he thought himself not only at liberty, but bound in honour to carry them out. And it was this mixture of resistance and of submission, of loyalty and of tact, and jet of plainness or even abruptness of speech, which, combined with his other and infinitely greater qualities, exactly suited Lord Dalhousie, and enabled two such master-spirits, if I have read their characters and correspondence aright, to move, in the same sphere, with mutual appreciation, and without coming into anything like dangerous collision .'

I have thought it right to set forth the powerful, perhaps at times imperious, personality with which Lord Dalhousie designed and enforced the policy that made the Punjab what it became. He felt himself so strong a master, that he did not fear