Page:The Sikhs (Gordon).djvu/218

182 subjects the British Government will rule with mildness and beneficence, but if resistance to constituted authority shall again be attempted, if violence and turbulence are renewed, the Governor-General warns the people of the Punjab that the time for leniency will then have passed away, and that their offences will be punished with prompt and most vigorous severity."

The Sikh government went the way of all governments which will not learn to rule intelligently. The whole of the Punjab came under the British flag, which now waved over the continent of India from the sea to the Himalaya and Sulaiman Mountains. Little was it thought then of what the near future had in store for this land of soldiers. A few years later, when the storm of the great mutiny of the Bengal army suddenly burst as a bolt from the blue, the Sikhs were again in the field, but this time as loyal soldiers of their honoured Queen Victoria, fighting in her cause alongside their English comrades.