Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/87

Rh 12th of March, 1849, General Gilbert received the submission of the entire Sikh army at Ráwal Pindi, together with the last forty-one of the 160 Sikh cannon captured by the British during the war. While the Sikh army heaped up their swords and shields and matchlocks in submissive piles, and salamed one by one as they passed disarmed along the British line, their Afghan allies were chased relentlessly westwards, and reached the safety of the Khaibar Pass panting, and barely twenty miles in front of the English hunters. The horsemen of Afghánistán, it was said, 'had ridden down through the hills like lions and ran back into them like dogs.'

The question remained what to do with the Punjab. The victory of Sobráon in 1846 gave to Lord Hardinge the right of conquest: the victory at Gújrát in 1849 compelled Lord Dalhousie to assert that right. Lord Hardinge at the end of the first Punjab war in 1846, tried, as we have seen, an intermediate method of ruling the province by British officers for the benefit of the infant prince. This method had failed. It produced, what many had foreseen it would produce, a period of perpetual intrigue, ending in a general insurrection. Under such a policy, a local spark of treason or revolt might at any moment spread into a general conflagration.

In determining the future arrangements for the