Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/232

224 'No prudent man, having any knowledge of Eastern affairs, would ever venture to predict a prolonged continuance of peace in India. We have learned by hard experience how a difference with a native power [the Sikhs], 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 [among the Santáls], 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 on which they broke out in their frenzy of blood, have been regarded as a simple, harmless and 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 .'

Neither on this, nor on any other question, did Lord Dalhousie shrink from declaring the plain truth, however unwelcome the truth might be at the time. His briefest 'office-notes,' thrown off in a moment, upon the daily multitude of questions which came up to him for decision, have in them the ring of a great soul. 'I circulate these papers,' he wrote hastily on one case, in which