if?QPEif YOf PRIHCETOH HtC. theological^ rS^umK"& r DS 479 . 2 . S65 1883 v. 1 I Smith, R. Bosworth 1839- [ 1908. I Life of Lord Lawrence »883 V./ LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE VOLUME I. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/lifeoflordlawren01smit_0 LIFE OF /' Lord Lawrence BY R. BOSWORTH ''SMITH, M.A. LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD; ASSISTANT MASTER AT HARROW SCHOOL,* AUTHOR OF ‘CARTHAGE AND THE CARTHAGINIANS,’ ‘ROME AND CARTHAGE,* ETC. IN TWO VOLUMES Vol. I. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS i883 ►^pUCPERTy op4*''*,, P HI IT 0 ETON \ N **££ TH CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE. 1S1I-1S29. PACES Introductory — The Scoto-Irish and their Characteristics — Henry and John Lawrence compared — Scope and Object of Biography — John Lawrence’s Father — His Mother — His Sister Letitia — His successive Homes — His Childhood — His Nurse Margaret — His School at Clif- ton— Anecdotes — Foyle College and its Surroundings — His Compan- ions— Anecdotes — His Intellectual Progress — Dr. Kennedy and Sir Robert Montgomery — Wraxall School — Reminiscences by Welling- ton Cooper and F. B. Ashley — Offer of Writership by John Huddle- stone — ‘A soldier I was born, and a soldier I’ll be’ — Haileybury College — Its Staff of Professors and Course of Education — Contem- poraries of John Lawrence — Anecdotes — Reminiscence by J. H. Bat- ten— Sir Charles Trevelyan — Irish element in John Lawrence — Chelsea Friends .......... 1-29 Prospects of John Lawrence— Start for India — His Companions— Home- sickness— Residence in Calcutta — Ruling Principles of his Life — Appointed to Delhi — History and Description of Delhi — Battles for Empire — Successive Cities — The Great Mogul and his Treatment by the English — Crimes and Abuses in Palace — Sir Charles Metcalfe — Theopbilus Metcalfe— Duties of Resident — Character of City Popu- lation— The Delhi District — Reminiscence by Charles Trevelyan — CHAPTER II. LIFE AT DELHI. 1829-1834. VI CONTENTS OF Work and Life of John Lawrence as ‘Assistant to Resident’ for four Years — The Sullateen — Slavery — Forgery — Story-telling — A Family Gathering — Robert Napier 30-43 CHAPTER III. LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 1834-1S37. Paniput, historical and geographical — Battle-field of India — The Jatsand their Characteristics — The Sikhs and their Religion — Duties of Col- lector— Their Variety — ‘ Cutcherry on Horseback1 — Sympathy with People — Reminiscence by Charles Raikes — Jan Larens sub Janta. — John Lawrence’s Mode of Working — Anecdotes — The Village Cowherds and Arrears of Revenue — Reminiscence by Sir Richard Pollock — A Tonic — A Durbar — Solitude— Purchase of Chanda — Narrow Escape — Fragment of Autobiography — ‘ A hunt, a robbery, or a murder?’ — Jan Larens — Legendary Fame — The ‘Breasts of the Faithful ’ — Physical Strength — Moral Courage — A Service re- paid— Story of ‘ The Brothers ’ — Arrest and Detection of the Mur- derer by John Lawrence — Murder of William Fraser, Commissioner of Delhi — Detection of Murderer — Saves Russeldar from Drowning — Chase after a Robber — ‘ The widow and her money-bags ’ . . 44-77 CHAPTER IV. LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 1S37-184O. Reminiscence by W. S. Seton Karr — His Friendship for Lawrence, and his Tribute to his Memory — John Lawrence transferred to Gorgaon — Predatory Character of People — Nature of Country — ‘ Passive re- sistance ’ — ‘Settlement officer’ at Etawa — Robert Mertins Bird — His Services and Career — Retired Civilians — ‘ Settlement of North- West’ — ‘Permanent settlement’ — Its Results — Law of Sale and its Results— Difficulties of Settlement — Village Communities and Boundary Disputes — The Talukdars — Settlement Officers of North- West — Opposing Schools — Description of Etawa — Famine — Its Causes, Effects, and Remedies — Views of John Lawrence — Pilgrims and Pilgrimages — The Goddess Situla, or Small-pox — A Brahmin Pilgrim — Starvation — Work at Etawa — Reminiscence by J. Cumine — Some personal Characteristics of John Lawrence — Story of ‘ The disputed boundary ’ — Remarks by Sir Henry Maine — Dangerous Illness— Determines not to Die — Journey to Calcutta — Goes on Three Years’ Furlough — General Character of first Ten Years in India— Reminiscence by Herbert Edwardes 78-115 THE FIRST VOLUME. CHAPTER V. FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 184O-1S42. Paucity of Materials for Biography— No Journals, and few private Let- ters— How explained — Changes in Clifton Home — Death of Father — Marriage of Sister Letitia — The 1 Lawrence Fund ’ — Death of old Nurse Margaret — Visit to Scotland — Visit to Ireland — Meets his future Wife— V*sit to Bonn — Visit to Bath — Reminiscence by Mrs. Kensington — Visit to Lynton — John Sterling and Caroline Fox — Second Visit to Ireland— Becomes engaged to Harriette Hamilton — Her Antecedents — ‘Carders’ of Meath — Story of her Father and Andrew Rabb— Her early Life— The Marriage — Its Happiness — Anecdotes— Wedding Tour on Continent — Visit to Rome — News of Cabul Disaster reaches them at Naples — First Letter of John Lawrence — His Illness — ‘ If I can’t live in India, I must go and die there’ — Sails for India 116-132 CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR. 1S3S-1S42. Sketch of Afghan War — Why material to Biography— Governor-General- ship of Lord Auckland — Progress of Russia — Character of Afghanis- tan and Afghans — Dost Mohammed — His Advice and the Way in which he was treated — Advice of other great Authorities, and how treated — Mission of Alexander Burnes — Shah Soojah — 1 When your military difficulties are over, your real difficulties will begin ’ — Fatal Infatuation — Rising at Cabul — Death of Burnes and Macnaghten — Akbar Khan and the Retreat — The Moral — Lord Ellenborough and the Army of Vengeance — The Sandalwood Gates — Manifesto of Lord Ellenborough — Who was to do most to carry it into Practice ? 1 33-143 CHAPTER VII. MAGISTRATE OF DELHI ; AND FIRST SIKH WAR. 1842-1846. John Lawrence and his Wife land at Bombay —Adventurous Journey across Central India — Lord Ellenborough’ s Pageant — Dearth of Employment — Camp Life — The Taj at Agra — Meeting with George Lawrence on his Return from Captivity — Narrow Escape of George I.awrence — John Lawrence reappointed to Delhi — Sir Robert Collie Hamilton — Annexation of Khytul — Reminiscence by Colonel Henry Yule — Birth of Eldest Daughter — Meeting of the Lawrences and CONTENTS OF viii their Wives at Kurnal — Condition of Kurnal — Sanitary Inquiries of John Lawrence — The ‘ Purveyance system ’ — Condition of Native Women — Story of ‘The leper’ — Treatment of the Natives by English — Sympathy with them — The Great Gulf — Magistrate of Delhi — Tail Reform — John Lawrence owed Nothing to Patronage — Annexation of Scinde and its Character — ‘ Peccavi ’ — A Heritage of triumphant Wrong — Sir Henry Hardinge Governor-General — His History and Character — His Preparations for Defence against Sikhs — Meets John Lawrence at Delhi — Mutual Impressions — First Sikh War — ‘ No one can tell what fools may do ’ — Battle of Ferozeshah — A Cadmean Victory — John Lawrence ‘ The Base of Operations’ for Sobraon — Battle of Sobraon — Annexation of Jullundur Doab — Questionable Treatment of Jummoo and Kashmere — ‘Sendane up John Lawrence’ — Reminiscence by Colonel Ramsay . . 144-173 CHAPTER VIII. COMMISSIONER OF TRANS-SUTLEJ STATES. 1846. Great Leap in Advance — Folio Volumes of Letters — Character and Population of Jullundur Doab — Reminiscences by Robert Cust and Hercules Scott — Heavy Work — Powers of Despatch — Harry Lums- den and Edward Lake — Fortress of Kangra — Its History, Resist- ance, and Submission — A Bloodless Victory — Land Tax to be paid in Money instead of in Kind — Importance of this Reform — The Rajas of the Hills — Female Infanticide — Its Causes — The Bedi of Oona — ‘ Those Bedis were not such bad fellows’ — Humour of John Lawrence — Danger of Combination among Sepoys foreseen — His Relations to his Subordinates — Visit to Simla .... 174-1S8 CHAPTER IX. ACTING RESIDENT AT LAHORE. 1S46-1848. Character and Career of Runjeet Sing — ‘ It will all soon be red’ — East- ern Dynasties — State of Punjab under Runjeet’s Successors — Character of Sikhs — Sir Henry Lawrence Resident at Lahore — Bona-fide Efforts to save the Sikh State — His Measures — John Law- rence takes his place at Lahore — His Special Difficulties — Divided Responsibility — The Sirdars, the Maharani, and her Grand Vizier Lai Sing — Letters — Anecdotes — The Question of Jagheers — Jan Lanns sub Junta again — Absolute Straightforwardness — Golab / THE FIRST VOLUME. Sing and Imamuddin — Their Characters — State Trial and Banish- ment of Lai Sing — Henry Lawrence practically Ruler of the Punjab His Assistants and his Work — John Lawrence returns to Jullundur A bold Prophecy—1 Assess low ’ — George Christian and George Barnes — Treatment of Chiefs in Jullundur Doab — Important and Difficult Question — A Cow Riot — Banishment of the Maharani — Character of Sir Henry Lawrence’s Rule in Punjab— His HappinAs there — Henry a John-ite, and John a Henry-ite — Henry Lawrence goes to England with Lord Ilardinge — Relation of Lord Ilardinge to the Lawrences CHAPTER X. THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 1 848. John Lawrence ‘acting’ Resident at Lahore again — Letters of Lord Hardinge to him — Drawbacks and Difficulties in his Work — Passive Resistance of Sirdars — Reminiscence by Lewin Bowring — Simplicity of Life — ‘ The gorgeous East ’ — House and Household — Friendship with Sir Colin Campbell — Arrival of Lord Dalhousie in India — Sir Frederick Currie succeeds John Lawrence at Lahore — Birth of second son Henry — Dhurmsala — Murder of Agnew and Anderson — Was it planned? — Story of Moolraj — Letters and Advice of John Lawrence — Delay of chief Authorities — Lord Gough and Lord Dal- housie— Exploits of Herbert Edwardes — Van Cortlandt — Siege of Mooltan and its Vicissitudes — General Rising in Punjab— Second Sikh War — Sikhs allied with Afghans — Battle of Chillianwallah — A Victory or a Defeat ? — Achievements of ‘ Assistants to Resident ’ — George Lawrence — James Abbot — Lieutenant Herbert — Reynell Taylor — Position of John Lawrence in Jullundur Doab — Content- ment of People — Force at his Disposal — Risings in the Hills — He conducts a Thirteen Days’ Campaign — Leads Sikhs against Sikhs — Successes — Bedi of Oona again — Escape of a Guru — Charles Saun- ders— John Lawrence attracts Attention of Lord Dalhousie — Mas- terful Character of Lord Dalhousie — His Relations to Lord Gough and Henry Lawrence — Change of Master, and what it often implies Local Experience and its Value — Racy Letters of Lord Dal- housie— Bulk of his Correspondence sealed up for fifty Years — Re- turn of Henry Lawrence to India — His Ikbal — Capture of Mooltan — Battle of Gujerat — Submission of Sikhs — ‘ Runjeet Sing is dead to- day ’ — Advice of John Lawrence — Annexation of Punjab and its Justification ix CAGES IS9-2I4 2IS-25I X CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XI. THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 1S49-1852. PACES How was the Punjab to be governed? — Balance of Civil and Military Elements — Sir Charles Napier and Lord Dalhousie — A volcanic Board — Did it answer its purpose? — Its three Members: Henry Lawrence, John Lawrence, C. Greville Mansel — Their Idiosyncra- sies— Physical Characteristics of Punjab — Its Rivers and Doabs — The Derajat — A Country of Extremes — Hill Districts and Plains — Boundaries and Mountain Ranges — Frontier natural or ‘ scientific’ ? — Races inhabiting Punjab — The Peshawur Valley — Character of Northwest Frontier — Runjeet Sing’s Principles of Government, of Taxation, of Punishment— Disarmament of People — Protection of Country — Raising of Irregular Regiments — The Guide Corps, its History and Characteristics — Protection of Peshawur Valley — De- fensive Arrangements of Frontier — The ‘ Wardens of the Marches’ — Raising of Police — Prevention and Detection of Crime — Cattle- stealing— Dacoity— Thuggee— Jails built — Native Customs, as far as possible, respected— Land Survey and Revenue Settlement— Its Benefits — Reforms in Taxation — Soldiers become Cultivators — De- velopment of Resources — Road-making — Robert Napier and Alex- ander Taylor — The Grand Trunk Road — Canals — The Bari Doab Canal — Coinages and Languages — Education — Agriculture — Forest Trees — Sanitary Measures — ‘Perfection made up of trifles’ — The Punjab a financial' Success — General Results — Quotations from ‘ Punjab Report,’ from Lord Dalhousie, and the Directors of East ■ India Company — Sir Richard Temple’s Retrospect . . . 252-286 CHAPTER XII. HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 1849-1852. Difficulties and painful Character of the Subject — Dhurmsala — A Bear Hunt and a Nose Maker — Story of a Gudi — Mrs. John Lawrence during second Sikh War — The Lahore Residence after Annexation — Busy Scene — Meeting of the Board — Subjects to be dealt with — Spheres of the Lawrence Brothers — Sir John Kaye on John Law- rence--Differences of Opinion and Heart-burnings — Loss of Koh-i- noor — The Brothers compared and contrasted — Henry Lawrence’s generous Fight for Sirdars — His unique Character — His Peregrina- tions— ‘ Achilles absent is Achilles still’ — John Lawrence brought into Prominence, how? — ‘A killing Summer’ — Arrest of Sirdars — THE FIRST VOLUME. xi Reform of Tariff — Sir Charles Napier — His Character and Disap- pointments— Ilis Biography and his Writings — Antagonism to Lord Dalhousie, to the Lawrences, and to Civil Government generally — Scinde and Punjab Schools in India — 1 Backward ’ and 1 Forward ’ Policy — Krere and Lawrence — Quotations from Sir Charles Napier — His attack on Punjab Administration — His Knowledge of the Subject — His Opinion on Things in general — His Prophecies — An- swer of John Lawrence — Meeting of Antagonists at Lahore — Story of Selection of Mean Meer Cantonments--Sir Charles Napier’s Tour of Inspection — The Kohat Pass — Fierce Controversies — Letters of John Lawrence — The Administration in Scinde — Visit of John Law- rence to Lord Dalhousie at Simla — No Holidays allowed in the Punjab — ‘The Punjab head’ — Question of Frontier Force — Visit of Sir Henry Lawrence to Kashmere and Ladak with Ilodson — Ill- ness of John Lawrence — Dr. Hathaway — Affectionate Letter of Lord Dalhousie— John Lawrence’s own Anticipations of his Future compared with the Reality — Death of infant Son — Tenderness of John Lawrence— Daughters sent to England with Nicholson and Edwardes — Mansel leaves the Punjab — Ilis Character — Succeeded by Montgomery — His History and Characteristics — The Triumvirate at Foyle College and on the Punjab Board — Story of the Simpson Brothers — Visit of Lord Stanley — ! Heroic simplicity ’ — Subordin- ates of the Lawrences — Their Careers and Characters — The Board is to be dissolved — What it had done— Had it answered its Pur- pose ? — Chief Subjects of Difference between the Lawrence Brothers — Which was right ? — Reminiscence by General John Becher — How did Montgomery’s Advent affect the Question at Issue — ' A buffer between two high-pressure engines ’ — Pathetic Letters of John Lawrence — Both Brothers offer to resign — Lord Dalhousie makes his Choice between them — Sir Henry Lawrence leaves the Punjab — Parting Scene at Lahore and at Umritsur — Career and Influence of Sir Henry Lawrence, ...... 2S7-351 CHAPTER XIII. CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 1852-1853. Effects of Henry Lawrence’s Departure — General Character of John Lawrence’s Rule- — His chief Fame rests on it — Consolidation and Development — Abolition of Board good for State then, and, still more, four Years later — Difficult Questions to be dealt with — Mont- gomery ‘ Judicial Commissioner ’ — Edmonstone ‘ Financial Commis- sioner ’ — Division of Labour — Shifting of Parts, but Actors the same CONTENTS OF xii — First Letter to Nicholson — ‘Nicholson worth the wing of a regi- ment ’ — Last Appeal of Henry Lawrence — Gravitation of John Law- rence towards his Brother’s Views — Less Worry and more Work — General Characteristic of Chief Commissionership — Justice — Equity — Subordination — Economy — Thoroughness — Despatch — Kindness to Natives — Frontier Policy — Distribution of Patronage — ‘Avoid the hills ’ — John Lawrence’s chief Objects, Occupations, and Difficul- ties— Correspondence with Lord Dalhousie best shows his Head ; with Nicholson, his Heart — Difficulties in dealing with Nicholson, with Robert Napier, with Coke, with Macleod — ‘A lac of rupees’ — ‘ If you want the thing well done, go to Napier ’ — Taking of a Bribe — Description of Macleod — Exceptional Advice to Beclier— Treatment of Natives by English Officers — Complications in Bahawulpore — Important indirect Results — Policy towards Afghans and Frontier Tribes — Murder of Mackeson — Panic in Peshawur District — ‘ An imperial No ’ — Lawrence’s Opinion of Herbert Edwardes and Sir James Outram — ‘An imperial Yes’ — Letters to Courtenay — Letters to Lord Dalhousie and increasing Intimacy — At Peshawur — The Bori Afridis — John Lawrence under Fire — His Glee — Attempt to Murder Godby — John Lawrence sends second batch of Children to England with Charles Saunders — Powers of Work — Visit to Mooltan and the Derajat — Cattle-stealing still — ‘The first specimen of the conquering race’ — Futteh Khan Khuttuck — Lawrence’s De- scription of him — Troubles with Hodson in Command of Guides — Complaints against him — John Lawrence’s Forbearance — Court of Inquiry — Kader Khan — Hodson remanded to his Regiment — Differ- ences between Tribes of Northern and Southern Derajat — The ‘ Cunctator ’ — Succeeds Edmonstone — The Delectable Mountains — House and Work at Murri — Birth of third Son Charles — Philip Melvill and George Christian — First Meeting with Richard Temple — His Powers of Work and rapid Rise — ‘ Punjab Report ’ — Temple becomes Secretary to John Lawrence — Relief to Chief Commissioner — Reminiscence by Temple — Second Punjab Report — Moral and material Progress . ... 352 CHAPTER XIV. RELATIONS WITH HIS CHIEF AND HIS SUBORDINATES. 1854-1856. The Crimean War — ‘ Be on the Look-out for Menschikoffin the Khyber’ — Russia and Afghanistan — ‘ Don’t send a European Envoy to Cabul ’ — Views of Edwardes, of Lawrence, of Lord Dalhousie — Moral Courage and Loyalty of John Lawrence — Character of Afghans THE FIRST VOLUME. — John Lawrence’s Negotiations with Gholam Ilyder Khan — Diplo- macy not necessarily Trickery — Description of Ilyder Khan — Herat and Peshawur— Mohammed Khan and George Lawrence — Anecdotes — ‘ Look at his hand ’ — Khazwanis and Khugwanis — The Turks beat the Russians — Conclusion of Treaty — Its Terms — ‘ The soul of the battle’ — Return of Old Punjabis to John Lawrence— Lake — Reynell Taylor — Harry Lumsden — Neville Chamberlain — George Campbell — Sydney Cotton — What Lawrence cared for in his Subor- dinates— ‘Keeping the team together’ — Difficulties — Correspon- dence with Nicholson, Neville Chamberlain, Coke, Edwardes, Montgomery, Napier — ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ — Magnanim- ity and Forbearance of John Lawrence — Nicholson’s ‘ Pen and ink ’ Work — Napier’s Public Works and Expenditure — Result of John Lawrence’s Efforts — Relations to Lord Dalhousie — Character of Lord Dalhousie — His commanding Powers — His Defects— His Style of Writing — His Kindness — His Appreciation of Services — His Ill- health — His Dignity — Every Inch a King — Masterful Character of John Lawrence — What enabled him to get on with Lord Dalhousie — Mixture of Qualities — ‘ You are a good hater’ — Correspondence with Lord Dalhousie — General Character of his Rule — A Baronetcy or a K.C.B. ? — Illness of Lady Lawrence — What she would have missed had she gone to England — Farewell Visit to Lord Dalhousie at Calcutta — Annexation of Oude — John Lawrence’s Views of it — The ‘ Chief Commissioner ’ to become ‘ Ligutenant-Govemor ’ of the Punjab — Estimate of John Lawrence by Lord Dalhousie, by Sir J. P. Grant, and Sir Barnes Peacock — Last Meeting of the Brothers Lawrence — Arrival of Lord Canning — Departure of Lord Dalhousie — He goes Home to die — His Farewell Letters — The K.C.B. at last 406-450 CHAPTER XV. JOHN LAWRENCE AND AFGHANISTAN. THE BREWING OF THE STORM. 1856-1S57. Change of Masters — Impressions of Lord Canning — The War with. Persia and its Causes — Disgust of Lord Canning and Sir John Lawrence — Who was to have the Command? — Sir John Lawrence’s Opinion of his Brother Henry — Reminiscence by Sir George Campbell — ‘ Job- bing for one’S friends’ — Loyalty of his Friends — Popularity, and his Attitude towards it — Roughnesses — Appetite for Work — Overdone at last — ‘ Distracted with one botheration and another ’ — Nicholson again — Anecdotes — The Crimea, or Bhurtpore, or Kashmere ? — XIV CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. Temple goes to England — ‘Never say Die’ — Dost Mohammed and Candahar — Proposed Interview between the Dost and Sir John Lawrence — A Wild-goose Chase — Sir John Lawrence’s Policy to- wards Afghanistan — Important Letters — Lessons for the Present and Future — Lord Canning agrees — Meeting in the Khyber — Picturesque Scene — Interviews with the Dost — Should English Officers be placed at Cabul ? — ‘ My verbal assurance pledges Government as much as a written article’ — Terms of Treaty — Anecdotes of the Dost — His Truthfulness — How he made both Ends meet — Mission of the Lumsdens to Candahar — Strict Limitation of its Objects — Sir James Outram in Command in Persia — Sir Henry Lawrence becomes ‘ Chief Commissioner ’ of Oude — Death of Lady (Henry) Lawrence — Letter to Sir Henry with Hints for his new Work — The Sisyphman Stone — Illness of Sir John Lawrence — Thinks of returning to Eng- land— ‘ The little cloud’ — Brewing of the Storm — The Chupatties — Causes and Symptoms of the Mutiny — Sir John Lawrence at Seal- kote and Rawul Pindi — Bursting of the Storm .... 451-484 ERRATA. Page 27, “ 135. “ 144. “ 157. “ 349. “ 169, “ 178. “ 322> line 7, for Hoddesden read Hoddesdon. “ 9, for foreign master read master. “ 32, for Ellickpore read Ellichpore. ‘ ‘ 4°. ) r for Monro read Munro. “ 29, ) “ 32, for protected Sikh states read Sikh domain. “ 3°. for Edmund Lake read Edward Lake. “ 24, for change read charge. “ 324. “ 32S. ’ [ for Roopore read Roopur. » ' “ 356, “ 393. “ 442, “ 480, (- for Edmondstone read Edmonstone. “ 22, I y “ 26, for in company doubled read doubled. “ 5, for Hindustanis read Hindus. ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. I. PORTRAIT . to face title-page Map of the Punjab and adjoining Countries. 1849-1858 “ page 215 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE. 1811—1829. Nowhere within the circuit of the British Islands is a more interesting, a more vigorous, or a more strongly marked type of character to be found than among the inhabitants of the North and North-east of Ireland. The people who have sprung from that sturdy mixture of Scotch and Irish blood are not without their conspicuous faults. No race which is at once so vigorous and so mixed is ever free from them. A suspicious- ness and caution which often verges on selfishness, an ambition which is as quiet as it is intense, a slow and unlovable calcu- lation of consequences, these are some of the drawbacks which those who know and love them best are willing to admit. On the other hand, there have been found amongst them men who, under the most widely different circumstances, in Great Britain itself, in that ‘Greater Britain,’ which lies across the Atlantic, and amongst our widely scattered dependencies, last, not least, in that greatest dependency of all, our Indian Empire, have rendered the noblest service to the State as intrepid soldiers, as vigorous administrators, as wise and far-seeing statesmen. Among the Scoto-Irish there have been found men who have combined in their own persons much of the rich humour and the strong affections, the vivacity and the versatility, the genius and the generosity of the typical Irishman, with the patience and the prudence, the devotion and the self-reliance, the stern morality and the simple faith of the typical Scotchman. In Vol. I.— 1 2 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 some families one of these national types seems to predominate throughout, almost to the exclusion of the other. In others the members differ much among themselves ; one conforming mainly to the Scotch, another to the Irish type of character, although each may manage to retain something which is most distinctive of the other. This last would seem to have been the case with the heretofore little known family which the names of Henry and John Lawrence have made a household word with Englishmen wherever they are to be found, and which, it may safely be predicted, will be loved and honoured so long as England retains any reverence for what is great and good. In the wide circle of that illustrious brotherhood which sprung from the marriage of Alexander Lawrence and Letitia Catherine Knox, it is hardly fanciful to say that Henry Law- rence was essentially an Irishman, but with a substratum of those deeper and sterner qualities which we generally consider to be Scotch ; that John was essentially a Scotchman, but pos- sessed also much of what is truly lovable and admirable in the typical Irishman. A study of the character of two gifted brothers, so like and yet so unlike, would have been of deep interest even if it had been the will of Providence that they should have lived and died, as their grandfather had lived and died before them, amidst the petty interests and the monoto- nous routine of the quiet town of Coleraine. But this was not to be. In the strange vicissitudes of human fortune, the two brothers differing widely as they did in aptitudes and tempera- ment, and separated from each other in very early life, were brought together again in India: the one from the Army, the other from the Civil Service, to sit at the same Council Board, and to rule in concert that huge and warlike province which a year or two before had seemed to threaten the very existence of our Indian Empire. They were to rule that huge province, in spite of their mutual differences, with unbroken success. When at last the differences became unbearable, like the patri- arch of old and his younger relative, they were to ‘ agree to dif- fer,’ each going on his different path, but still united, each to each, in their purity of purpose, in their simplicity of charac- ter, and in their love for the people of India ; each appreciating the other’s gifts, each doing full justice to the other’s aims, and each retaining, as it will be my happiness to show, in spite of many heartburnings, his brotherly affection for the other to the very end. 1811-29 EARLY LIFE. 3 Each was to be called off in a measure, or for the time, from his proper calling. The elder brother, the ardent artilleryman, was in comparatively early life to drop the soldier and to take to civil work, and after living to be named, should he survive Lord Canning, the provisional Governor-General of India, was destined, while defending against desperate odds the capital of his province, to die at last a soldier’s death, beloved as no Eng- lishman in India has been beloved before or since. The younger brother, who had been born a soldier, but whom Providence or Fate had willed should be a civilian, was destined, during his brilliant government of the Punjab, to do more in the hour of our utmost peril than any mere soldier conld have done, to tell some of the bravest generals that what they thought impossible he would make possible ; to call forth armed men, as it were, by thousands from the ground, and to launch them, one after the other, at that distant spot where his insight told him that an empire must be lost or won ; then to rule the empire he had done so much to save ; and, last of all, tov die in ripe old age, surrounded by those most dear to him, and to be buried, amidst the regrets of a nation, in West- minster Abbey, honoured, perhaps, as no Anglo-Indian has be- fore been honoured ; a man who never swam with the stream, who bravely strove to stem the current, and regardless alike of popular and of aristocratic favour, pleaded with his latest breath for what he thought to be right and just. To the biography of men whose lives have been so strangely chequered, of men who have not so much made history as become, as it were, a history in themselves, belongs of inherent right the highest interest and importance alike of history and of biography. The life of Henry Lawrence has been long since written, in the greater part at least, by one who knew him well. It has fallen to my lot, under disadvantages which neither I nor my readers are likely to undervalue, to attempt the biography of John Lawrence. During the more eventful period of Lord Lawrence’s life, I knew him only as most Englishmen know him now, from his deeds. But during his last few years it was my happiness to know him well ; and I am speaking the simple truth when I say that, to converse with a man who had done such deeds, and yet seemed so utterly unconscious of them ; who had such vast stores of Indian knowledge, and yet gave them forth as though he were a learner rather than a teacher ; who was brave and strong and rough as a giant, but tender as a 4 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 woman and simple as a child, seemed to me then, and seems still, to have been a privilege for which, if one was not a great deal the better, one would deserve to be a great deal the worse. If I am able to describe John Lawrence in any degree as I have often seen him, and as I trust a careful study of his voluminous correspondence, and the help given freely to me in conversation by his relations, his friends, and his opponents, have revealed him to me, I shall not have written in vain. With greater skill, with much greater knowledge, his biography might undoubtedly have been writen by one and by another who, unlike myself, had known him throughout his life, and who have perhaps a knowledge of India only less than John Lawrence himself ; but I venture to think that it could scarcely have been written by any one with a keener sense of responsibility or with a more genuine enthusiasm. And here, once for all, let me remark, and then I will, as far as possible, dismiss the biographer to the place which, in any good biography, he ought to hold, that the spirit in which I have endeavoured to study my subject is not the spirit of one who fears the simple truth. John Lawrence was nothing if he was not truthful ; he was transparent as the day, and my high- est aim has been to render to so ‘heroically simple ’ a character that homage which is its due — the homage of unalloyed truth. So far as I have been able to avoid it, I have toned down nothing ; I have exhibited his character in all its lights and shades. The life of Lord Lawrence could not have been lived by any such perfect, by any such unexceptionable, I might add by any such insipid characters, as it is the delight of many biog- raphers to portray. If it be true, as one who was not likely to feel much sympathy for Lord Lawrence’s character has observed, that ‘great revolutions are not made by greased cartridges,’ much less is it true that John Lawrence could have done one half of what he did had he regulated his life by conventional standards, or had he known how to adapt his opinions and his practices to those which were most in favour at the hour. If John Lawrence had in his best days the strength and the courage of a giant, happily, for the interest of his biography, he had also something of the rough humour, of the boisterous pranks, of the wild spirit of adventure which we usually associate with the Norwegian Troll. lie always said, as the letters I shall quote will abundantly show, exactly what lie thought. lie al- ways acted — as every action of his life will prove — exactly as i 8 i 1—29 EARLY LIFE. c he spoke. He raised against himself, as every strong ruler, as every vigorous reformer, as every great man must inevitably do, not a few enemies ; he attached to himself by the self-same processes, and for the self-same reasons, troops of most devoted and most loyal friends. Those, then, who would see John Lawrence not as he was, but as perchance they think he ought to have been, must go elsewhere. The rugged lineaments and the deep furrows of his grand countenance — For his face Deep scars of thunder had entrenched, and care Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows Of dauntless courage — are a picture, which he who runs may read, of the grand and rugged character which lay beneath it, and which it has been my highest aim to strive faithfully to reproduce. The father of John Lawrence was just such a man, and had lived just such a life as might have been expected of the father of such a son. His life had been one continuous struggle with an unkind fate. Hairbreadth escapes, moving accidents by flood and field ; brave deeds innumerable, often handsomely acknowledged by his superiors, but requited scantily or not at all ; the seeds of disease sown by exposure and by his many wounds ; the prolonged pinch of poverty ; a keen sense of slighted merit, and a spirit naturally proud yet compelled to stoop to ask as a favour what he felt to be his right, and to remind his employers of deserts of which they should rather have been the first to remind him : these and other elements of the kind go to make up the tragedy of his hard and weather- beaten life. He was fortunate in one thing only, that he had sons whose deeds were destined to be better requited than his had been, and whose lives, enshrined in the memories of their grateful countrymen, have compelled, and, it may be, will to all future time compel them, to enquire what manner of man was the father from whom they came. Sir Herbert Edwardes, in his life of Sir Henry Lawrence, has preserved the long roll of Alexander Lawrence’s services, recorded chiefly by his own indignant pen. It is unnecessary, therefore,' here to do more than glance at them. Left an orphan at the early age of ten to the care of his sisters at Coleraine, Alexander Lawrence, impatient of restraint and 6 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 athirst for adventure, went off in his seventeenth year, without a commission, as a volunteer to India. It was four full years before he was allowed to purchase the commission which his merits had long since won. For in those four years he had managed to see as much active service in the field, and to receive as many hard knocks as would have entitled him, now- adays, to hasten home to receive a dozen swords of honour, and a dozen addresses of congratulation at a dozen public din- ners. As a lieutenant he fought and distinguished himself near Seringapatam, at Cochin, and at Colombo, at the Canote river, and in the battle of Sedaseer. Finally, at the famous storming of Seringapatam, he had a full opportunity of showing the stuff of which he was made. On May 4, 1799, he volunteered with three other lieutenants to lead the forlorn hope at the storming of Tippu Sultan’s fa- mous capital. Of these four he was the one survivor, and it was not his fault that he was so. When he reached the top of the glacis he received a ball in his arm, which he carried with him to his grave. But observing that his men were standing still to form and fire wThen they ought to have been rushing in, he ran forward, wounded as he was, ‘ from right to left of the rear rank of the forlorn hope hurrahing to them to move on.’ When this had no effect, he ran through their files to the front, calling out, ‘Now is the time for the breach!’ On reaching the foot of the breach he received a second ball, which carried off one finger, and shattered another into several pieces, but even so he did not give in till he had seen his men carry the breach. Then, fainting from loss of blood, he fell down where he was and lay scarcely sensible, under the fiery mid-day sun of May, till one of the soldiers of his own regiment, when the fight- ing was over, came strolling over the spot, and, recognising the uniform on what he supposed to be a dead officer, turned his body over. Seeing who it was, and observing that there was some life ‘ in the old dog yet,’ he carried him off as best he could on his shoulders to the camp, swearing as he toiled along that he would not do as much for any other man of them.1 It is unnecessary to follow further his military career. In one of his earlier campaigns by lying on the wet ground at night he had caught a fever, which gave him at intervals throughout the rest of his life many rough reminders ; and in > Life of Sir Henry Lawrence, by Sir Herbert Edwardes, vol. i. pp. 4-6. 8i 1—29 EARLY LIFE. 7 1809 he returned to England after fifteen years’ hard service, broken down in health and still only a regimental captain. His merits procured him one or two appointments in England, and as Lieutenant-Colonel of a veteran battalion at Ostend in 1815 he must have been within earshot of the cannonade at Waterloo, a privilege exasperating enough to the man who had stormed the breach at Seringapatam, and now in vain petitioned to be sent to the front. When at last he was driven to sell his commission for fear that, if he died, as then seemed likely, the price of it— the only worldly property he possessed — would be lost to his family, he obtained a pension of 100/. a year for his wounds, a pittance which, as he grimly remarked, would do little more than pay his doctors ! This pension, it is pleasant or painful to add, was, not without frequent petitions from himself, afterwards considerably increased, and the old hero did not die until he had sent forth in succession five sons, all of the same sterling metal as himself, to the country to which he had given his life. ‘ If you are ever brought before a court-martial, sir,’ he said somewhat sternly to his son George St. Patrick, when leaving England, a man afterwards known to Sikhs and Afghans alike as a model of cool courage and chivalrous honour — ‘ if you are ever brought before a court-martial, sir, never let me see your face again.’ With greater pathos and with equal truth might the tough and travel-worn veteran have addressed each one of his sons as he sent them off to the country which had proved so cruel a step-mother to him, in the words that Virgil puts into the mouth of the Trojan warrior — Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem ; Fortunam ex aliis. One incident only of his life in England requires to be mentioned here. In the year 1809, shortly, that is, after he returned from India, he became Major of his regiment, the 19th Foot, which was then or soon afterwards quartered at the small town of Richmond, in Yorkshire, and it was while he was living here, on March 4, 1811, that John Laird Mair, the sixth of his sons and the eighth of his children, was born. What wonder that some fifty years later, when Sir John Law- rence was returning home after the Mutiny, with his honours thick upon him, thinking, as well he might, that his career was over and that he had earned his repose, he told a trusted friend, 8 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 with a tinge of sadness, that one of his first visits would be to the place which had given him birth ? What wonder either that the accident of his birth at an English town tempted more than one English statesman in the first burst of the national grief at Lord Lawrence’s death to claim the great Scoto-Irish- man as, in part at least, their own, and to point out in eloquent language that he had combined in his person the best social and moral characteristics of the British Islands — Irish boldness, Scotch caution, and English endurance ? But what of John Lawrence’s mother? What was her char- acter, and what share had she in the moulding of her son ? Here again we are not left to surmise or inference alone. For Sir Herbert Edwardes quotes an account of her given him in after years by ‘one of her sons,’ whom I have no hesitation in pronouncing, from internal evidence, to have been John Law- rence himself. ‘I should say,’ he writes, ‘that on the whole we derived most of our metal from our father. Both my father and mother possessed much character. She had great admin- istrative qualities. She kept the family together, and brought us all up on very slender means. She kept the purse, and managed all domestic affairs. . . . When I was coming out to India, my poor old mother made me a speech somewhat to the following effect : — “ I know you don’t like advice, so I will not give you much. But pray recollect two things. Don’t marry a woman who had not a good mother, and don’t be too ready to speak your mind. It was the rock on which your father shipwrecked his prospects.’’ ’ One or two points call for notice here. The mother who spoke thus was a Knox, the daughter of a Donegal clergyman but descended from the Scotch reformer. She prided herself on her descent ; and simple, thrifty, homely, God-fearing as she was, her relation to the reformer was not that of blood alone. She possessed that sound good sense and that steady persever- ance which marks so many of the Scotch settlers in Ulster. If John Lawrence was right in supposing that he owed ‘ most of his metal,’ most, that is, of his courage and his military in- stincts, of his iron resolution, and his love of adventure, to his father, it is probably not less true, whether he knew it or not, that he owed his shrewd common sense, his hatred of ostenta- tion and of extravagance, and the vein of deep religious feel- ing, which displayed itself specially in his later life, but under- lay the whole of it, to his mother. The influence of a mother 8 i 1-29 EARLY LIFE. 9 who could follow uncomplainingly from youth to age the for- tunes or misfortunes of her somewhat impracticable and way- ward husband, who could rear a family of twelve children on the scantiest means, and wandering as she was obliged to wander from place to place, could yet hold them together and give them something in each successive residence which they could look upon as their ‘ home,’ is not to be measured by its immediate or ostensible results. Men rarely understand — per- haps they are incapable of understanding — the amount of pa- tient endurance, the thousand rubs and annoyances, which a long-suffering wife or mother bears, and bears in silence, that the current of the family life may flow smoothly on. When she succeeds, her efforts, as likely as not, pass unnoticed ; they are lost in her success. Nor would she wish it otherwise. Where she fails, as fail sometimes she must, on her falls the blame. But the influence of such a woman is a living influence not- withstanding. It is felt, not seen ; unacknowledged, perhaps, but well understood. It pervades the home life ; nay, when she is removed by death, it is found to have made the home it- self, and it surv ives henceforward as the genuine undercurrent in the lives of all those who have been happy enough to have been brought within its sphere. One such influence — the most sacred and most cherished of all memories — it may have been the lot of one or another among my readers to have known, and some such influence, the same in kind, though not certainly in degree, I gather from the letters which have come into my hands, was that of Letitia Knox. Not that her character was especially lovable or tender, or that the home she made would nowadays be called a genial or a happy home. The domestic management seems to have been hard and unyielding. There were no luxuries ; hardly even were there any of the comforts of life. It could not have been otherwise. The old Colonel’s very select library, consisting chiefly of his Josephus and his Rollin, was not such as to sup- ply food for young minds which were either inquisitive of his- torical fact like that of John, or full of imagination and senti- ment like that of Henry Lawrence. More pleasant than the Colonel’s library must have been the stories of his adventurous life, stories of which John Lawrence tells us that, in the absence of his elder brothers, he was the favoured recipient during his country walks. More pleasant still must have been the nursery, where ‘ old nurse Margaret ’ ventured, in the children’s interest, IO LIFE OE LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 to break the hard-and-fast rules of diet laid down by the higher authorities for the children’s good. Pleasantest of all must have been the gentle influence of that ‘ Aunt Angel ’ who for many years had her home with the Lawrences, and whose room was the favourite resort of the whole family — one of those beautiful spirits which has learned early in life to sacrifice itself, and is able at last to find its own happiness in nothing but in that of others. Portraits of Alexander Lawrence and of his wife still remain, and, apart from the interest attaching to their features as the parents of their children, each has a touch of pathos or romance peculiarly its own. In the miniature of the brave old veteran which belongs to Sir George Lawrence, his eldest surviving son, besides the deep lines on the face which are a distinguishing mark of the Lawrence family and which are now known to the world in the features of the subject of this biography, may be noticed on the right cheek the traces of a deep sabre cut received in one of his earlier engagements, while the mere fragment of a right hand remaining to him recalls the stormer of Seringapatam. The portrait of the mother is larger, and is in the possession of her youngest son, General Richard Lawrence, a man whose promptitude and valour, as I shall hereafter show, did us good service in the Mutiny, alike at Sealcote and at Lahore. Simple in her life, and dependent in her old age upon ‘ the Lawrence fund,’ contributed by her sons, she steadfastly resisted all the entreaties of her family that she would have her portrait taken. Perhaps she thought it a waste of money ; perhaps, in the eyes of a descendant of John Knox, it savoured of vanity or ostenta- tion. But what she declined to do for her children, she was willing and anxious that they should do for her. So the daughter sat down close by her mother’s side. The painter worked away, and the ruse was not discovered till the portrait was well finished, and revealed, to the surprise of the aged mother, the features not of her daughter, but of herself. It was a truly pious fraud, and was duly acquiesced in by the old lady. There she sits bolt upright, facing full the painter or the spec- tator, prim and neat, serious and matter-of-fact, with a high- crowned cap, a wide collar, and a shawl pinned neatly at the shoulders, as was the fashion of her younger days — for she never changed fashion with the changing times — her knitting in her hand, while she herself is absorbed in her work and is iSi 1-29 EARLY LIFE. 1 1 quite unconscious of the fraud that is being played upon her by the man whom she is looking full in the face ! It is almost a truism, that it is a happy thing for all con- cerned if, in a large family of brothers and sisters, a sister hap- pens to be the eldest. If she is worthy of her place, her influ- ence moulds, softens, checks, refines, elevates. She forms a common centre round which the other members of the family revolve. If they are able to agree in little else, they agree in their trust in her. Such was the lot of the Lawrence family. The eldest son died at the age of three years, the very day on which Letitia was born, as though the brother would make room for the sister, and worthily she filled her place. She had the courage and force of command of the most famous of her brothers, but she combined with it much of the tenderness and of the softer and subtler influences of woman. She belonged not to that type of woman, a type all too common, who pride themselves on their influence over men, and, content with it, reserve for their own sex what is unattractive and unlovely. Such a woman would have been as hateful to Letitia herself as to her brothers. Her sisters-in-law, some of whom were women of marked character as well as gifted with rare charms, owned her sway, and grudged not the influence which she retained, as of right, over her brothers to the end. She was the adviser and guide of the whole family. Her will was law, not so much be- cause it was a resolute will as because she never sought her own. To her the strongest-minded of her brothers came for advice, as men came to Ahithophel of old, as though they would ‘inquire of the oracle of God.’ She thus in large measure, as we shall hereafter see, shaped the destinies of her brothers’ lives. In their intercourse with her, their rougher and more tempestuous side seems altogether to have disappeared. They told her every difficulty, shared with her every joy and sorrow, and corresponded with her in the most intimate and unrestrained intercourse until her death. What Henryr Lawrence felt towards her and what her influ- ence over him was like, is apparent to those who have read the letters which passed between them, and which have been quoted so abundantly by Sir Herbert Edwardes. John Lawrence, in like manner, kept up a correspondence with her throughout his life, crammed as it was with multitudinous cares and multi- farious occupations, till death came between them. What he, too, felt towards her is clear from the remark which in the bit- 12 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i 8 i 1-29 terness of his soul was wrung from him when he heard of her death, that he would never have gone to India as Viceroy had he thought that he would never see her again. The letters which passed between him and her, and which up to that time had been religiously preserved by each, were deliberately de- stroyed by the survivor on his return from India. He objected —as who in his heart of hearts does not object ? — to the pub- lication of essentially private letters ; but what the loss has been to the biographer in attempting, with such materials as are at his disposal, to do justice to the inner and gentler side of Lord Lawrence’s character, the few letters to her which have ac- cidentally come into his hands too surely show. Could they have been published with a clear conscience, they would have shown by themselves that John Lawrence was as tender as he was strong. The loss, I repeat, to the biographer is incalcu- lable ; but at least he is saved, in this instance, one of his great- est difficulties — the task of deciding, where the correspondence is so sacred, what he will have the courage to publish or the heart to withhold. Such, in outline, was the home and such the home influences on the Lawrence children. It was a locomotive home enough. Richmond from the year 1809, Guernsey from 1812, Ostend in 1815, and Clifton thenceforward to the old Colonel’s death ; these were the successive headquarters of the family from the time when Alexander Lawrence returned to England from India. In the year 1813 occurred the first considerable break in the family. The three elder sons, Alexander, George, and Henry, were sent off from Guernsey to the ‘ Free Grammar School of Londonderry.’ It was situated within the walls of the famous maiden fortress, close to the side of St. Augustine’s church, and was under the care of their maternal uncle, the Rev. James Knox. It was then in a transition state, for in the following year its governors set an example which the govern- ing bodies of the great schools of London are only just begin- ning to imitate. They authorised its removal from the interior of the city, and with the active assistance of the then Bishop of Uerry, Dr. William Knox, they re-erected it on a much more advantageous site. The spot selected was a hill in the suburbs, commanding a fine view of the historic fortress and of the steep banks and pretty country villas on the other side of the wide ship-traversed river Foyle which flows beneath, and which has since that time i S i 1-29 EARLY LIFE. 13 given to the school the more ambitious name of Foyle College. It was a spot well calculated to stir the generous enthusiasm and the historical sympathies of the boys who were there brought up. But, over and above this, it possessed what must have been a special recommendation in the eyes of the stern old Colonel, in that his sons, being relatives of the head master, would be able to remain there the whole year through. In other words, they were to have no holidays ; and during the years that they remained there, I can find no trace of any unpro- ductive expenditure of time or money on the journeys from Guernsey to Londonderry and back. Here, then, let us leave for the present the three elder broth- ers and see how it was faring meanwhile with their younger brother John. One or two facts only have been preserved about him. His sister Letitia used to relate that her motherly feelings had been first called out towards him from the day on which she found him crying violently and at last discovered that a bit of hot coal had somehow lodged itself between his cheek and his baby cap-strings, and had inflicted a mark upon him which was to last all his life. Another incident has a more melancholy interest when taken in connection with the calamity which befell him in the latter years of his life ; for it was the shadow of his cross that was to be. When he was about five years old he had a bad attack of ophthalmia, which obliged him to be kept in a darkened room for a whole year. He would lie on a sofa, holding the hand of his sister or his nurse Margaret while they read aloud to him. It was their care of him during this period which helped to call forth the devotion he ever afterwards felt for both, and he would often say in his later life that he would be able to recognise any when and anywhere, by its feeling the hand of either of his kind attendants. Some of his earliest recollections were associated with that eventful year which saw the hundred days’ campaign and heard the roar of Waterloo ; and he tells us in a fragment of autobio- graphy which has come into my hands, that being thrown much upon his father’s society owing to the absence of his elder brothers, he used to accompany him in his walks and listen to the stirring tales of his adventurous and ill-requited campaigns. It seems not to have occurred to the disappointed veteran that he might be arousing by these very tales within the boy’s breast military hopes and aspirations which one day he might find it difficult to quench. For he had resolved in the bitterness LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 14 1811-29 of his heart that no son of his, if he could help it, should join the service which had served him so ill. One incident of John Lawrence’s early life connected with his nurse Margaret, whom he loved so tenderly, I am able to relate from the recollection of his youngest daughter Maude, almost in his own words. He was fond of telling it, and few . that ever heard Lord Lawrence tell a story were likely alto- gether to forget it : — One day when I was about four or five years old and was staying with my father and mother at Ostend, my nurse Margaret was sent to market to purchase food for the day. She was sent with a 5/. note, and was ordered to bring back the change. When I heard that my nurse was going to the market, I at once went to my mother to get permission to go with her. I was always fond of going out with her. She used to tell me all kinds of weird stories, which would fill me with a kind of awe for her. So I trotted along by her side, she amusing me as she went along. When we got to the market she purchased several things — at one stall a pair of fowls, at another vegetables, here bread or flour, and there something else necessary for our household. Now it happened that though Margaret had often been there, and was well known, she had never had so much money with her before. This excited suspicion. She could not get her note changed, many people thinking she had not come by it fairly. At last there was a great hubbub, the shop-people accusing her, while she main- tained her innocence. It was finally settled by their taking her before the magistrate to be examined. He asked her who she was, who was her master, and what was her occupation. She was dreadfully confused and frightened, and could hardly say a word. All she could get out was that her master was Colonel Lawrence and that his little boy was with her. On hearing my name, I began to feel very important, and thought I would now come forward and speak up for my nurse, so out I came from behind her — for I had clung to her all the time — and said in as loud a voice as I could manage, ‘ Why, Sir, it’s our old nurse Margaret, she is a very good woman, and all that she says is quite true ; I came to the market with her to buy our food, and papa gave her the money. I think that if you will let her go, you will do right, as my father knows that what I say is quite true.’ The magistrate saw quite clearly now that everything was aboveboard, so we were allowed to go home in peace. He said to me before we went away, ‘ Well done, little man ; you spoke up for your nurse bravely.’ I was tremendously stuck up by this, and walked home with my nurse, feeling immensely important and thinking that I must now take care of Margaret, and not she of me. When the three elder brothers left Foyle in 1819, John was brought for the first time into the society of his brother Henry, that brother whose life and character were to be so closely con- iSii-29 EARLY LIFE. 15 nected and vet to form so strong a contrast to his own. They went together to a Mr. Gough’s school at College Green, Bristol. It was a day school, and John, ‘ a little urchin,’ as he describes himself, ‘ of eight,’ used to trudge along four times a day with unequal steps by the side of his brother Henry, ‘a bony power- ful boy’ of thirteen, over the hill which separates Clifton and Bristol. His sister recollects how, tired out by his walks and his work, he used to lie at night at full length upon the hearth- rug preparing his lessons for the following day. One reminis- cence of these school-days has already been quoted by Sir Her- bert Edwardes in John Lawrence’s own words, but it is too authentic a record not to find a place again here : — I remember, when we were both at school at Bristol, there was a poor Irish usher named O’Flaherty, and he had done something to offend the master of the school, who called up all the boys and got on the table and made us a great speech, in which he denounced poor O’Flaherty as ‘ a viper he had been harbouring in his bosom ; ’ and he also denounced some one of the boys who had taken O’Flaherty’s part as ‘ an assassin who had deeply wounded him ! ’ I was a little chap then, eight years old, and I did not understand what it was all about ; but as I trotted home with Henry, who was then fourteen, I looked up and asked who the ‘ assassin ’ was who had * wounded ’ the master. Henry very quietly replied, ‘ I am the assassin.’ I remember, too, in connection with this very same row, seeing Henry get up very early one morning (we slept in the same room) and I asked where he was going. He said to Bran- don Hill to fight Thomas. Thomas was the bully of the school. I asked if I might go with him, and he said, ‘ Yes, if you like.’ I said, ‘ Who is to be your second ? ’ Henry said, * You, if you like.’ So off we went to Brandon Hill to meet Thomas, but Thomas never came to the rendez- vous and we returned with flying colours, and Thomas had to eat humble pie in the school. Henry was naturally a bony muscular fellow, very- powerful ; but that fever in Burmah seemed to scorch him up, and he remained all the rest of his life very thin and attenuated. At such a school, discipline was not likely to be of the mildest kind, and the birch was probably the only instrument of moral suasion recognised. At all events, years afterwards, when some one asked Lord Lawrence whether there had been much flog- ging at his school, he replied, with grim satisfaction and Spar- tan brevity — and I have pretty well ascertained by the ex- haustive method that the school must have been, not Foyle or Wraxall, but College Green — ‘ I was flogged every day of my life at school except one, and then I was flogged twice.’ 1 6 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 The time came for him to pass to a milder rule, and in 1823, being then twelve years of age, he was transferred to his uncle’s care at Foyle. For two centuries past, this school had been to the North of Ireland much what Tiverton was for two centuries to Devonshire and Cornwall ; a school, that is, which gave a good, but hardly a first-rate, education to the sons of the sur- rounding gentry ; and if, as I have already remarked, the site itself was calculated to stimulate the energies of the boys of the Lawrence generation, how much more ought the brilliant careers of those who were boys together then to stimulate those of the present day ! Strange that a small school in the North of Ireland should have contained, within a period of a few years only, those who were to do such good service to the State in war and in peace as Lord Gough, the bravest of soldiers and most reckless of generals, the man who claimed the most doubt- ful of victories at Chillianwallah and gained a crowning one at Gujerat ; as Sir George Lawrence, the lion-hearted and chival- rous prisoner of Afghan and Sikh ; as Sir Henry Lawrence, as Sir John Lawrence, as Sir Robert Montgomery ! Stranger still that the last three of these men should have lived to rule the Punjab in concert, and play by universal consent a foremost part in that struggle of heroes which saved our Indian Em- pire ! I cannot find by careful inquiry among the few schoolfellows of John Lawrence who have survived him that, even now, looking back in the light of all that he has done, they saw, or think that they saw, any promise of his future eminence. He cast no shadow before him. Robert Montgomery then, as ever afterwards — at Wraxall, in India, and in South Kensington — his intimate friend and companion, only recollects that he was ‘determined and quick-tempered, and that in their walks to- gether he used to entertain him with long stories of sieges and battles.’ As a boy and as a young man he read, as he said himself, ‘ much history and biography in a rather desultory way ; ’ and it is to this kind of reading that, man of action as he was throughout his life, he owed such traces of culture as he possessed or would ever have cared to claim. 1 1 is life from the time that he set foot in India left no room at all for that leisure which is the necessary condition of high culture. But, remembering how crammed was his life with action, his his- torical knowledge was remarkable. He was accurately ac- quainted with the campaigns of the leading generals of ancient EARLY LIFE. 1 7 1S1 1-29 v and modern times, and he could discuss them alike with the wide sweep of a theorist and with all the minute knowledge of a specialist. I well remember, shortly before his death, being struck with the minute knowledge he showed in a casual con- versation on a period of ancient history — the campaigns of Hannibal — of which I had just then been making a special study. Plutarch’s ‘ Lives ’ were always in his hands at school and at home, and in after life he used to say, half humorously, half seriously, that when he was in doubt in any difficult matter he would turn over its pages till he came to some suggestive passage. And these ‘ sortes Plutarchianae ’ seem to have been on one or two critical occasions of at least as much practical service as were the ‘ sortes Virgil ianae ’ to the scholar of the Middle Ages, or the haphazard opening of the Bible to the un- lettered Christian of to-day. But I am anticipating. In any case, what an admirable hunting-ground would Lon- donderry and its neighbourhood be to a boy who was fond of history, or who had any military instincts. To roam along the ramparts of the heroic city amidst the quaint old culverins which, when the ammunition was exhausted, hurled bricks covered with lead against the foe ; to visit the cathedral, crammed as it is with relics and trophies of the siege ; to climb its tower, whence the sentries peered with hungry eyes for those distant sails far down the Foyle which were to bring the promised aid, and which, when they at length ap- peared, did so only to disappear again ; to row to the spot where once frowned the terrible boom, which the ‘ Mountjoy’ and the ‘ Phoenix ’ forced at last, bringing to the starving garrison food which they could hardly stagger forth to grasp in their skeleton fingers ; to stand in the pulpit where Ezekiel Hopkins, the craven bishop, preached submission to the powers that be, and George Walker, the patriot hero, thundered resist- ance to the death ; to pass through the gate which the traitor Lundy would have thrown open, and to visit the spot whence, Judas-like, when he was detected, he slunk down the wall into the outer darkness ; to join the ’prentice-boys when they celebrate their feast of Purim, and still hang in effigy the Haman of their race and creed ; — all this would invest with something of histori- cal romance the everyday life of even the most matter-of-fact boys at school, even as, to this day, it kindles into wild enthusi- asm the sober-minded Puritans of the surrounding country. The sports of the boys at Foyle College partook of the spirit- Vol. I 2 i8 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 stirring and heroic character of their surroundings. There were about a hundred boys in the school, the boarders being chiefly the sons of the clergy and gentry of the adjoining coun- ties ; the day scholars the sons of the citizens of Derry. The broad distinction often drawn by boys themselves between boarders and day scholars was emphasised at Foyle by a mimic warfare, carried on sometimes in the shape of single combats between champions representative of each party, sometimes between the collective forces of the whole. Here is an account of one of these Homeric combats, which I give almost in the words of Dr. Kennedy, a contemporary and brother-in-law of John Lawrence, who bore, as we shall see, no small part in it. A fortress had been constructed of stiff clay by the boarders on a hillock in a field behind the school. This fortress was regularly manned and relieved at six hours’ interval through- out the day and night. The night operations were hazardous in more ways than one, for the relieving force had first to es- cape the notice of the masters as they crept surreptitiously out of the windows of the school-house. The day boys, on their part, would sometimes rise from their beds in a body in the middle of the night and march rapidly from Derry to the assault. Many a fierce onslaught and stubborn defence (says Dr. Kennedy) did our fortress witness beneath the light of the moon and stars. The weapons in use on these occasions were, happily, not shelalahs, but cauliflower-stalks or, as we used to call them, * kale runts ’ — no bad sub- stitute for shelalahs, when held by the lighter end and swung by a power- ful arm. Nor let it be imagined that there was not a fair proportion of casualties, and that the list of wounded was not sufficiently imposing. My own career was cut short for a time, and very nearly for all time, in one of these engagements. During a brilliant sally with my comrades from the fortress, my retreat was cut off, and I found myself resisting in a hand-to-hand combat two fellows each a head taller than myself. I had managed to reach the top of a high fence which gave me a great ad- vantage, but behind me was a perpendicular fall of twelve feet on to a road. They called on me to surrender at discretion ; my answer was a blow with my kale runt on the head of one of my assailants. His com- panion caught me off my guard, and dealt me a blow on my legs which hurled me headlong on the road below. I had not then learned the knack of falling on my shoulders, and my skull came first in contact with the road. Fortunately it was equal to the occasion, and as to my neck, as my assailant remarked when I had recovered, it was not to be broken , it was reserved for a different fate. I escaped with a severe -con- cussion of the brain. 8i 1-29 EARLY LIFE. 19 Such were the amusements which nerved the courage and braced the sinews of the Lawrence generation. It is illustrative of a savagery in schoolboy nature which has now nearly passed away, as well as of that mixture of na- tional characteristics in John Lawrence to which I have already alluded, that on his first going to his English school at Clifton he was nicknamed ‘ Paddy,’ and received many kicks as being an Irishman ; while, on being transferred to his Irish school at Foyle, he was nicknamed ‘ English John,’ and received many, probably a good many more, kicks, as being an Englishman. What the character of the education at Foyle College was like we are left to judge by the results, and by casual remarks in after life of the two brothers. That it was not a first-rate education is probable enough. ‘For my part,’ says Sir Henry Lawrence, ‘my education consisted in kicks: I was never taught anything.’ But boys are often apt in perfect good faith to attribute to their school what is due, in part at least, to their own shortcomings. John Lawrence, in the fragment of auto- biography already cpioted, probably states the case with greater fairness thus : ‘ At school and at college I did not work regu- larly and continuously, and did not avail myself of the oppor- tunities which offered for securing a good education. But I worked by fits and starts. . . . When I went to college (Hailey- bury) I was a fair Latin and mathematical scholar, and a poor Greek one ; but I had read a great deal in a desultory fashion, particularly of history and biography, and was generally, for my age, well-informed.’ The religious training was more persistent than judicious. A kind-hearted sister of the head master used to take this part of the education under her special charge, and would send for the boys one by one from their pi a)', every two or three days, that she might read and pray with them. The Lawrences, being nephews as well as pupils, got a double share of these atten- tions, and Sir Robert Montgomery well remembers how they used to slink by their aunt’s room on tiptoe in hopes of escap- ing. It was a hope often disappointed ; for the door would open on a sudden and the vigilant aunt carry them off in triumph to her lecture. It is appalling to think of the concentrated bat- teries that must have been brought to bear upon their devoted heads during holiday time. If the seeds of John Lawrence’s deep religious convictions were sown now, it is certain that they long lay dormant, and it 20 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 is probable that it was to a reaction from the forcing system of Foyle College that was due the most striking characteristic of his religious belief — its reserve and its unobtrusiveness. He never talked of religion, hardly ever said a word that was dis- tinctly religious even to his intimate friends and relations. Yet everybody knew it was there. Levity and irreligion stood abashed in his presence. His religion seemed to be too sacred and too simple to admit of handling in common talk. It was a plant with roots so deep and so tender that he would not al- low himself, still less anyone else, to pluck it up to see how it was growing. In 1825 John Lawrence left Foyle, and went to finish the first part of his education at Wraxall Hall, a large rambling Eliza- bethan house in North Wiltshire, about six miles from Bath, which, with its inner court, its orchard, and several large gar- dens attached to it, gave ample room for the amusement of its inmates. Robert Montgomery, John Lawrence’s fidus Achates , and one or two other Irish boys, accompanied him thither. And from a conversation which I have had with one of his few surviving contemporaries — Mr. Wellington Cooper of Lincoln’s Inn — I recall the following: — John Lawrence was tall and overgrown ; I was much struck by the angular formation of his face. He was rough but kindly ; hot-tempered but good-natured withal. We had a rough enough life of it at school ; our bedrooms were so cold that the water used to freeze hard in the basins, and the doctor used to remark that it was no wonder that we were all in such good health, for every room had a draught in it. This was true enough. The window-frames of our bedroom were of stone, and an iron bar across the centre was supposed to prevent ingress or egress. Lawrence managed to loosen it so that it could be taken out and replaced without attracting observation, and when the nights were hot he would creep through it in his night-shirt and, reaching the ground by the help of a pear-tree which grew against the wall, would go and bathe in the neighbouring stream. We were fast friends, and in the kindness of his heart he would have done anything for me. I was very fond of bird-nesting. A swallow had built its nest at the top of our chimney, and I expressed a wish to get at it. ‘ I’ll get the eggs for you,’ said John, and went straight to the chimney, and began to climb up it inside. It soon became too narrow for his burly frame. ‘ Never mind, I’ll get them yet,’ he said, and at once went to the window. I and my brother followed him through it, and, climbing a wall twelve feet high, which came out from one end of the house and formed one side of the court, pushed him up from its summit as far as we could reach towards iS i 1—29 EARLY LIFE. 21 the roof. He was in his night-shirt, with bare feet and legs ; but, avail- ing himself of any coign of vantage that he could find, he actually man- aged to climb up the wall of the house by himself. When he reached the roof, he crawled up the coping stones at the side on his knees, and then began to make his way along the ridge towards the chimney ; but the pain by this time became too great for human endurance : ‘ Hang it all,’ he cried, ‘ I can’t go on ! ’ and he had to give it up. The amusements at Wraxall were very different from those at Foyle. There was little fighting and little cricket. Marbles, prisoner’s base, and kite-flying were our chief recreations. Lawrence was good at mar- bles and prisoner’s base, in which latter game he used often to over- balance himself, much to our amusement. We had a big kite which it would take five or six boys to hold ; there was a large chain on the door of the vast range of old stables, which no one of us could hold out at length. The kite was attached to this chain and would sometimes keep it taut for hours together. The kindness of heart which I remember in John Lawrence at school was vividly recalled to me by an anecdote I heard of him in much later life. A governess who was taking charge of his nieces at Southgate heard that her sister, who was in poor circum- stances, was ill in Paris with no one to look after her. Sir John at once wrote to the chaplain at the English Embassy to ask him to find her out, to transfer her to more comfortable quarters and see that she had the best medical aid, at his expense. Another Wraxall schoolfellow, the Rev. F. B. Ashley, vicar of Woburn, Buckinghamshire, adds one or two touches which should be preserved. Soon after Lawrence reached Wraxall he and I became great friends ; and when it was decided that I was to go to India, which was his desti- nation also, and we were given the same work, our friendship deepened and we became sworn allies. He was naturally taciturn, and I was equally so ; consequently we thought more than talked together. Once I remember his coming to me with that grand brow of his knit with the deepest indignation, and saying that the master had suspected him of something gross. I saw how the matter stood, and said, ‘ You are in- nocent, but nothing can be done except to hold up your head and show you are incapable of such baseness.’ My intercourse with him was a happy period of my schoolboy life. His family had come to live at Clifton, my native place, and w'e were always together in the holidays. One day we had a narrow escape. We were taking a walk in holiday time beyond the hot wells at Clifton, under the rocks, in the winter. When we reached St. Vincent’s, where is now the suspension bridge, we were seized with the rather mad idea of climbing to the top. The ground 22 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 was covered with two or three inches of snow, and before we got very far our hands became painfully cold as we grasped at the rocks and tufts of grass in the crevices. Soon they were quite benumbed. We tried to look back, but it was impossible to return. We glanced at each other and then made a vigorous push for it, continually lookUig to see if we had hold, for we could feel nothing, our hands being completely numbed. We arrived somehow at the top, gave rather a solemn look at each other, and without making a single remark proceeded on our walk. The boy who thus held his tongue and thought in silence was the ‘ father of the man ’ who, as we shall see hereafter, when a telegram arrived reporting the outbreak of the Mutiny, spoke not a word either then or on the whole of that day to the friend and high official who was with him, but consumed his own thoughts in silence, estimating the full gravity of the crisis and pondering the methods by which he could meet and overcome it. In 1827 came the turning point of John Lawrence’s life. John Hudlestone, an old friend of the family who had risen to high office in the Madras Presidency, had, on his return to England, become a director of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament, and the influence and patronage which he thus acquired he used with a single eye for the benefit of those among whom the best years of his life had been passed. For two services in particular his name deserves to be grate- fully remembered amongst them. It may perhaps be ques- tioned which was the greater of the two. By his exertions in Parliament and elsewhere he did much to prepare the way for the abolition of suttee by Lord William Bentinck, and he seat the Lawrences to India. The three elder brothers, Alexander, George, and Henry, had already received from him appointments in the Indian army and had gone off to India, the two former in the cavalry, the latter, for fear lest it should be said that no Lawrence could pass for the artillery, in the more scientific branch of the service. It was now John’s turn, but, to his surprise and dis- gust, the appointment offered to him was an appointment not in the army, but in the Indian Civil Service. His father had been a soldier before him, so were his three elder brothers. The stories of his father’s campaigns to which he had listened, the books of travel and of history which he had read, the asso- ciations of his Londonderry school, — all had combined to fill his mind with military aspirations, and now he would go to i S i 1-29 EARLY LIFE. 23 India as a soldier or not go at all. In vain did his father point to his scars and talk of his hard service and his scanty pension. In vain did Henry Lawrence, who had just returned from India invalided from the First Burmese war, and disgusted, like most young officers of his energy and capacity, with the incapacity and the red-tapeism which seemed to block the way, appeal to arguments which were likely to be of more weight in his broth- er’s eyes — the greater field for ability, for vigour, and for use- fulness which the Civil Service afforded. John Lawrence stood firm ; and had there not been an influence at home more powerful than that of either his father or brother, it is likely that he would have stuck to his determination to the end, and India, when the time came, if she had gained a great general, would have lost a still greater ruler. How the matter ended I am able to relate in the words of an eyewitness, one of the earliest and latest friends of the Lawrences, who happened to be staying at Clifton when the knotty question had to be decided. The testimony which she gives incidentally to that paramount influence which now and through all John Lawrence’s life moulded and stimulated him, will be observed. John Lawrence’s eldest sister (says Mrs. B ) was an extraordinary woman : strong of mind and of will, quick in apprehension, yet sound and sober in judgment, refined and cultured, with a passionate enthusi- asm for all that was 4 pure and lovely, and of good report.’ In a word, hers was a nature possessed by the highest qualities of her soldier brothers, in combination with feminine gentleness and goodness. She had enjoyed varied advantages in the society in which her lot was oc- casionally cast. At the house of Mr. Hudlestone, among other distin- guished men, she had often met Wilberforce and the Thorntons, and had quietly drunk in their wit and conversation from the sofa to which, as an invalid, she was long confined. Perhaps her brother Henry, who more nearly resembled her in character and disposition, was most amen- able to her influence; but John, too, though the greater independence of character manifested in his after life was early developed, cherished what might be called without exaggeration a boundless reverence for all she said and thought. In the present stern conflict between duty and inclination the family ‘ oracle ’ was lovingly resorted to. The scene in Letitia’s room can never be forgotten by those who witnessed it. It may have been the crisis in John’s life. He was seated at the foot of the in- valid’s couch in earnest debate about the perplexing gift. With all the vehemence of his ardent boy nature, as if to leave no doubt as to his own decided prepossessions, and perhaps with a bold effort to win the 24 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1811-29 assent which he felt to be indispensable, he exclaimed, f A soldier I was born, and a soldier I will be ! ’ The prudent counsellor, however, ad- vised differently. She urged him without hesitation to accept the boon, as affording in every way advantages unknown to the military life. Other influences no doubt conspired with hers to induce him to make what was to his own personal feelings and aspirations a great self-sacri- fice, but it was to Letitia’s calm advice and good judgment that he reluctantly but bravely yielded. She may be said indeed to have turned the scales, and thus in a measure determined an illustrious future. To Haileybury accordingly John Lawrence went, while Ashley, his Wraxall friend, had to go to Addiscombe without him. The East India College at Haileybury, whatever may have been its shortcomings, did a noble work in its day, and one for which, as it appears to me, no adequate substitute has yet been found. It gave an esprit de corps, and a unity of pur- pose, it laid the foundations of lasting friendships, and stimu- lated a generous ambition among those who were about to be engaged in one of the grandest tasks which has fallen to the youth of any country or any age. It was then in good hands. Dr. Joseph Hallet Batten, Fellow of Trinity College, Cam- bridge, and an excellent classical scholar, as well as a high wrangler, was the Principal, and with him worked an able staff of professors. Among them were the Rev. C. W. Le Bas, who was dean and professor of mathematics ; the Rev. Henry Walter, who had been second wrangler, professor of natural history and chemistry, one of the cleverest and most genial of men ; W. Empson, who had lately succeeded Sir James Mackintosh in the professorship of law, and was afterwards to become son-in-law to Francis Jeffrey, and editor of the ‘ Edinburgh Review ; ’ and the Rev. T. R. Malthus, the cele- brated political economist, who was professor of that science and also of history. Among the Oriental staff, to whom the students were indebted for such knowledge of Arabic, Sanscrit, Persian, Hindustani, Bengali, Telegu, as they could pick up in the scanty time afforded for the learning of those languages, should be specially mentioned Mirza Ibrahim, an accomplished scholar, and in every point of view a remarkable man. It will readily be believed that so distinguished a staff of professors drew to Haileybury as visitors some of the best known men in the country, and the house of Malthus in parti- cular was the resort of philosophers and statesmen from all parts of Europe. On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that i 8 i 1—29 EARLY LIFE. 25 the professional staff was too good for the material on which it had to work — youths of from sixteen to eighteen years of age. They sometimes lectured over their pupils’ heads, and in India it was a common remark among thinking civilians that the Haileybury course would have been as invaluable as it would have been eagerly sought after, if it only could have been offered to them at a later period of their career. John’s elder brother, Henry, accompanied him with parental care on his first visit to the College, on July 22, 1827, and, anxious and energetic as usual, walked up and down the library with him, busily explaining some rather recondite matters which he thought might be useful in the impending exami- nation. But John was less eager to receive than Henry to impart information, and an anxious parent, observing what was passing, begged Henry to transfer his attentions to his son. Henry complied ; the questions which he discussed were duly asked in the papers which followed, and to the help thus given his grateful pupil attributed his success in the ex- amination. John, on his part, took a fairly good place, but nothing more. At that time the demand in India for young civilians was so great that the usual period of residence at Haileybury — four terms, or two years — was reduced by half, or even more, pro- vided the candidate was eighteen years of age, and was able to pass the necessary examinations with distinction. This latter condition John was able to fulfil at the end of his first year; but being only seventeen, he was compelled to remain at Hailey- bury a second year, and to see some twenty of his contempo- raries pass out before him. During these two years he was ‘ neither very idle nor very industrious.’ He managed to gain some prizes and medals, but not in such numbers as to attract the attention of those about him, or in any way to indicate his brilliant future. In his second term he carried off the prize for history and another for his knowledge of Bengali. In his third term he won another prize for Bengali, and was second in political economy. In his fourth and last term he gained a third prize for Bengali — a language of which the future Pun- jabi was not destined to make much use — and the gold medal for law. The highest immediate aim of an industrious and ambitious Haileybury student was to pass out the first of his term to his own presidency, a distinction gained by Charles Trevelyan about two years before. John Lawrence passed out 26 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1S1 1-29 third for Bengal, a position with which his friends and he him- self were well satisfied. Among the more distinguished of his contemporaries at Haileybury were John Thornton, afterwards well known as secretary to James Thomason, the eminent Lieutenant-Gov- ernor of the North-West Provinces ; Edward Thornton, his brother, who was afterwards one of the ablest lieutenants of John Lawrence in the Punjab and was brought into the closest contact with him in the most critical period of his life, the dark days of 1857 ; Michael P. Edgeworth, also a Punjab Commis- sioner ; Martin Gubbins, the well-known Commissioner of Oude ; William Frere, who rose to be Member of the Bombay Council ; John Muir, who at an early age succeeded in winning a European reputation as a profound Sanscrit scholar ; Donald McLeod, one of Lawrence’s most trusted assistants in the Pun- jab, and one of his dearest friends ; and, finally, J. II. Batten, son of the Principal, and afterwards well-known as Commis- sioner of Kumaon. Batten entered Haileybury on the same day as John Lawrence ; it was to him that John Lawrence specially applied his familiar term of ‘ comrade,’ and it is to his aid that I am indebted for many of the details which I am able to give of the Haileybury of that day. There were few among those whose names I have mentioned who did not seem likely to distinguish themselves in India at least as much as John Lawrence. It is significant of the rather faint impression which he managed to make upon his contem- poraries that the one fact which Edward Thornton is able to recall about him is his having often seen his somewhat remark- able form planted in the centre of the doorway leading from the quadrangle into the reading-room — a fact which he charit- ably inclines to interpret as implying that John Lawrence fre- quented the reading-room rather than the playing-ground. And it is, perhaps, more characteristic, and certainly more amusing, to hear that Batten, having struck up a friendship with the future Governor-General, was often told by his father, the Principal, that he was sorry to see him ‘ loafing about with that tall Irishman instead of sticking to the more regular stu- dents.’ The pressure put upon those who were not disposed to work on their own account was never great. Lectures were over at one p.m., and the rest of the day was entirely at the disposal of the students. The college was situated in the midst of an open 1 8 1 1—29 EARLY LIFE. 27 heath where fine air was to be had for the asking. It was a country where it ‘ seemed always afternoon’ — ‘a place,’ says Sir Charles Trevelyan, ‘ eminently suited for roaming and saun- tering,’ an occupation which seems to have fallen in with John Lawrence’s tastes, but was often varied by visits, which were neither allowed nor forbidden, to the three neighbouring towns of Hertford, Ware, and Hoddesden, which unfortunately lay at an equal and easy distance from the college. Of John Law- rence’s general characteristics and mode of life under such circumstances I am able to give a good notion in the words of his friend J. H. Batten. John Lawrence was in appearance rugged and uncouth, but his tall gaunt figure was sufficiently set off by an intelligent face and by his high good humour. He did not much affect general society ; and though, like others, he sometimes ‘ rode in the dilly’ to Ware or Hertford, he on the whole preferred mooning about the quadrangle and the reading- room, or wandering over the wild neighbouring heath, not uncommonly varying the game of fives at the college racquet-court by one of skittles or bowls or quoits behind the ‘ College Arms,’ and the bad beer pro- cured at this and neighbouring hostels was often recalled, not without regret, in after life by the exiles of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. Law- rence at that time displayed a good deal of the Irish element, and he with his intimate friend Charles Todd — who died after a short career in India — first initiated me into the mysteries sacred to St. Patrick’s Day, Hallowe’en, the glorious, pious, and immortal memory of King William, the ’prentice-boys of Derry, etc. By a stupid and inexcusable failure in Bengali, I managed to come out only sixth in my last term, while Law- rence was third. But it was a failure which enables me to record a characteristic anecdote. On that great final day of our Collegiate ca- reer, the 28th of May, 1829, my father, the Principal, was in high good humour, for in spite of the disaster just described, I had delivered be- fore a rather brilliant audience in the Hall a prize essay on ‘ The Power of the Romans in the West compared with the British in the East ; ’ and going up with pretended anger to John Lawrence, he said good humour- edly, ‘Oh, you rascal, you have got out ahead of my son ; ’ to which with ready wit Lawrence replied, ‘ Ah, Dr. Batten, you see it’s all con- duct j I.fear Hallet has not been quite so steady as I ; ’ thus turning the tables on the Principal, who, to Lawrence’s knowledge, had more than once remonstrated on my ‘ loafing about with that tall Irishman.’ This brings me to another anecdote. When I was at home on fur- lough during what turned out to be the Mutiny year (1857), I went to Brighton to pay my respects to Mr. Le Bas, who had long since retired from the Haileybury Principalship, in which he succeeded my father. Those who knew the man, with his sharp peculiar voice, and his hand to his ear, can easily imagine the scene. He called out to me, ‘ Hallet, 28 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 181 1-29 who is this John Lawrence of whom I hear so much? ’ to which I re- plied, ‘ Don’t you remember a tall, thin Irishman with whom I much consorted, who once kept an Irish revel of bonfires on the grass plot opposite to Letter C ; and whom you forgave on account of his Orange zeal and his fun ? ’ ‘ Aha ! ’ said the old dean, ‘ I remember the man ; not a bad sort of fellow ; ’ and then he burst into one of his fits of laugh- ter, ending with the dry remark, ‘ But what has become of all our good students ? ’ A letter of Sir Charles Trevelyan, who preceded John Law- rence at Haileybury by two years, adds a few touches which should be preserved The great charm of Haileybury was its thoroughly rural surroundings. I have known students stand at the college gate for half-an-hour together in the evening, listening to the nightingales in the adjoining woods. Bathing in the Lea in the Rye-House meadows was a great amusement in the summer ; while in winter I remember a match at foot-ball be- tween the students of the two upper and two lower terms, which lasted over several days and finally had to be given up on account of the an- tagonistic spirit it elicited. But in all seasons we used to take long walks in every direction. Athletic exercises were not in vogue in those days as they are now, and if these were less than the average at Hailey- bury, it was owing to the attractions of the open and pleasant country in which it was situated. The dissipation for which some of the students were most notorious was tandem-driving. I remember an occurrence connected with it which amused me at the time, and may be still worth repeating. Two students, driving a tandem, met Dean Le Bas on the road, and knowing that they would be sent for, they considered together what they would say. When the remonstrance came theyjustified them- selves by saying, ‘ Why, sir, there is no harm in driving two horses abreast, and why then should it be wrong to drive them one in front of the other ? ’ To this Le Bas whistled out in his peculiar way, with ready presence of mind, ‘ Sir, a tandem carries dissipation on the face of it ; ’ which is perhaps as much as could be said against it. It may be added that the excellent public school which has now taken the place of the Old India College at Haileybury has done honour to itself by letting into the wall of the room C 54, which he formerly occupied, a brass plate with the words, ‘John Lawrence, 1829,’ engraved upon it; while among the dormitories occupied by the boys which have received the names of Haileybury students who were afterwards distinguished in India, such as Trevelyan, Ed monstone, Thomason, Bartle Frere, and Colvin, or of distinguished Principals of the old college, such as Batten, Le Bas, Melville, there is none which 1 8 1 1—29 EARLY LIFE. 29 bears so illustrious a name — a name known, as Macaulay would sav, to every schoolboy — as that which is called after the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab and the Governor-General of India — ‘John Lawrence.’ At the close of each summer and winter term during his residence at Haileybury, John Lawrence regularly repaired to the house of Mr. Stevens, an old friend of the family, in Chelsea for a week or ten days before going down to his home at Clif- ton ; and in general harmony with the account I have given of his college life is a second contribution of Mrs. B., a daughter of Mr. Stevens, and a life-long friend of John Lawrence. It is worth preserving, as it enables us to see something, even at this early period, of the inner and gentler side of his rough character. Every remembrance (says Mrs. B.) of the days and weeks he passed at our house at Chelsea is bright and pleasant. They are associated with a hilarity, indeed an exuberance of innocent glee, to which he himself, to his latest years, talking of our house as the ‘ elastic house,’ loved to refer. He gave pleasure to everyone ; even Henry, with his quiet re- served nature, regarded with quiet complacency the frolics of his young brother ; and a venerable Scotch lady, unaccustomed to such ebulli- tions, yet unable to resist their fascination, could venture on no severer stricture than — it was from her a compliment — 1 He is a diamond, though a rough one.’ No work was done while he was in the house, and the ‘ impositions ’ inflicted for some freak at the college were handed over to the junior members of our household, who copied the necessary Persian character as best they could. I well remember the goodly number of prize vol- umes which he brought in his portmanteau from term to term. Speak- ing of these, he would say, * They are Letitia’s books ; they are all hers ; I should not have had one of them but for her. I work with her in my mind; she shall have every one of them.’ The same declaration of brotherly gratitude was made in connection with the highest honour that Haileybury could bestow — the gold medal ; and when he got to Clifton, he was soon at the foot of the old couch with the grateful tribute : ‘ Take them,’ he said, ‘ they are all won by you.’ CHAPTER II. LIFE AT DELHI. 1829—1834. We have now followed, with the help of such scanty records as are, at this distance of time, recoverable, the career of John Lawrence during the first eighteen years of his life. They are in no way especially remarkable. He has passed through three schools and the East India College at Haileybury without their leaving any very distinctive mark on him, or lie on them. He has been crossed in the darling wish of his heart, to follow the profession of his father and three elder brothers. The one rel- ative whom we have seen to possess an extraordinary influence over him has used it to shape — possibly, as it may have seemed to him, to thwart — his destinies, and he leaves her behind him on the couch of an invalid. Strong, rough, warm-hearted, self- reliant, full of exuberant merriment, half-disciplined, and little more than half-educated, with the Irish element in his character at this period distinctly overshadowing the Scotch, he leaves his father’s home, hardly expecting to see him again, for a pro- fession which he would never have sought, and for which he deems he has no special aptitude. Scores, nay, hundreds, of young civilians must have started for India with lighter hearts and with hopes apparently better founded than his. With him there went out his elder brother, Henry, who had already seen five years of India and Indian campaigning, and had been driven back to England before his time, fever-stricken, and ‘so reduced,’ as an entry in his mother’s diary puts it, ‘ by sickness and suffering, that he looked more than double his age.’ John Hudlestone, the kind friend who had given the elder brothers, one after the other, their appointments in India, had indeed consoled Henry’s broken-hearted sister when he first left the parental home, by saying to her, ‘ All your brothers will, I think, do well, but Henry has so much steadiness and resolu- tion that you will see him come back a general. He will be “ Sir Henry Lawrence ” before he dies.’ But no kind friend, 1829-34 LIFE AT DELHI. 31 so far as I can discover, ventured on a like prediction with respect to John. That he would be ‘Sir John Lawrence’ before he died would have seemed unlikely enough to the most san- guine of his friends, or the most appreciative of his Haileybury tutors. But that he would be a chief instrument in the saving of India, that he would be Governor-General, that he would die ‘ Lord Lawrence of the Punjab,’ would have seemed as absurd and as incredible as the prediction in the nursery story to young Dick Whittington, that he would one day become Lord Mayor, nay, thrice Lord Mayor of London. John Lawrence passed out of Haileybury in May, 1829, but he lingered on some four months longer in England, that he might have the ‘ benefit of his brother Henry’s society on his voyage out.’ ‘ Henry’s presence in England,’ he says himself, * during the time I was at Haileybury, had been of considerable advantage to me. He went down to the first examination with me, and stimulated me to exertion while I was there.’ It seems strange in these days of whirlwind locomotion when a man is thankful to be allowed to leave his post in India on short fur- lough and, after spending a month with his friends at home, is back at his work again before his three months are up, to find that John Lawrence spent four months in England merely that he might have the ‘benefit of his brother’s company during the voyage.’ But there were no steamers in those days. Worse still, there was no Overland Route, and the voyage to India round the Cape was sometimes a matter, as the brothers were to find to their cost, of five months and more. They sailed from Portsmouth on September 2, 1829, accom- panied by Honoria, the sister who came between them in point of age. John suffered terribly, as he always did in later life, from sea-sickness. It was six weeks before he could leave his berth. At one time, as he often used to tell, his life was all but despaired of ; and a terrible hurricane off the south of Africa showed that the ‘ Cape of Storms ’ was still true to its character. But in the intervals of comparative comfort the two brothers studied hard at the native languages, for which neither had a turn, but which each knew to be indispensable fora life of usefulness in India. They did not reach Calcutta till Febru- ary 9, 1830, and here they separated, Henry to join his com- pany of Foot Artillery at Kurnal, a large military station to the north of Delhi, on what was then our north-west frontier ; John, to complete in the College of Fort William such study of the na- 32 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1829-34 tive languages as was necessary before he could enter on his civil duties. It may be of some interest to remark here that in the same year with John Lawrence, there came out to India two re- markable men — Alexander Duff, the first missionary of the Church of Scotland, who ‘set to work almost in the next street to him,’ and Sir Henry Durand, who some forty years later was to become Foreign Secretary and afterwards col- league in Council of the young ‘writer’ who would then have risen to be Governor-General. During the whole time that John Lawrence was in the College of Fort William he was more or less ill. The climate did not agree with him. He took little care of himself, and he was so much depressed in spirits that he thought seriously of returning to England. He has often been heard to say since that an offer of 100I. a year in England in those dark days would have taken him straight home. The society of the capital, with the brilli- ant carriages on its Mall, its morning and evening canters over the Maidan, its balls and its dinner-parties, so acceptable to most young civilians, seems to have had no charms for him, and perhaps the rough, downright young Irishman, who then, as ever afterward, cared nothing for appearances, would have made little way with the society of the capital. A pining for home and friends such as I have described, and an absolute detestation of India, has been no uncommon thing, even among those who, like John Lawrence, were destined afterwards to find the most appropriate field for their talents, and to rise to the highest eminence there. Not even ambition and the charms of a ‘ study of the native languages’ are proof .against the depressing influ- ences and enervating vapours of the City of Palaces at a time when the thermometer is standing at ninety degrees in the shade. Robert Clive, in sudden accesses of home-sickness, twice over, it is said, while he was a tenant of Writers’ Build- ings, at Madras, attempted to destroy himself; and it was not until he had assured himself that the pistol, which had refused to go off, was properly loaded, that he determined to bear up against his depression, as a man reserved for something great. Charles, afterwards Lord, Metcalfe, for a whole year after his arrival in India, plied his father with piteous appeals to obtain for him the veriest pittance in England in exchange for the miseries of exile. So we need not be surprised if John Law- rence passed through a similar slough of despond. At last he managed to pass the necessary examinations in Urdu and Per- 1829-34 LIFE AT DELHI. 33 sian, of which latter language he remained ever afterwards a colloquial master ; and then, instead of applying for a post in one of the more settled and peaceful provinces of Lower Bengal, where the work would, comparatively speaking, be one of rou- tine, he was, at his own request, gazetted for Delhi.1 This ap- plication, as we shall see, gave some slight intimation of the stuff of which he was made. There was now no more inaction, no more halting between two opinions. He had put his hand to the plough and there was no looking back. He shook him- self, like Samson, and awoke to his work. From the present moment to the very end of his official life, we shall find no parallel to the inaction of the four months spent in England be- fore leaving it for India, or to the depression which seems to have dominated him during the ten months he spent in Calcutta before embarking in his active work. There was, henceforth, no nervous looking forward to what might be, or backward to what might have been. To do the thing that lay before him, to do it thoroughly, to do it with all his might, not regarding the consequences and not turning either to the right hand or the left — this was henceforward the ruling principle of his life, and to that ruling principle who shall say how much of his success was owing ? A breathing space of some months was usually allowed to young civilians, after passing their examination, before they were expected to be at their post. But John Lawrence was off to his at once. The method of travelling usual in those days was the comparatively easy one of ‘ trek ’ up the Ganges. But John preferred the more rapid mode of palanquin dawk, and managed to accomplish the distance of nine hundred miles in eighteen days. The motives which induced him to select the Delhi district as his first field of action are not far to seek. 1 I have not thought it desirable or practicable, in a work which quotes so largely from documents of a bygone generation, and deals with events which ought to stereo- type for ever, in the memories of Englishmen, the names of so many Indian places in the form in which they were then known, to attempt any accurate system of trans- literation. It is difficult to a biographer of John Lawrence, steeped as he must necessarily be in the writings of his time, even to think of Delhi as ' Dilhi,’ of Fero- zepore as ‘ Firozpur,’ of Cawnpore as ‘ Kahnpur,' of Lucknow as ‘Lakhnao. ' To him the capital of the Moguls can never be otherwise than Delhi, and the capital of Oude must always remain Lucknow. I have therefore, in the case of the more im- portant names of men and places which occur repeatedly in the letters and life of John Lawrence, thought it best to adhere to the spelling of the time rather than to follow the more accurate system of spelling and of accentuation which has been adopted by a later generation. Vol. I. — 3 34 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1829-34 It was not that the work would be easy and straightforward, or the inhabitants tractable and submissive. On the contrary, the work was as arduous and exacting, and the inhabitants as turbulent and warlike, as could have been found within the Company’s dominions. But for this very reason it was likely to afford the best preparation for whatever might come after- wards. And now that we have followed John Lawrence to the great city which, with the surrounding district, is for the next thir- teen years, to prove so admirable a training ground for his great, but, hitherto, quite undeveloped capacities, and, some twenty-five years later, is to witness the crowning achievement of his life — its recapture from the mutineers — it will be well to take just such a brief retrospect of its history and antece- dents as may enable us better to understand the extent to which the peculiarities of the place and the people acted on him, and his energy and determination reacted on them. Historically and geographically Delhi is the most important city in Hindustan. Situated on the river Jumna, in the very centre of Northern India, it is brought, by the help of the Ganges, into which the Jumna flows, and of the vast network of canals which Mogul and English enterprise have spread over the country, into direct communication with almost every city of note between it and the Bay of Bengal. It stands on the direct line of advance into Northern and Central India from the passes of the Hindu Kush and the Suliman mountains — the only point of the compass, it should be remarked, from which an invasion of India need ever be seriously contem- plated. Its inhabitants, spirited, energetic, and fanatical, con- trast equally with the soft and supple Bengali, on the one side, and the ferocious and haughty and untamable Afghan on the other. Altogether the spot seems marked out by Nature her- self as that whereon, once and again, the battle for the Empire of India would be lost or won. Its history and its traditions stretch right back to the fifteenth century b.c., when, under the name of Indra-Prastha, it was deemed worthy of a place in the Sanscrit Epic of the ‘ Mahabharata.’ Since that time, on the same, or nearly the same, spot, city after city has been founded, has risen to opulence and power, or even to empire, and then has fallen by slow decay, or, as has more often hap- pened, has been stamped out of existence by the heel of the de- stroyer. The debris of these cities of the dead cover an area of 1829-34 LIFE AT DELHI. 35 forty-five square miles, and towards one end of this vast space rises the citv of the living, the foundation of the Emperor Shah Jehan. Turk and Tartar, Persian and Pathan, Mogul and Mahratta, have swept down upon Delhi in ghastly succession, have plun- dered it of its wealth, massacred its inhabitants, levelled its buildings with the ground, or, again, have made it the seat of a long dynasty of kings, and lavished upon it all the magnificence and gorgeousness of the East. There is thus hardly a great name in the history of Northern India which is not in some way connected with Delhi, as founder or conqueror, embellisher or destroyer. In the eleventh century Mahmud the Iconoclast, on his return to Afghanistan from his frequent incursions into India, adorned his palace at Ghuzni not less with the jewels of Delhi than with the sandal-wood gates of Somnath. In the twelfth, Mohammed of Ghor made it what, with few intermis- sions, it has ever since remained, the capital of Mohammedan India, and planted upon its throne as his vassals the famous dy- nasty of ‘Slave’ kings. In the fourteenth, Tamerlane, the arch-destroyer, plundered, depopulated, and destroyed it. It was at Delhi that Baber was proclaimed emperor, and at Delhi that Humayun was buried. The site of Delhi, Shah Jehan, the master builder of a whole dynasty of builders, the architect of those wonders of the world, the Pearl Mosque and the Taj Mehal, selected for the capital of his Empire, in preference even to that of Agra, and, rebuilding the city from the ground, called it after his own name ‘Shah Jehanabad ’ (cir. 1656). In the eighteenth century Nadir Shah, the great Persian invader, treated its inhabitants and its movable wealth much as Tamer- lane had dealt with them before him, and what little of revenue or power he left to the great Mogul was afterwards appropriated by the Mahrattas. He became a mere puppet in their hands, and in the beginning of the present century (1803) he passed under the gentler sway of that ‘ company ’ of merchants who throve and trafficked and ruled in Leadenhall Street, but could, at their pleasure, command the services and unsheath the swords of generals as redoubtable as Clive and Coote, as Lake and Wellesley. When Lord Lake entered the city of the Moguls, after his surprising series of victories, he found the venerable emperor, ‘oppressed by the accumulated calamities of old age, and de- graded authority, extreme poverty, and loss of sight, seated 36 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1829-34 under a small tattered canopy, the remnant of his royal state.’ But the English conquerors, touched, as they could not fail to be, by such a pitiable sight, treated Shah Alum with that re- spectful sympathy which, whatever their faults, they have seldom failed to show to fallen greatness. They gave him back his palace, one of the most splendid creations of Shah Jehan, and set apart extensive districts in the neighbourhood of the city for the proper maintenance of him and of his court. The management of these districts they wisely kept under their own control ; but a lac of rupees (10,000/.) — a sum which was after- wards considerably increased — was poured month by month into the lap of the blind and helpless old man. Within his palace, a building strong and vast enough to house an army as well as a court, he was to reign supreme. Less than this the English could hardly, with any show of justice or generosity, have done ; and yet it may be doubted whether even this was not more than the best interests of the venerable puppet himself, or of the miserable creatures who infested and disgraced the purlieus of his court, demanded. ‘ The Vatican and a garden ’ was indeed the irreducible mini- mum which the discrowned head of the Catholic Church could well have been expected to accept from the ruler of one of the most Catholic of nations. But a palace and the revenues of a palace left to an Eastern king, who has none of the duties and — owing to the protection guaranteed to him by a greater power from without — none of the salutary fears of royalty, is likely, as our dear-bought experience in India has proved again and again, to become a pest-house doubly steeped in debauchery and corruption. It is a despotism, tempered neither by epi- grams nor by assassination. But the English, in their generosity to the fallen king, went beyond even this. By a cruel kindness, which was more credit- able to their hearts than their heads, they restored to the de- crepit descendant of Tamerlane his titular sovereignty over the whole of the vast regions which had been conquered or claimed by his ancestors. True, it was only the shadow of empire that they gave him ; but in the East a shadow, a remembrance, a symbol, has often proved to possess more vitality, and to be more real even than the reality which it was supposed to repre- sent. One or two of our wiser statesmen shook their heads, and tried by gradual encroachments insensibly to minimise the imperial pageantry. But their efforts were only partially sue- 1829-34 LIFE AT DELHI. 37 cessful. The first British Resident, a kind-hearted and gener- ous man, continued to approach this phantom of royalty with knee-worship, which the most supple of courtiers might have disdained to use in approaching a European sovereign. Suc- cessive Governors-General or their representatives offered him nuzzurs, or presents, which, to the native mind in general, and certainly to that of the old king himself, must have suggested that he, and not they, was the paramount power in India. The current coin of the country continued to bear, not indeed the image — for that no good Muslim would allow — but the super- scription and year of the reign of the Great Mogul. Native sovereigns looked upon themselves, nay even upon the English conquerors, rather as tenants-at-will than as proprietors, and felt insecure upon their thrones till the fountain of sovereignty had recognised their claim to their territories or their titles. And so Resident succeeded Resident, Seton gave way to Metcalfe, Met- calfe to Ochterlony, and then Ochterlony to Metcalfe again, at the Residency house ; Shah Alum was succeeded by Akbar Shah in the palace, and Bahadur Shah expected, in due course, to succeed Akbar ; and, though some of the more obnoxious obeisances and privileges accorded to the Mogul were gradu- ally lopped away, yet the fundamental mischief wTent on un- checked. If it be true that, during the anarchy which accompanied the break-up of the Mogul power, the imperial city had become the sink for the rascality of all the surrounding countries, it is equally true that now, under the aegis of the English protec- tion, the imperial palace became the sink of the city. In the city itself, and in the adjoining country', English rule was rapidly introducing law and order and security for property, for honour, and for life. But within the walls of the palace, though murder and torture may have been checked from fear of the Resident, there was the same dreary round of extrava- gance and profligacy, jealousy, and intrigue; still the same mis- erable inhabitants, a motley crowd of panders and informers, concubines and eunuchs. Nor was it possible for the Resident to do more than to enter a feeble protest against the libertinism to which the English Government itself had, with the best in- tentions in the world, given a charter. If the phantom of Mogul sovereignty became every' day' more contemptible, and the torch of the Mogul Empire seemed to be dying out with a last expir- ing flicker, it was not dead yet, and might with that very ex- 38 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1829-34 piring flicker blaze forth into a conflagration which would en- velop the whole of India. So thought one or two of the wisest of our countrymen then ; and so, wise after the event, thinks everyone now. Such, then, were the antecedents and such the general con- dition of the imperial city when, early in 1831, John Lawrence arrived as one of the ‘ assistants ’ to the Resident ; and it is not difficult to infer from what I have already said how profound an influence the profligacy of the court and the corruption of the aristocracy on the one hand, and the patient sufferings and the sterling qualities of the masses of the people on the other, must have had upon the whole of his subsequent career — at a time, that is, when it would be his no longer to obey but to be obeyed, no longer to observe but to act, no longer to chafe at abuses but to sweep them clean away. The town and district of Delhi had been, ever since the time of its conquest from the Mahrattas by Lord Lake, under the control of a British officer, who bore the title of ‘ Resident and Chief Commissioner.’ The post was one which demanded and developed high qualities, and its varied duties were indicated by the unusual title which its occupant bore. It had twice been filled by Charles Metcalfe, who, fortified by the experience thence derived, was now rising, as John Lawrence was himself to rise from it, in later days, by rapid strides towards much higher dignities, and was not to die till he had been, in rapid succession, supreme governor of India itself, of Jamaica, and of Canada. The post of Resident of Delhi was, at that time, held by Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, a younger brother of Sir Charles. The work was partly what is called in India ‘political,’ partly administrative. The ‘political’ duties of the Resident brought him primarily into contact with the Mogul and his palace, but they also made his influence felt over the vast range of country which lies between Malwa on the south-east and the Punjab on the north-west. They thus embraced those numerous states, the appanages of the oldest and proudest and most powerful Rajpoot chiefs, which, together with intervening tracts of desert, make up the district called by a geographical fiction, as if it were a united whole, Rajpootana. They included also the * protected Sikh states’ of Jhcend, Puttiala, Khytul, and Nabha, which, with numerous smaller chieftainships, were interlaced in a perplexing manner with the British territory. iS’9-34 LIFE AT DELHI. 39 In his civil capacity as ‘Commissioner’ in the purely British territory, the Resident had to keep order, to administer justice, to superintend the apportionment and collection of the revenue, and to develop, as far as practicable, the resources of a very im- perfectly developed country. His assistants, who were four or five in number, usually lived like the members of one family, in the Residency house or compound, and after they had served their first apprenticeship were liable to be employed in any of the various duties which belonged to the Resident him- self. They thus managed at a very early stage of their career to combine the functions of magistrate, collector, and judge. The Delhi district, happily for all concerned, was a non- regulation province. In spite of successive waves of foreign conquest which had swept over it, the native institutions had been less changed here than in almost any other part of India. The venerable village communities remained intact, and the cue of the English officers was, happily, not to destroy, but to pre- serve and make the best of them. That ‘mystery of iniquity,’ as it has been well called by Sir John Kaye, the law of sales for arrears of rent, had not been introduced into the Delhi ter- ritory, and justice was administered not so much by hard and fast regulations, as on principles of natural equity. It is thus not too much to say that every ‘ assistant ’ to the Resident, owing to the variety of his work, the liberty he was allowed, and the sense of responsibility which was thus developed, enjoyed almost unique facilities for showing what was in him. Among the ‘assistants’ in 1831 was Charles Trevelyan, who by his energy, his ability, and his fearlessness, had already, in his subordinate capacity, made a great narpe. Amidst all but universal obloquy, he had struck boldly at corruption in high places, and at last, amidst all but universal appreciation, he had levelled it with the ground, never again, it is to be hoped, to rear its head. He found a kindred spirit in the newly arrived John Lawrence, whom he had himself been instrumental in at- tracting thither ; and thus began a friendship which lasted with- out intermission for nearly fifty years, till death ended or put the seal to it. The two friends did not remain long together now, for Trevelyan was called off in the following year to Bhurtpore, while John Lawrence remained behind in the city with which so much of his career was to be bound up. The impression, however, made by the younger man, who had not yet done a stroke of professional work in India, upon 40 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1829-34 the elder, was distinct enough, and has, after the lapse of some fifty years, in conversation with myself, been thus vividly re- called * ‘When I first saw John Lawrence he was in appear- ance singularly like what he was in advanced life ; nay, he looked in a manner older than in after life : the lines in his face were even deeper. He had a hungry, anxious look. He seemed to be of a mercurial disposition. I do not mean that he had instability or the faults of the Irish character, but he was earnest and restless. For example, he was very fond of riding, and he always appeared to be riding at a hand gallop. Here was the foundation for a man of action. I did not seek for or detect any signs of what is ordinarily called “superi- ority ” or greatness then, but, looking back now, I can see that what I did notice was capable of a much higher interpretation than I put upon it.’ John Lawrence’s first appointment under the Resident was that of ‘assistant judge, magistrate, and collector’ of the city and its environs — over an area, that is, of some 800 square miles, and a population of about 500,000 souls. Of this total the city itself contained some 200,000, and with their narrow round of interests and occupations, and their petty crimes and quarrels, the work of the assistant magistrate would be princi- pally concerned. The city population consisted of many dif- ferent elements. The capital of Mohammedan India of course contained a large number of Indian Mohammedans, but the larger portion was composed of Hindus, with an admixture of Sikhs and Afghans. The general insecurity of life and property at Delhi during the break up of the Mogul and the rise of the Mahratta power, had drawn thither, by a natural process of agglomeration, most of the stormy spirits of Northern and Central India. The criminal class in such a population would necessarily be large, and it was not unfrequently recruited by a reinforcement of arch criminals from the sanctuary of the palace. Within that sanctuary the English magistrates were powerless. Slavery, polygamy, and concubinage — those inseparable adjuncts of Oriental despotism — reigned unmolested. The Sullateen, or princes of the blood, ‘men who feared neither God nor man, and whom no one outside the palace would trust for a rupee,’ revelled within it in extravagance and lust and infamy of every description. Sometimes a pair of half-naked slave girls, with the marks of stripes upon their backs, would escape from the 1829-34 LIFE AT DELHI. 41 windows of their gilded prison-house, and the Resident or his assistants would have the satisfaction of declaring to the pursu- ing myrmidons of the palace, that having once touched British soil, they were free. Within/he palace all the offices and all the etiquette of the old Mogul court were still scrupulously preserved. Sometimes one of these dignitaries, forgetful even of the honour that reigns among thieves, would turn his sharp practices upon his brother ministers. On other occasions — as in an incident related to me by Sir Charles Trevelyan — they ventured to use the ill-gotten experience and facilities for crime acquired within the palace in the more extended field of the city. The titular Lord Chancellor, or his equivalent, had set up, outside the palace, a regular factory for forging deeds. It was an easy task, for he possessed, in virtue of his office, the entire series of seals belonging to the former Emperors and their chief officers. The existence of this factory was perfectly well known in the city, and even respectable men, when they found that the titles to their land were disputed, resorted to it to get them set right by forgery. One day a vakil of the Raja of Bullubghur reported at the residency that the ex-Chancellor was at that moment forging the grant of a village in his mas- ter’s territory. The kotwal was sent with a posse comitatus to the place, and found the operation actually going on, and the ex-Chancellor, who had in his possession at least a hundred seals of former Hakims of Delhi, was condemned to five years’ labour on the public roads. The capture of Delhi by the mutineers, twenty-six years later, has been to the history of the Delhi district, on a small scale, what the burning of Rome by the Gauls was to the whole course of Roman history. Nearly all the contemporary records of the times of which I am writing perished in the flames ; but even in the absence of these, as well as of all pri- vate letters, knowing as we do how John Lawrence felt and acted in after times, we can easily imagine the zest with which he would have flung himself into adventures of the knight- errant kind when they came in his way — his rescue of a slave girl from her tormentors, or the arrest and punishment of a scoundrel born in the purple, the moment that he dared to carry his malpractices beyond the charmed circle of the palace walls/ But the occupations of the assistant magistrate were not all of this exciting character, nor was his intercourse confined to 42 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1829-34 the criminal classes. ‘ In those days,’ says John Lawrence, ‘ many of the chiefs about Delhi still held houses and gardens in the city, to which they constantly resorted, partly to pay their respects to the representative of British power, and partly to enjoy the pleasures and luxuries of social life. There were then living also in Delhi old men of rank and family, who had served in one capacity or other in the late wars ; men who had been employed in the irregular fashion under Sir Arthur Wel- lesley or Lord Lake, men who used to be fond of telling stories of those interesting times, and to whom the names of Mr. Seton, the first Resident, of Sir Charles Metcalfe, of Sir David Ochterlony, and of Sir John Malcolm were as household words.’ Storytellers such as these found an excellent listener in John Lawrence, who, a still better storyteller himself, doubtless often retaliated in kind ; and thus, in his very first post, gathered an amount of experience such as, in other parts of India, could only have been acquired very gradually. He thus came to know the family histories of the chiefs, their feelings and their wishes, their merits and their faults — a knowledge which after- wards stood him in excellent stead when he had to deal on a wider scale, as responsible ruler, with dispossessed or discon- tented Sikh chieftains scattered over a newly conquered pro- vince. John Lawrence remained at Delhi for nearly four years, 1 working regularly and steadily without any change or inter- mission.’ Once indeed he joined a hog-hunting expedition given by Trevelyan on an extensive scale in some large tama- risk jungles on the banks of the Jumna ; and once or twice he paid hasty visits to his brother George, who was then enter- taining, at his house at Kurnal, Henry Lawrence and the sister (Honoria) who had come out to India with them. On March 6, 1831, Henry had written from Kurnal to his sister Letitia at home, ‘ You may imagine how glad we are that John has got himself appointed to Delhi. He is now within a few hours of us and in very good hands ; on my return to Kurnal at the end of the month he will come over.’ And it is pleasant to read in a letter written to me, and dated ‘ February 18, 1880, Brighton,’ from Honoria (now Mrs. Barton), the sister concerned, how these anticipations of the family were fulfilled : ‘ During the fifteen months that we lived with our brother George at Kurnal, John occasionally visited us, and made us very happy. He seemed quite satisfied with his position at Delhi, and liked his 1 829-34 LIFE AT DELHI. 43 work, and we knew that he had warm friends in the Commis- sioner and his family.’ It may be mentioned that, much as he liked the Commissioner, he did not, as the other ‘ assistants ’ usually did, live in the Residency compound, but in a separate house, a mile and a-half off, with a chaplain of the name of Everest, with whom he had struck up a friendship. Nor is it without interest to remark that among the young Englishmen then to be found at Delhi was Robert Napier, who at that very time was engaged, at the head of a body of sappers, in strength- ening the fortifications which, twenty-seven years later, were so long to bid defiance to the forces which John Lawrence was to keep hurrying thither from his distant province. CHAPTER III. LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 1S34— 1837. At the end of his four years’ apprenticeship in the city of Del- hi, John Lawrence was transferred to a ‘district’ and placed in charge of the northern division of the Delhi territory. Its chief station was Paniput, at a distance of some twenty miles from which there lay the important military cantonment of Kurnal. But the Paniput district needed no cantonment to keep alive the martial spirit, or to awake the military associations, which are inseparably connected with its history : for what the plain of Esdraelon has been to Jewish, and the carse of Stirling to Scottish, history ; what Belgium has in later times been to the history of the whole of Europe ; — that the Paniput district is to the history of the Indian Peninsula. It is, in short, the battle- field of India. Not to speak of less important combats and campaigns in- numerable, three times over the fate of the whole peninsula has been decided within its boundaries. It was here, in 1556, that Akbar, the greatest of the Moguls — then a stripling of thirteen years old — after performing, according to the story, prodigies of personal valour, which we may believe or not, succeeded, as we must believe, under the guidance of the able general, Bell- ram Khan, who nominally served under him, in winning back for his father, Humayun, the empire which he had lost. It was here in 1739 that the upstart Nadir Shah, the greatest warrior whom modern Persia has produced, after raising himself to the Persian throne, and beating back the Turks and Russians to the west and north, and taking Herat and Candahar, Ghuzni and Cabul, to the east and south, shattered the forces of the Mogul Mohammed Shah, and carried off the spoils of Delhi as his prize. And it was here, once more, in 1761 that Ahmed Shah, Dourani, after repeatedly invading India through the Khyber Pass, finally defeated the Mahratta hosts, and, after incredible slaughter, drove their remnant headlong southward over the Nerbudda, 1S34-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 45 deprived for the time of all their northern conquests. Had it not been for this crowning victory, the Mahrattas must have overrun and conquered all Upper India thirty years and more before the Wellesleys came to stop them. Influenced, it may be, by these historical traditions, the people of the Paniput district bore a character for turbulence and disaffection beyond that of any of the adjoining districts; and, if the city of Delhi had given John Lawrence an insight, which he could hardly have obtained elsewhere, into the con- dition of all classes of a city population, as well as of the older aristocracy, it is equally certain that few districts could have given him so thorough an acquaintance with the wants and habits of the best part of the inhabitants of India, its agricul- tural population and — what is more material to note here — with, perhaps, the very best section of that best part, the widely spread race of Jats. Let us then, as in the case of the city of Delhi itself, and for the same reasons, dwell for a moment on the history and lead- ing characteristics of the race which, under various designa- tions, occupies by far the larger part of the country in which John Lawrence’s active life is henceforward to be passed. The Jats are said by Tod, the historian of Rajpootana, to be descended from the ancient Getae, or Scythians. The apparent similarity of name, no doubt, suggested the precise Scythian tribe to which he assigns their origin ; but their handsome, prominent features and their tall, bony frames clearly proclaim their northern birth. They are to be found scattered over nearly the whole of the country between the Jhelum and the Jumna, and extend southward even to Bhurtpore and Agra. Like other hordes of northern invaders, which, from the time of Darius and Xerxes downwards, have poured into India from the wilds of Central Asia, they were, in their turn, conquered and absorbed by the compact and complex civilisation of the country which they overran, and they thus became almost as BrahminicaL in their belief and institutions as the Hindus themselves. Indeed, the same process was then going on in India which was repeated on a larger scale in Europe in the fourth and following centuries after Christ, and it was attended with like results. The successive hordes of Ostrogoths and Visigoths, of Vandals and Franks, of Bulgarians and Slavonians, who overran the decaying fabric of the Roman Empire, were themselves taken captive by the nascent Christianity and by the 46 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 majestic system of law which are its most fruitful and enduring legacies to the Western world. But the stereotyped religion of the Hindus could not satisfy the spiritual wants of the Jats, in the way in which Christianity with its few rules and its all-em- bracing principles, its boundless power of development, and its adaptability to the most diverse conditions of time and place, was able to meet the needs of the progressive nations of the West. And the Jats have, to an extent which is very remark- able in an Oriental people, been able to appreciate and assimi- late one elevated creed after another, as they have, successively, been presented to them. At one time the new impulse came in the shape of that great religious and social movement which, starting in the breast of an unlettered shepherd of Mecca, was carried by the half-naked Arabs and by those whom they conquered and inspired, amidst the crumbling of all older thrones and creeds, in one sweep of unbroken conquest from Gibraltar to Delhi. At another time, as in the case of the religion preached by the pious and gentle prophet Nanuk, it came in the shape of a peaceful internal re- formation. In this way many of the Jats, especially those along the southern Indus, became fervent Muslims, while others, sev- eral centuries later, especially those in the central districts about Lahore and Umritsur, became equally fervent Sikhs — ‘ disciples,’ that is, of Nanuk, and of the Gurus or religious leaders of whom he was the spiritual progenitor. Strange, at first sight, that the same people should be able to embrace with equal enthusiasm creeds so different as those of Mohammed and of Nanuk ! And strange, also, that the hatred between the votaries of each shoidd be so intense that J.ohn Lawrence could afford in the crisis of our fate to put arms freely into the hands of one of these sections, in full confidence that they would use them, not against their common masters but against their own brethren ! But it will be discovered on a closer investigation that the fundamental principles of both religions were the same. Both were based on an antagonism to idolatry, and both proclaimed as their leading doctrines the Unity of God and the equality of man. And it is a melancholy fact of human nature, as observable in the East as in the West, that they who differ least on religious questions generally hate the most. Whether an Eastern race, which has proved itself so singularly plastic in religious matters as to adopt successively three such religions as the Hindu, the Mohammedan, and the 1834-37 LIFE and adventures at paniput. 47 Sikh, will be capable of a yet further step in advance, and be ready, when it is properly presented to them, to embrace Chris- tianity, is a question which is equally interesting in an ethno- logical and religious point of view. As far south as Kurnal all the Jats adopted the name and creed of Sikhs, but those beyond are still Hindus in creed and retain their original name. The Sikh religion was, at first, merely a reformed Hinduism. But in process of time it became much more, and may be described rather as ‘ the military and political spirit superadded to a reformed religion.’ The Sikhs are equally well known as excellent and thrifty cultiva- tors of the soil and as hardy and formidable soldiers. Their feelings, social and political, are highly democratic ; and though they rally round the leaders of their race, it is in the free spirit of associates rather than of servants. Those Jats who have not adopted the new religion are quite as fearless and industrious, but are more peacefully inclined, than their Sikh brethren. They know how to defend their rights, should any one be ven- turesome enough to attack them, with the most effectual of ar- guments ; and the only real obstacle to our conquests in the north of India in the beginning of this century came from them. It was the great Jat chiefship of Bhurtpore, for instance, which rolled back for a time the victorious career of Lord Lake. Such, then, was the race, thrifty, industrious, independent, stoutly attached to their village communities and their ances- tral acres — with which John Lawrence had now to deal in his new appointment as collector-magistrate of the Paniput district. How did he deal with them ? I shall presently quote the testimony, as vigorous as it is dis- criminating, of the only Englishman who can speak with per- sonal knowledge of John Lawrence’s work at Paniput. But first let us inquire in more general terms what the duties of a collector-magistrate are or were : I say were, for many changes have taken place since John Lawrence’s time, and it has, I be- lieve, been found necessary to carry out one change in particu- lar which he always strongly deprecated — the separation of the judicial functions from those of the collector of revenue. Thousands of educated Englishmen who appreciate Lord Law- rence warmly, and regard him as one of those national heroes of whom England may justly be most proud, yet have a very inadequate notion of the long and painful period of self-disci- pline and probation which prepared the way for his success. 48 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 They know little of the labours, multifarious and yet monoto- nous, exhausting yet also refreshing ; of that union of a liberty which is practically unfettered with a responsibility the most real, which go to form the characters and shape the careers of Englishmen in India, and which have produced, in spite of many mistakes and shortcomings, a succession of statesman- soldiers, and soldier-statesmen, such as no imperial state has before produced, and in the long roll of whom there are few names equal, and not one superior, to that of John Lawrence. A ‘district’ usually contains a population of several hundred thousand inhabitants, who are spread over several thousand square miles of territory and are distributed among many hun- dreds of villages and townships. Over this vast area and these multitudinous interests the ‘collector,’ sometimes with a small staff of European assistants, sometimes, as in the case of John Lawrence at Paniput, singlehanded, rules as a kind of terres- trial providence. His primary duty, as his name implies, is the collection of the revenue or land-tax on the punctual payment of which the solvency of the Indian Government depends, while on the care with which it was originally assessed, on its moder- ate and fixed amount, and on the leniency with which, in times of exceptional distress, its payment is enforced, depends in great measure that for which alone it is to be hoped our Indian Empire exists — the prosperity and happiness of its inhabitants. In provinces which have been long settled, the collection of the revenue is, except where the powers of nature have been more than ordinarily unkind, a work of no great difficulty. In fact, owing to the admirable village system which, in the North- West Provinces and in the Punjab, the most ardent of our re- formers have happily been content to leave unreformed, it may almost be said to collect itself. Tax-gatherers in England may be surprised to hear that the taxes in these provinces often possess the peculiarity of being paid before they are asked for. But the collector of revenue is, or rather perhaps was, also a magistrate, and is responsible for the administration of justice throughout his district. Every criminal, from adacoit or a thug down to the petty thief, is brought before him. lie is ex- pected to redress every grievance, from a murrain among the flocks or a scourge of locusts among the crops, down to ‘a claim to a waterspout in the bazaar ’or an opprobrious epithet. For many hours every day while the rain is descending in cata- clysms and turning the world into a vapour-bath, or again, while 49 1834-37 LIFE and adventures at paniput. the sun is scorching it like a furnace and baking it till it is hard as iron, he sits patiently on his stifling cutcherry, listening, re- proving, advising, consoling, condemning. Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli. The collector has to keep his eye upon the police, well know- ing that they will work effectively if that eye, or one of the thousand Argus eyes which he requires, be upon them : with- out it they will do nothing, or worse than nothing. ‘ Every- thing,’ says R. H. Cust, in an excellent article on the subject in the ‘ Calcutta Review,’ ‘ which is done by the executive gov- ernment is done by the collector in one or other of his capaci- ties— publican, auctioneer, sheriff, road-maker, timber-dealer, recruiting-sergeant, slayer of wild beasts, bookseller, cattle- breeder, postmaster, vaccinator, discounter of bills, and regis- trar.’ New tanks to be constructed ; rivers to be bridged, to be turned into new courses or back into their old ones ; new roads to be made ; new dispensaries, hospitals, schools, or jails to be built ; lands to be cleared or drained ; primaeval forests to be felled or new ones to be planted ; new crops or new methods of cultivation to be introduced ; — all these come within the col- lector’s legitimate and ordinary functions. Who is sufficient, it may well be asked, for these things ? No one is altogether sufficient ; but it is simply surprising, thanks to the energy, the sagacity, the punctuality, the strong love of justice, and the careful and loving study of the native character which so many of our administrators in the latter days of the East India Com- pany possessed, how few of them fell conspicuously short of such success as is attainable by poor human nature. But the most important duties of the collector-magistrate are not discharged in the stifling cutcherry at the central station, but rather in that ‘cutcherry on horseback,’ or under the easily shifted tent, which forms his locomotive home during some five months in the year. Whenever the season is favourable — when- ever, that is, the deluges of rain or the overpowering heat allow him to do so — he makes a progress through his dominions, which is only not a royal progress because it is something more, pitching his tent, now here, now there, as best suits the pur- poses of his work. The people have now no longer to go to see him, but, what is much better, he goes to see them. He rides about redressing human wrongs. Divested of all state, and Vol. I. — 4 50 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 often quite alone, he visits each village contained in his cure of souls, takes his seat under some immemorial tree or beside the village well, where the village elders soon cluster around him. He talks to them, listens to their stories and their grievances, dis- cusses the weather and the crops, and settles on the spot itself — sometimes by a mere word, sometimes by a long investigation of many days together — some outstanding boundary dispute which has been the cause of heart-burnings and head-breakings for many generations. He thus gets to know the people and to be known of them. He makes allowance for their many faults — the growth of centuries of oppression by foreign or domestic tyrants ; he appreciates their simple virtues, and is rewarded in his turn — a reward not often given to an Englishman when he has risen to a higher grade — by their gratitude, their respect, and their affection. Often, indeed, when a magistrate has risen to the top of the tree, and is the victim of the scandal and the envy, the ingratitude and the self-seeking, the etiquette and the officialism which haunt the antechambers of the great, and finds that he is in that worst of solitudes, alone amidst a crowd, must he look regretfully back upon the simpler life, the purer motives, and the more satisfying rewards which were his once happy lot. And now let us hear what Charles Raikes, the author of one of the best books on this and kindred subjects,1 and, like Charles Trevelyan, another lifelong friend of John Lawrence, writes from his personal recollection about the duties which the Pani- put district required, and of the way in which John Lawrence discharged them. Early in the year 1835 John Lawrence was stationed at the ancient and historically famous town of Paniput. He was * officiating’ as magis- trate and collector of the district. He had also to conduct a settlement and survey pf the lands comprised in his district. Let us glance for a moment at the details of the sort of work and duty confided to this young Irishman. Paniput is situated on the high road from Delhi to the Pun- jab, about seventy miles northwest of Delhi. The district is inhabited by Jats, industrious Hindu peasants, devoted to agriculture, and attached by the strongest ties to the land ; by Goojurs, who were given to cattle- lifting; and by Ranghurs (Rajpoots converted to a nominal form of Mohammedanism), who were as jealous of their land as the Jats, still worse thieves than the Goojurs, with a taste for promiscuous robbery and murder into the bargain. These men, it is to be remembered, are * Notes on the North- West Provinces of India. >834-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PAN1PUT. 5 1 not at all like the typical ‘meek Hindu,’ but on the contrary are tall, strong, bold fellows, determined and ready to fight for every inch of their land and every head of their cattle. In those days they never went out to plough or to herd their buffaloes without sword, shield, and often a long matchlock over their shoulders. Over some 400,000 of a population like this, scattered in large villages through an area of 800,000 acres, John Lawrence ruled supreme. He himself in those days had very much the cut of a Jat, being wiry, tall, muscular, rather dark in complexion, and without an ounce of super- fluous fat or flesh. He usually wore a sort of compromise between Eng- lish and Indian costume, had his arms ready at hand, and led a life as primus inter pares , rather than a foreigner or a despot, among the people. Yet a despot he was, as any man soon discovered who was bold enough or silly enough to question his legitimate authority — a despot, but full of kindly feelings, and devoted heart and soul to duty and hard work. As magistrate he had charge of the police — a handful of sowars, or troopers, mounted on country horses and armed with sword and pistol, and mostly retained at headquarters, and the ordinary constabulary force stationed at the various thanahs, or police-stations, dotted over the district. Each of these stations was under the charge of a thanadar, or chief of police, with a jemadar, or sergeant, a mohurrir, or scribe, and a dozen or so of police burkundazes (literally ‘ hurler of fire’), who, armed with sword or lance, formed the rank and file of the force. But these were supplemented by a nondescript but very useful village official, a choukedar, whose duty was that of a watchman or parish constable, and a reporter (to the thanadar) of all crimes, sudden deaths, or other note- worthy events which happened in his village. This was the framework of the district police, little changed from the system which had prevailed for centuries under the Emperors of Delhi. It was a system suffi- ciently efficacious to protect the public under a just and energetic ma- gistrate, and an apt engine of oppression under a venal or, above all, under a careless and slothful official. Suffice it to say that John Law- rence at Paniput was the right man in the right place, and for the fol- lowing reasons. First, he was at all times and in all places, even in his bedroom, ac- cessible to the people of his district. He loved his joke with the sturdy farmers, his chat with the city bankers, his argument with the native gentry, few and far between. When out with his dogs and gun he had no end of questions to ask every man he met. • After a gallop across country, he would rest on a charpoy, or country bed, and hold an im- promptu levee of all the village folk, from the headman to the barber. ‘ Jan Larens ,’ said the people, ‘ sub janta ,’ that is, knows everything. For this very reason he was a powerful magistrate, and, I may here add, a brilliant and invaluable revenue officer. Secondly, he was never above his work. I have an indistinct recol- lection of his arresting a murderer, on receiving intelligence of the 52 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 crime, with his own hand. At all events, where the report of a murder, an affray with wounding, or a serious robbery came in, John Lawrence was at once in the saddle and off to the spot. With greater deliberation, but equal self-devotion, he proceeded to the spot to investigate impor- tant disputes about land, crops, water privileges, boundaries, and so forth. The Persian proverb, * Disputes about land must be settled on the land ’ — ‘ Kuzea zunieen buh dir zumeen ’ — was often on his tongue. Thirdly, owing to this determination to go about for himself and to hear what everybody had to say about everything, he shook off, nay, he utterly confounded, the tribe of flatterers, sycophants, and informers who, when they can get the opportunity, dog the steps of the Indian ruler. What chance had an informer with a man who was bent on see- ing everything with his own eyes ? All this I might have said of Donald Macleod, of Robert Montgomery, and of other friends of Lawrence who became great Indian administra- tors. But John Lawrence had in addition a quality of hardness, not amounting to harshness, but not short of severity, which made the male- factor tremble at his name. He might or he might not be loved — this seemed to be his mind — but respected he would be at all events. I have said enough to show that in the early days of his Indian career John Lawrence was a most energetic and vigorous magistrate. To do any sort of justice to the training of those days which prepared him for future distinction, I must now turn to Lawrence as a revenue officer. The good old East India Company which he served, and which called the young men sent out to rule her provinces * writers,’ called the chiefs who gathered up her lacs of rupees and ruled her landed millions ‘ col- lectors.’ John Lawrence then was a ‘ collector’ as well as a magistrate, and just then the collector’s work was in a transition state, which en- tailed severe labour and tested every faculty. The great survey and settlement of the land was in progress ; boundaries were to be marked, every village measured and mapped, and registers of the area, the soil, the cultivators, the rent, the land-tax, in short, of all the facts and figures affecting the land, were to be made. How it happened that Lawrence was expected single-handed to ac- complish so vast a work I cannot tell. All that I can say is that when I was sent to help him, I cannot remember that he had any one to share his burden except his native officials, who in those days had purely ministerial powers in the revenue departments. For seven or eight months he lived amongst the agricultural classes in his tent, and thus mastered the detail of revenue work. I was younger than Lawrence, and had been only three or four years in India when I went to join him at Paniput. For very good reasons I shall never forget my first interview with my chief. He was, I was go- ing to say, in his shirt sleeves, only I am not sure that he wore a shirt in those days — I think he had a chupkun , or native undergarment — sur- rounded by what seemed to me a mob of natives, with two or three dogs at his feet, talking, writing, dictating — in short, doing cutcherry. 1834-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 53 After some talk with me he summed up thus : ‘ Now look at this map. Paniput district is divided into nine thanahs (police circuits): I give you these three at the north-western extremity, including the large canton- ment of Kurnal. I put the police and revenue work under you. Mind, you are not to get into rows with the military authorities. If you behave well to them, they will be civil to you. If you can keep crime down and collect your revenue in your share of the district, I will not interfere with you. If you want help, come to me. All reports of your own tha- nahs will be sent to you. I shall soon know what you are made of. Go, and do not be hard on the zemindars (landowners). Government rev- enue, of course, must be paid, but do not be hard : “ The calf gets the milk which is left in the cow.” Come and see me sometimes.’ Lawrence thus trusted me and taught me to trust myself. From that hour my fortune as a public officer was made. I learned my work under the ablest of masters, and shall ever gratefully remember the day which saw me installed as assistant to the young magistrate and collector of Paniput. John Lawrence remained in charge of the district which has been thus vigorously described for nearly two years (1835-37), and during the greater part of that time he was the sole British officer in charge of the administration. The district was in bad order when he came into it, for his predecessor had not been very competent. Part of it, moreover, had suffered from the drought of 1833 and 1834. ‘To bring people,’ says John Law- rence, ‘ who were impoverished and discontented into order and contentment ; to make them pay their land-tax punctually ; to deter, if not to wean, them from their habits of life, which were those of their ancestors for centuries ; to revise the assessment of the land-tax which had broken down, and at the same time to carry on and improve the general administration, was no light task.’ In his predecessor’s time the revenue had often been collected almost in the Sikh fashion, at the point of the sword. Soldiers and guns had been the ordinary accompaniments of the revenue- collector. This John Lawrence did not like, and he determined to get on without them. There was one walled village in par- ticular which was notorious for its recusancy. John Lawrence surrounded it by night with his own police, and, stationing a small knot of them on each track which led to the pastures, gave them strict orders to turn back into the village all the cat- tle as they came out in the early morning. The police did as they were told, and the village cowherds took back word that the orders of the Sahib were that no cattle were to be allowed 54 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 to go to pasture till the land-tax was paid. Another and an- other sortie was attempted by the cowherds, but always with the same result. Meanwhile the cattle were becoming more hungry and more obstreperous, and at last a deputation of the villagers came out and asked for an interview with the Sahib. It was granted ; but he soon found that they had come armed only with the usual non possumus ; they had no money and could not pay. ‘ Well,’ said the Sahib, ‘ I will let you go to the next vil- lage to borrow it, and if you bring back either the sum you owe or a bond from the banker to pay it for you within a certain day, well and good. Otherwise the cattle stay where they are.’ The deputation saw that the Sahib was in earnest, and soon re- turned with the money. The cattle were able, by two or three o’clock in the afternoon, to pass out to their long-delayed morning meal, and there was no more trouble in the collection of the revenue in that part of the district ; no need of guns, or soldiers, or even police. Another incident, told me by Sir Richard Pollock, is equally illustrative of the change produced in the Paniput district by the change of ruler. His predecessor, as I have said, had not been enough of a terror to evildoers ; crimes had increased pari passu with revenue arrears, and in his strenuous endeavours to introduce a complete reformation John Lawrence’s health broke down. One day a Haileybury contemporary, who was at work in an adjoining district, rode over to see him and found him ill in bed. Nothing seemed to interest or arouse him. In the course of a talk, which was all on one side, his friend hap- pened to mention that at a place where he had changed horses that morning he had found the stand of a fakir, and entering into a conversation with him had asked whether there was any- thing new stirring in the neighbourhood. ‘Indeed there is,’ replied the fakir ; ‘ Sahib is gone, and everybody regrets him ; for one, Larens Sahib, has come in his place who is quite a dif- ferent sort of man ; ’ and he then went on to draw a dismal pic- ture of the way in which rules were enforced, rogues punished, and revenue arrears collected. ‘ Such a recognition of my ef- forts by such a man,’ said John Lawrence, in telling the story, * acted upon me like a tonic, and I seemed to mend from that hour.’ Thus the work grew under John Lawrence’s hands, and the natives knew who was king. In the evening he used to hold what he called his durbar — that is, he would sit outside his 55 '834-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. tent in the loosest of loose dresses and talk by the hour to all comers. ‘ You Feringhis,' said an old chief to him one night, who had seen what he thought to be better days, ‘ are wonder- ful fellows ; here are two of you managing the whole country for miles round. When I was a young man we should have been going out four or five hundred horsemen strong to plun- der it.’ So entirely was John Lawrence thrown on the natives for society and for recreation during his Paniput life, that he seems to have half forgotten his own language. A young civil- ian, who called upon him one day on his way up the country, told John Thornton on his return that he had hardly been able to make out what Lawrence said to him, his conversation was so interspersed with Persian words and expressions. But the natives were not his only companions. If he had a good horse or a good dog he never felt alone ; and he took care in this sense of the word never to be alone. Ilis means at this time were small, and he never spent much upon himself ; but the sight of a fine Arab was, once and again, too much for him, as an incident he was fond of telling, and which has been handed on to me by Sir Richard Pollock, shows. One day a sheikh brought a batch of Arabs to his station, and one of the first visitors to the stables was, as a matter of course, the collector-magistrate. A particularly fine Arab, named Chanda, took his fancy ; but, as the price named for it was three thousand rupees, and no efforts could induce the owner to take a smaller sum, while all that John Lawrence pos- sessed in the world was two thousand rupees, he was obliged at last to go home disconsolate. On the way it occurred to him to make one effort more, and when he reached his home he got out his two money-bags, each containing a thousand rupees, put one bag on each side of him in his buggy, and drove straight back to the sheikh. As he stepped down he took care to shake the bags well and make the contents jingle in the old man’s ears, and explained again that he could pay down so much in cash and no more — that he had no more. The cheerful jingle of the rupees was too much for the dealer, and Lawrence went home the happy possessor of the Arab, but without a penny in the world that he could call his own. But Chanda was not so bad a bargain after all. On one occasion he saved his owner’s life. John Lawrence was gallop- ing home late one night, as his custom was, across country, when the Arab came to a dead stand, nearly shooting his rider 56 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 over his head. Lawrence tried to spur him on, but Chanda re- fused to move, and only after backing a good way, and then taking a considerable circuit, consented to continue in the for- mer direction. The night was very dark, and Lawrence, who had never known his horse do the like before, was a good deal puzzled. The next day he managed to make his way back to the place, when he found, to his horror, that he had ridden at full gallop right up to a large open underground tank or cis- tern, such as are not uncommon in that thirsty country, some thirty feet deep. One step more would have been the death of both horse and rider. And often afterwards, in looking over the points of a horse, he would draw attention to the full, round, prominent eye, able to take in rays of light invisible to man, which had caught sight of the yawning chasm immediately below him in that dark night. ‘ It was an eye like that,’ he said one day, as he was examining a fine horse’s head in Mr. Woolner’s studio, ‘which saved my life.’ The post of collector-magistrate of Paniput, which had hitherto been only an ‘ acting ’ one, now became permanently vacant, and John Lawrence, who had not been thought too young to reduce anarchy to order on a minimum of pay, was thought, as it seems, too young now that it had been so re- duced to keep things going and to receive the proper salary. And, to make the disappointment more complete, he was super- seded by a civilian who, having failed as a judge and having been deprived of the less onerous appointment, was now given the far more difficult post of collector and magistrate of Pani- put ! It was red tape with a vengeance ; but if it first gave John I,awrence the hatred of red tape which he certainly showed when he was in a position to burst through its bonds, it may be well for all concerned that the disappointment came upon him. Turned out of Paniput, John Lawrence reverted to his ‘sub- stantive ’ post as assistant magistrate and collector of Delhi, and many years afterwards he thus summed up what, as he thought, he had seen and done and gained in these first five years of work in India. During my charge of the Paniput district, I completed my training as a civil officer. It was a hard one, it is true, but one which I had no cause ever to regret. It has facilitated all my subsequent labours, no matter how varied, how onerous. I had become well acquainted with the duties of an administrator both in a large city and in an important 1 834-37 LIFE and adventures at paniput. 57 agricultural district. I had come in contact with all classes of the peo- ple, high and low. I had made acquaintance with most of the criminal classes, and understood their habits of life. I had seen all the different agricultural races of that part of India. I had learned to understand the peculiarities of the tenure of land, the circumstances of Indian agricul- ture, canal and well irrigation, as well as the habits, social customs, and leading characteristics of the people. During this period, I defined and marked off boundaries between village lands, which had been the cause of sanguinary feuds for generations ; I revised the revenue assessments of the land ; I superintended the collection of the revenue ; I had charge of the treasury; I sought out and brought to justice a number of great criminals ; I managed the police, and, in fact, under the humble desig- nation of magistrate and collector, was the pivot round which the whole administration of the district revolved. In the discharge of my multi- farious duties I visited, in all cases of more than ordinary difficulty, the very locality itself. For the most part, my only aids in all this work were the native collectors of the different subdivisions of the country. In addition to all these duties, I did what I could to relieve the sick. In those days we had no dispensaries, and the civil duty of the medical officer was limited to the charge of the jail. I used to carry about a good-sized medicine-chest, and, when the day’s work was over, was con- stantly surrounded by a crowd of people asking for relief for most of ‘ the ills to which flesh is heir.’ Many a poor creature I had thus to send away, simply from fear of doing him harm. Such was my daily life for nearly two years, and such were the lives of my brother civilians in adjacent districts. Half our time was spent in tents ; and every portion of our charges would at one time or the other be duly visited, so that in the event of any untoward accident, or serious crime, we could judge pretty correctly as to the peculiar circumstances connected with it. These were very happy days. Our time was fully occupied, and our work was of a nature to call forth all our energies, all our sympathies, and all our abilities. Our emoluments were relatively small, but the experience and the credit we gained stood us in good stead in after years. During this period I saw little of English society, finding that I could not enjoy it and also accomplish my work. Thus I seldom visited the cantonments except on urgent business, and then only, as a rule, for a single day. In those days I met with many curious adventures, and on some occasions was in considerable peril of life, but good fortune and careful management combined brought me success- fully out of them all. These last simple words are tantalizing enough. They sug- gest but they do not satisfy. How suggestive and how unsatis- fying I have the best of reasons for knowing, for old friends of John Lawrence have told me, alike in writing and in conversa- tion, that when he first came home from India on furlough he 58 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 used to pour forth a continuous flow of stories of hair-breadth escapes from assassination, from drowning, from wild beasts ; of great criminals hunted down ; of cattle-liftings on a gigantic scale ; of riots and raids ; of robberies and murders ; of thugs and dacoits ; of feats of his favourite dogs or horses, — all drawn directly from his own experience. And again, many years af- terwards, when he had retired, as he thought, from public life, and when a family of children was growing up around him at Southgate, or at Brocket Hall, it was their ordinary Sunday evening’s treat to hear one of these wonder-stirring adventures. ‘ What shall it be ? ’ he always used to begin by asking — ‘ a hunt, a robbery, or a murder ? ’ The children, with that appe- tite for the awe-inspiring which is one of the most pleasurable pains of childhood, and one of the most loved regrets of a later and a sadder age, generally first chose the murder. But their father had an abundant store of each kind from which to draw. Unfortunately it occurred to no one, either in those earlier days when few people thought that he would become great, or in later days when he had already become so, to write these stories down, and many of them are therefore irrecoverably lost to the world. But I am told that greybeards of the Delhi dis- trict, and of the Jullundur Doab still talk of his deeds of prowess and skill around the village well, and tell them to their chil- dren’s children. It may well therefore happen that some of these may go down to posterity, magnified and multiplied as they go, and that centuries hence Jan Larens may play in the North-West of India something of the part which the Trolls and Jotuns, or even Thor and Odin, have borne in the sad and serious European North; and that he may live for ever in Eastern song and fable along with the great heroes of the long past, Zal and Rustum, Solomon and the two-horned Iskander. It would be well if an immortality of the kind had always been as well deserved — acquired, that is, by deeds at which no one need blush, and for which no human being was the worse, and many were much the better. What a diary John Lawrence’s would have been during this early period of his life, had he had the patience to keep one ! But fortunately his adventures, even in the absence of all diaries and contemporary letters, need not be wholly lost to his coun- trymen. When, after the death of the Arabian prophet, dis- putes arose as to the meaning of a Sura, or the binding char- acter of a Tradition, and no answer could be obtained from the 1834-37 LIFE and adventures at paniput. 59 shoulder-of-mutton bones, or the oyster-shells or the bits of wood, or the leaves of trees, on which the Sacred Message had been originally written, recourse was had to ‘ the breasts of the faithful,’ and there a satisfactory answer or explanation was often found. From ‘the breasts of the faithful’ scattered everywhere help has been, I think I may say, as diligently sought by me as it has been freely given. From the breasts of Montgomery and Cust, of Trevelyan and Raikes, of Thornton and Pollock, and several other of his earlier friends ; from the recollections of his wife and children ; from a host of his later friends in England ; not least, from his devoted lady-secretary, — I have gathered up such fragments as I could of the history of his earlier and more adventurous career ; and from these, as well as from my own recollections of his conversation, and from five or six stories, which, shortly after his marriage, with the aid of his ever- ready and faithful helper, he himself committed to writing, I am able to give some slight idea of the dauntless tracker of criminals, of the ‘mighty hunter before the Lord,’ of the giant in strength and in courage, in roughness and in kindliness, in sport and in work, which John Lawrence then was. No Samson, no Hercules, no Milo, no Arthur, can have had more stories of personal prowess, of grim humour, of the relief of the distressed, to tell than he. Physically he was a Hercules himself, as the noble busts of him by Mr. Woolner, and the re- markable portrait by Mr. Watts, which, it is to be hoped, will, some day, become the property of the nation, may still show to those who have never had the opportunity of seeing the man himself. Physical strength, commanding height, activity of body, elements of power as they are everywhere, are nowhere more potent than among the natives of India, whether among the enervated Bengalis, who can at least admire in others what they do not possess themselves, or among the wiry Sikhs and relentless Afghans, who can hardly fail to appreciate that of which they themselves possess so large a share. And when these physical characteristics are combined with others, moral and intellectual, which are conspicuously wanting in most In- dian races — with absolute truthfulness in word and deed, with active benevolence, with a sagacity which is the result not of mere shrewdness, but of untiring honesty of purpose, with boundless devotion to duty and hard work— their possessor be- comes a power indeed in the land. On board the ship on which John Lawrence first went out 6o LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 to India, he used, even when weakened by sea-sickness, to astonish the passengers by the ease with which he could hold out at arm’s length a cannon-ball which few of them could lift at all. Excitement sometimes lent him almost a preternatural degree of strength. One night an Indian village was in flames ; all' efforts to extinguish it were useless, and an old woman, finding that neither she nor her belongings fiad the strength to carry out a sack of corn, almost all the worldly goods she possessed, from her cottage, sat down upon it, determined, like the Roman senators of old, to perish with her household goods. John Lawrence, who just then appeared upon the scene, in a sudden access of strength, like the Samson that he was, caught up the sack, and, like his prototype with the gates of Gaza, carried it to a safe distance from the burning house. The old woman, finding that her sack of corn was saved, was no longer unwill- ing to save herself, and John Lawrence, going the next day to the spot, found that he was quite unable even to lift the sack from off the ground ! But these anecdotes indicate mere bodily strength. Here is one which implies something more. Shortly after his appointment as Collector of Delhi, a lawless chief in an outlying and desert part of the country refused to pay his land-tax. Attended only by a single orderly — for he seldom took more — John Lawrence rode thither, a distance of some thirty miles, very early in the morning, to demand or to en- force payment. The village was walled, the gates were shut and barred, and not even his strength was able to force an en- trance. What was he to do ? To go back would be a confession of defeat and would encourage other neighbouring chiefs to give similar trouble. On the other hand, it was the hottesi season of the year. There was no food, no shelter, no shade outside the walls except that of a single sickly babul tree. Finally, there were no troops within thirty miles. lie sent a hasty note by his orderly back to Delhi asking for some guns, and then sat down under the babul tree, exactly opposite the principal gate, a single man beleaguering or threatening a forti- fied post ! The fierce sun of India had done its worst, and was fast subsiding towards the horizon, but still no guns appeared, and still the resolute Collector sat on. At last the chief of a neighbouring village approached and offered, should the Sahib so will, to help him to reduce his subjects to submission. John Lawrence, knowing that in India, as elsewhere, jealousy is a 1834-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 6l ruling motive among neighbouring potentates, accepted his offer for what it was worth. The result of a mereshowof force, backed up by John Lawrence’s stern resolution, was the sub- mission of the recusant chieftain, the infliction of a fine over and above the land-tax, and the return of the Collector in tri- umph to Delhi, after winning a bloodless victory, and without even the news, which has so often struck terror into the native breast, having reached the village, that the ‘guns were coming.’ Years afterwards, when the Collector of Delhi had risen to be Chief-Commissioner of the Punjab, and had just succeeded in winning back Delhi from the mutineers, a list of rebel chiefs who had been sentenced to death was presented to him for his signature. The first name on the list attracted his attention, for it was that of the Goojur chieftain who had given him sitch timely aid twenty years before ; and he struck his name off the list and spared his life. So much for the way in which John Lawrence managed the turbulent chieftains of his district. Now for a story illustrative of the manner in which he detected crime in a different stratum of native society. I have pointed out already how numerous were the criminal classes in the Delhi district, and have endeav- oured to indicate the circumstances which had tended, for a cen- tury past, to attract them thither and to give immunity to their crimes. The story which I am about to relate is one of a col- lection of four or five which Mrs. John Lawrence took down from her husband’s dictation at Delhi in the spring of 1845, with a view to the amusement of a younger generation who were just then beginning to appear. I give it in full as an illustra- tion as well of John Lawrence’s style in storytelling as of his energy and sagacity in action. The Brothers. I think it was in the month of June, 1835, during my magistracy of the district of Paniput, in the North-West Provinces of India, when a murder occurred which interested me so much that, though many years have elapsed, I recollect the whole circumstances of the case as if they had occurred yesterday. The night being sultry, I had ordered my bed to be placed outside the bungalow, in the open air. This is a practice common in India when the nights, as at that season, are very hot and dry; and, however dangerous it may appear to people in Europe, is there done with perfect impunity. I had undressed in my room, and having put on my night-clothes, which in that part of India consist of a complete suit, covering the per- 62 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 son from top to toe, was walking towards my bed, preceded by my old bearer, or valet, carrying the wax taper. Suddenly we were disturbed by the appearance of my khansama, Ali Khan, who, rushing forward with pallid face and faltering tongue, explained that, on his way to the town, he had just witnessed a murder close to my gate. I was inclined at first to doubt his story, but on questioning him further was convinced that it was too true. Ali Khan explained that, after seeing everything settled for the night, he was on his way to his house in the town when his attention was called to a scuffle between several persons a little in front of him. Being alarmed, he squatted down and watched, when he saw three or four men knock another down and cut his throat, after which they decamped. On seeing this he had immediately run back to give the alarm. After hearing his account I exclaimed, ‘ Ai pajee ! (you low fellow) why did you not run and help?’ Ali Khan replied, * I was not armed, and therefore could give no assistance, and if I had cried out they would have killed me also.’ On hearing this I immediately sent him off to turn out the guard, dis- patched the old bearer for my pistols, and taking the taper from him, without waiting to dress, ran off towards the place the khansama had pointed out. On arriving I found the body lying on the face, weltering in its blood, and covered with wounds. The countenance was cut and slashed in every direction, the head was nearly severed from the body; and even the hands and arms and legs were covered with wounds. As I stooped down to examine the corpse, which was still warm, a sudden gust of wind blew out my candle. Seeing therefore that nothing could be done till assistance arrived, I sat down, and after a few minutes which, in my impatience, seemed an hour, I discovered the bearer run- ning along with my pistols. The old fellow did not seem to like the business, for after every few yards he stopped and looked back, loudly vociferating for the guard. However, on hearing me call, he became more assured and ran up to me. In a short time a part of the guard appeared, half-armed and half-dressed, with flambeaux and torches. By this time the moon began to rise and cast her light over the plain, which was of much assistance to us. The first thing was to examine the ground, and, the soil being light and sandy, we had no difficulty in tracking the murderers for some distance. In India the science of track- ing, whether it be the marks of man or beast, is well understood, and I have known such adepts in the art as to be able to follow a track for hundreds of miles, and that too when a person unskilled in the art could discern nothing. I was once, with a party of villagers and police, following a number of Thugs who had murdered five travellers on the preceding night. The ground was hard and covered with grass, and, beyond the marks of a struggle here and there, I could discern nothing, yet the men who were with us, after minutely examining the spot, carried the traces for many miles. On the way they told me the number of men, women, children, and ponies of which the party consisted, and, strange to say, on their 1S34-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 63 apprehension, which took place the next day, the description turned out right in every particular. However, to return to my story : we found that the murdered man was on his way from the city to my house, that he had come to a certain point alone, when he was suddenly attacked by several men. He had run some distance, when one of them headed and turned him towards the others. Here he had fought and been killed. The distance we ex- amined was some two or three hundred yards, and in this space we found one of his shoes, three other pairs, the scabbard of a sword, and two bludgeons covered with sword-cuts and blood. By this time it was near twelve o’clock ; the moon had risen bright and cold, and we were grouped round the body. I felt much distressed : our search had ended in nothing ; we had no definite clue to the mur- derers ; and so dreadfully was the face disfigured, that we could not discover the probable caste and profession of the man, much less who he was. I had in my time seen many cases of murder, but the present one seemed fairly to puzzle me. To think that a man should be mur- dered almost within a stone’s-throwr of my door and that the murderers should escape detection was more than I well could submit to. I sat down on a stone, directing some of the sepoys to clean the dead man’s face and try to make out who he might be. What increased the difficulty was that the body was nearly naked, having nothing but a ‘ dhoty ’ or linen cloth round the loins. The evening having been warm, he had evidently been walking in this state — a practice in that country very common with all classes, from the highest to the lowest. After rubbing and cleaning the face for some time, one of the guard attached to the Collector’s office called out, ‘ Why, I verily believe it is our com- rade Ram Sing ! I am sure I know the curl of his moustache ; he was smoking with me only this evening.’ After much discussion it seemed to be the opinion of the majority that it was Ram Sing, though some still doubted. So much, however, was agreed to by all, that he was missing, and that the deceased was about his size. Taking it for grant- ed that it was Ram Sing, we began speculating who could be the mur- derers. I remarked, ‘ Whoever they may be, it was clearly from revenge they murdered him, or they never w'ould have mangled his body in this way.’ One of the men added, ‘ The man who outran and turned him must be a great runner, for Ram Sing was an active fellow.’ ‘ Yes,’ says an- other, ‘ I see one of the shoes has an iron heel and no one but a constant runner w^ould need such a thing.’ Hearing this, I began to consider what class of men would come under this description, when it occurred to me that the post throughout the country was carried by footmen. Turning round, I remarked, ‘ The “ dawk wallahs” (postmen) are great runners : had he a feud with any of them ? ’ A sepoy instantly ex- claimed, ‘ Ram Sing had a brother named Bulram, a postman, with whose wife, as people say, he wras rather too intimate.’ ‘ Pooh ! ’ says another, ‘ that is an old business, which Bulram well knew. Besides, 64 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 who would kill his brother for such a thing ? ’ Now it is specially neces- sary to remark that such connections, however monstrous in our eyes, are very common among the Jats, to whom the brothers belonged. Among them it is the practice that when an elder brother dies the younger lives with the wife, even though he be already married. Owing to this, such illicit connections as that which existed between Ram Sing and his brother’s wife were neither so much thought of among them- selves nor so much reprobated as might be supposed. Though I well knew this, I was at once satisfied that we had the right clue at last ; so, sending the greater part of the men back to the house, and ordering a horse to be sent after me, I determined to follow up the search. We immediately started for the town, which was about half a mile distant, and directed our steps to Bulram’s house. Here we found the wife, who said she had not seen her husband that day, that he was probably at the post-house, and that the brother had been down that evening, had eaten his food with her, and left the house at about ten P.M., on his way to guard. She added that, while Ram Sing had been with her, another post-carrier, a friend of her husband, had come and inquired after him, but, finding he was not at home, had left imme- diately. Disappointed here, we bent our steps to the post-house. On entering the courtyard we found a number of the carriers lying on the ground fast asleep, and Bulram, the person we were in search of, quietly seated in a corner smoking his hookah. I immediately went up and addressed him on some indifferent topics, but so calm and self-possessed were his replies, that I began to think I was in error, and that he could not have committed the deed. However, taking up a lamp I looked steadily at his countenance. Though he knew my gaze was on him, he never moved a muscle, but continued smoking with apparent apathy, while his eye, which met mine, never quailed an instant. One of the sepoys standing by me broke the silence by exclaiming, ‘ Bulram, don’t you see it is the hazoor (his Honour), and yet you re- main seated ! ’ Bulram never moved, nor, indeed, appeared as if he heard him. I put down my hand, and, touching him on the shoulder, said, ‘ Stand up, Bulram, I want to look at you.’ I had till then been stooping over him, as he was squatting in the usual native style on the ground, and it oftly then occurred to me that he must have some reason for remaining in that posture. Bulram immediately stood up and, as he had nothing but the usual cloth about his loins, the upper part of his body was naked. I put my hand on his heart and said, * What is the matter that your heart beats so violently ? ’ He replied, * I have been bathing, and, fearing to be late at the post, ran up all the way.’ With all his composure and readiness of reply, there was something about his manner which brought back all my former suspicions. I stood atten- tively looking at him, when, all at once, I perceived a quantity of blood on his groin, which seemed to be welling out from under his dhoty. Pointing at the blood, 1 said, ‘ Ah, Bulram, what means this ? ’ He 1834-37 LIFE and adventures at paniput. 65 gazed at me for an instant and then said, ‘ Don’t trouble yourself, rnaino usko mara (I killed him).’ Putting up my hand for everyone to remain silent, I said, ‘ Whom did you kdl ? ’ He replied, ‘ Ram Sing, my brother ; I killed him.’ I added, 1 Why, what had he done ? ’ He said, ‘ He was intimate with my wife, therefore I killed him.’ On this he was handcuffed, and, leaving the house, I mounted my horse, which had arrived in the interim, and set out towards home. On the way I questioned him as to how it was that his accomplices had escaped, but that he had not attempted to fly. He replied, ‘ How could I know that you would have tracked me out in this way ? They have not escaped, they are in the post-house on the high road.’ Having as- certained who they were, I instantly despatched four horsemen to the place, about four miles off, to seize them. On arriving at my house, I took the necessary depositions of the parties and Bulram’s confession. At two A.M. I had just retired to sleep, when 1 was awakened by the return of the policemen with the other murderers. Hearing, however, that they stoutly denied their guilt, and that nothing had been found on their persons to criminate them, I ordered them to be secured, and went to sleep. In the morning the prisoners were confronted with Bulram, who steadily persisted in his story of the previous night, which the others as resolutely denied. In the meantime a party of trackers came in and reported that they had followed the traces from the place where the murder was perpetrated ; that it appeared that one man had returned direct to the city, and that two, after a considerable circuit, had gone into the post-house. I then rode down to the place with some careful men, and, after a diligent and protracted search, they found buried under the earthen floor of one of the sheds the murdered man’s turban, necklace, sword, a couple of bludgeons spotted with blood and covered with deep cuts, as if from a sword or other sharp instrument. On these things being produced the prisoners, who had till then denied, acknowl- edged the truth of Bulram’s statement. One of them said that, being friends of Bulram’s, they had gone at his request to assist him ; that they had no enmity to the murdered man, but had acted merely from friendship to his brother. He added that he had gone to the wife during the day under the pretence of asking for her husband, who was standing at a little distance waiting for him, but in reality to see if Ram Sing were in the house ; that they then went and lay in the ditch by the side of the road until Ram Sing passed, when they sprang out on him ; that Ram Sing, though surprised, resisted des- perately until overpowered and knocked down ; and that as he fell he wounded his brother in the groin. It was from this wound that the blood which I saw and supposed to be from the wounded man, had flowed, and to conceal which Bulram had continued seated when I was talking to him. During the day the wretched woman, the cause of this horrid deed, hearing of the death of her lover, came and asked to see his body. She Vol. I. — s 66 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 embraced and kissed it repeatedly, crying bitterly, and seemed to have no thought but for his untimely death. In the course of the subsequent investigation many facts were elicited which, in a measure, seemed to palliate the crime of Bulram. It appeared that the intimacy had ex- isted many years, during which the husband had been perfectly aware of it. In the preceding year there had been a severe famine in the land, during which the husband, who was out of employ, was, with his wife, supported by Ram Sing, who lived with them. Some time, however, previous to the murder Bulram had objected to the intercourse with his wife, on which the brother had promised never again to visit the house. The wife, on hearing this, immediately left her husband and took refuge with her father, where, in spite of the entreaties of her own family and her husband, she insisted on remaining. The husband, seeing her de- termination, went to his brother, told him what had taken place, and begged he would come with him and use his influence with the wife, adding, ‘ You can come to see us as before, are you not my brother ? did you not save us from starving ? ’ The wife on this returned with them, and a few days afterwards the catastrophe I have related took place. The murderers were made over for trial to the circuit court, where Bulram, the husband, was sentenced to be hanged, and the other two to imprisonment for life. Such is my tale. It created a great sensation at the time, and Ram Sing's fate was universally regretted, whereas no one seemed to pity Bulram. The general feeling appeared to be, ‘ Was not Ram Sing his brother ? — how could he murder him ? ’ Delhi : March 4, 1845. Nor were John Lawrence’s zeal and activity confined to his own district, vast as it was. He sometimes made work or sought it for himself outside the Paniput district, and with the best results. Here is an instance. It attracted much at- tention at the time from the high position held by the mur- dered man, and from the romantic circumstances which led to the detection of the murderer. John Lawrence was fond of tell- ing the story, and more than one version of it has, I believe, appeared in print. From the last of these, which appeared in * Blackwood’s Magazine’ for January, 1878, and came then fresh from Lord Lawrence’s lips, I gather and condense the following, adding one or two characteristic incidents which seem in his old age to have escaped his memory, but were certainly told by him as part of the story on other occasions. On the morning of March 23, 1835, John Lawrence was just going to his bath at Paniput after many hours of work, when he received a brief note in Persian from one of his police, stat- ing that news had come from Delhi that on the preceding even- 6; 1834-37 LIFE and adventures at paniput. ing, as William Fraser, the Commissioner, was returning from a visit to a neighbouring Raja, a native trooper had ridden up to him and, firing his carbine into his ‘sacred body,’ had killed him on the spot. William Fraser was a man of great force of character and deservedly popular among all classes, though his regard for the poor had often brought him into collision with members of the aristocracy. He was also a great friend of John Lawrence. Grieved at the loss of his friend, and thinking that his intimate acquaintance with every corner of Delhi might be of assistance in discovering the murderer, Lawrence instantly ordered his horse, and rode off to Delhi beneath the blazing sun, a distance of forty miles. There he learned from Thomas Metcalfe and from Simon Fraser, the two senior civil officers left in the sta- tion, that no clue to the murderer had yet been found, and that though some Goojurs — a race famed for their skill as trackers — had succeeded in following the footprints of his horse from the scene of the murder for some distance in the direction of Delhi, they had failed to trace them beyond a point where several roads met. This did not look promising. A casual remark which had been made by one, Futteh Khan, to Metcalfe, to the effect that he should not wonder if his nephew, the Nawab of Ferozepore, knew something about the murder, was reported to Lawrence. Metcalfe had dismissed it from his mind as suggested by mo- tives of private animosity, but John Lawrence fastened upon it like a leech, and soon discovering that the Nawab had had a quarrel with William Fraser about some land, he forthwith proceeded with Simon Fraser to a house in Delhi which be- longed to that chieftain. They found no one in the courtyard, nor did any voice from within answer their repeated calls. Simon Fraser entered the house, and, during his absence, John Lawrence, sauntering up to a spot in the yard where a fine chestnut horse was tethered, began to examine his points, and soon noticed some nail- marks on a part of the hoof where they are not usually found. It flashed across him in an instant that it had been reported that Dick Turpin had sometimes reversed the shoes of his horse’s hoofs to put his pursuers off the scent, and at that same moment one of the Goojurs, picking up a straw, measured carefully both the hind and fore hoofs. ‘ Sahib,’ he cried, ‘ there is just one straw’s difference in breadth between them, 68 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 the very thing that we observed in the tracks on the road ; this must be the animal ridden by the murderer.’ While this was being said and done, a trooper in undress lounged up and, in reply to a question or two, told John Lawrence that he was an orderly of the Nawab of Ferozepore, and that he had been sent by his master on a special mission to the city. ‘ This is a nice horse,’ said Lawrence. ‘ Yes,’ replied the man, ‘ he is a fine horse, but he is very weak and off his feed ; he has been able to do no work for a week.’ The appear- ance of the horse, so John Lawrence thought, gave the lie to this, and espying at a little distance its saddle and other har- ness lying on the ground, he went up to it and, finding that the nosebag underneath the heap was full of corn, quietly slung it over the horse’s head. The ‘ sickly ’ animal began to eat greedily. Here was one link more, and, without saying any- thing to excite the trooper’s suspicion, he induced him to ac- company him to the cutcherry, where he ordered his immediate arrest. Some fragments of note-paper, which Simon Fraser had meanwhile picked up in a bucket of water in the house, were now fitted together by the two men. The ink had been all but obliterated by the water, but some chemicals revived it, and revealed the words written in Persian, ‘ You know the object for which I sent you into Delhi ; and I have repeatedly told you how very important it is for me that you should buy the dogs. If you have not done so, do it without delay.’ It hardly needed John Lawrence’s penetration, with the threads which he already held in his hands, to discover that ‘ the dogs ’ were the Commissioner, whose life the trooper had been too long in taking, and, on his suggestion, a message was sent to the Nawab saying that his presence in Delhi was neces- sary, as a servant of his, Wassail Khan by name, was suspected of the murder of the Commissioner. The Nawab obeyed the summons, but of course he backed up the trooper in his denial, and disclaimed all knowledge of the murder. Inquiries which were set on foot in the Nawab’s territories, while he was detained in Delhi, soon showed that a second man on foot, whose name was Unyah Mco, was believed to have been present at the time of the murder. He was a free- booter, well known for his extraordinary strength and ileetness of foot. lie had disappeared on that very night, and had not been seen since. Colonel Skinner, the well-known comman- 1834-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 69 dant of Skinner's Irregular Horse, was charged with the duty of searching for him. His whereabouts was soon discovered, communications opened with him, and promises of pardon made if he would give himself up and turn King’s evidence^ against the murderer. Not long afterwards a man appeared by night and said, 4 I am Unyah Meo, I will go with you.’ His story was soon told, and, simple truth as it was, it reads like a story from Herodotus about the ancient Persian court, or like a tale from the ‘Arabian Nights,’ rather than what it really was. He had been sent, as it appeared, by the Nawab, with instructions to accompany the trooper on all occasions, and should the first shot fail to kill the Commissioner, who was not likely, with his well-known character, to die easily, he was to run in and despatch him with his sword. Wassail Khan’s first shot had passed clean through the ‘sacred body ’ of the Commis- sioner, so Unyah Meo’s services were not required ; but he hur- ried off at once to tell his master that the deed was done. All that night and a good part of the next day he ran, and towards the evening arrived at the Nawab’s fort at Ferozepore, ninety miles distant. He went straight to the door of the Nawab’s room, and demanded immediate admittance, as he had news of importance to communicate. A thick curtain only shut off the presence-chamber from the ante-room, and as the orderly entered, Unyah Meo, with the suspicion natural to one of his profession, lifted up very slightly a corner of the curtain and bent down, all eye, all ear, for what might follow. He heard the Nawab give orders that on his leaving the room he should on no account be allowed to leave the fort. Well know- ing that, now that the deed was done, his death would be more serviceable to his master than his life, Unyah felt that this order was a sentence of death, and the moment he had told his story, and had been promised a large reward — for which he was to wait till the following morning — he slipped quietly down a back way, managed to leave the fort unobserved, and ran for his life to his cottage in the jungle, some seven miles away. He was tired out by the ninety miles he had run already ; but fear gave him fresh strength and speed, and he reached his home just in time for his wives — of whom he was blessed with a pair — to take him up to the flat roof of the house and conceal him under some bundles of straw. Soon the troopers, whose pursuing feet he had seemed to hear close behind him, appeared upon the scene. But the wives, Rahab-like, kept the 7 o LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 secret well, and Unyah, after a night’s rest, escaped, like the spies, to the hills, and defied every effort to find him till he gave himself up of his own accord, in the manner I have al- ready described, to the commander of Skinner’s Horse. His story was borne out by the accidental discovery of the carbine which had been used by Wassail Khan, under circum- stances which were quite in keeping with the other marvellous features of the case. A woman was drawing water from a well close to the Cabul gate of Delhi ; the rope broke, the bucket fell into the water, and the hook used to recover it brought up, not the bucket, but the missing carbine ! Other people de- posed that they had seen the trooper return on the night of the murder with his horse — the horse which could neither work nor eat ! — in a tremendous lather, as though from a long or rapid ride. The Nawab and his trooper still stoutly denied all knowledge of the crime, but they were tried by a special com- missioner, found guilty, and hanged together before the Cash- mere gate of the city. It is a story which John Lawrence might well be fond of telling, and it is not without a strange and tragic interest to remark that Simon Fraser, the younger brother,* who had helped him in the search, was the very man who twenty-two years later, when he in his turn was Commissioner of Delhi, was to fall one of the first victims to the fury of the mutineers in the Mogul’s palace on May 11, 1857. It did not need a similar displhy of sagacity on John Lawrence’s part to discover, on that occasion, who the murderers were, for the deed and its accompaniments seemed to shake our Indian Empire to its base ; but it did need all his sagacity, all his courage, and all his other manly qualities to undo what they had done ; and how he was equal to the occasion will appear in the second volume of this biography. Here is a story of another pursuit which, though it failed in its immediate object— the arrest of the criminal — served, when put side by side with the preceding, to deepen the feelings of admiration with which the natives regarded their intrepid and dare-devil ruler. There was a notorious robber in the district of Paniput whom John Lawrence was anxious to seize. The man had been caught once, but his wife had bribed the guard and he had escaped. He had committed several murders, and, one day, John Lawrence, receiving information that he was to sleep that 1834-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 7l night in a cottage not far distant, at once organised a party of horse and foot and, without communicating his intention to any one, started about ten at night for the village. It was a fine moonlight night, and a few miles’ ride brought them to a river which must needs be crossed. Lawrence had hoped to find boats on the spot, but they had been taken away to a neighbour- ing fair, and only one small boat was left, which, though it was large enough to carry the foot police across, would have to take many trips if it was to carry over the horsemen also. Time pressed. ‘We must swim it,’ said John Lawrence. I Iis followers demurred ; said there were quicksands, said the stream was too rapid, and they would all be swept away. ‘Well, you cowards may do what you like, but I am going,’ said John, and in he plunged and swam his horse out into mid stream. The russeldar, seeing this, took courage, said it was a shame to leave the Sahib to go forward alone, and crying out, * I fear we shall both be drowned ! ' he too plunged in on horseback and was followed by the others. But his fears were not altogether ill-grounded : the horsemen had nearly reached the other side in safety when they came on one of the quicksands. This im- mediately scattered the whole body of them. Some managed to ford over, some were thrown from their horses, and all was confusion. Lawrence’s horse was a powerful animal, and plunged so violently that his rider was thrown into the river, and with great difficulty reached the bank. There he found the horsemen all assembled, and said to them, ‘You see we are all safe after all.’ ‘No,’ was the reply, ‘the russeldar is drowned.’ * What ! ’ said Lawrence, ‘ the bravest of the whole lot of you ! Let us go in again and see if we can save him.’ But none of them would stir ; they looked on with that placid indifference with which Orientals often regard the fate of other people, and — it must be added in fairness— often also their own, and in spite of the objurgations of the magistrate, they showed no intention of risking their own lives to save that of their comrade. Once more John Lawrence plunged in on foot, and soon per- ceived the russeldar struggling at a short distance from the bank. He had got under his horse, and though he managed to keep his head above water, he was evidently fast losing his strength and senses. John swam to him and supported him by main strength till his syce brought a rope, and then they succeeded in dragging the drowning man to land. He thus 7 2 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 saved the man’s life, but got a bad kick from the plunging horse. In much pain he pursued his way to the village, and found that, though ‘ the nest was still warm ’ and the wife and children were within, the object of his search was not at home. The fact was, the night was sultry and the man had gone up to the top of the house to sleep. A few minutes after he was seen looking over the parapet, and as quick as thought John Lawrence was on the roof and full tilt after him. The murderer, a man of great strength and stature, as well as speed, ran along the roofs of the houses, which were all flat and joined each other. Finding that his pursuer was close behind him, and knowing the ground well, the man jumped down. Lawrence followed him, but jumped too far, and, alighting on a declivity, managed to dislocate his ankle, thus rendering further pursuit hopeless. The robber escaped for the time, but was caught not long afterwards. But in any case John Lawmence lost no caste in the eyes of his fol- lowers. They only wondered the more at the uncanny, the un- accountable eccentricities of the man who could have the cour- age to hang a raja, and yet risk his life to save a russeldar ! I conclude this chapter with the story of one more adventure — the discovery of a robber — which is hardly less striking than those which I have already related. It is one which I have heard Lord Lawrence tell himself, as none but he could tell it. But I prefer to give it in the more strictly accurate form in which it has come into my hands, having been written down, like the story of ‘ The Brothers,’ by Mrs. John Lawrence, at her husband’s dictation, in the spring of 1845, only a few years, that is, after the events related in it happened. It contains incident- ally some interesting personal details, and is rich in its obser- vation of the native character. The Widow and her Money-bags. It was my practice in India, where everyone who wishes to preserve health either walks or rides early in the morning, instead of taking a mere constitutional (as it is called), to endeavour to join that object with business, or, at any rate, with amusement. There was always some end in view — a village to visit, a new road to be made, or an old one to be repaired, the spot where a murder had been perpetrated to be examined. If I was in tents, making my annual visits in the interior of the district, which seldom occupied less than five months of the year, there was plenty to engage the attention. I seldom failed to visit every village 1834-37 LIFE and adventures at paniput. 73 within a circle of seven or eight miles before the camp moved on an- other march. Their locality, the nature of their soil, their means of irrigation — a point of much importance in the East— the general appear- ance of the inhabitants, and the character they bore among their neigh- bours, were all points on which 1 was much interested ; for all such information was of infinite value in the performance of my daily duties. I had in truth so much to occupy me, or, what is pretty much the same thing, made so much occupation for myself, that, though often the sole European in the district, and literally without any one with whom 1 could exchange a word in my native tongue, I do not think that I ever felt listless for a day. 1 sometimes rode alone, but more frequently with a single horseman, who either carried my rifle or boar spear. Thus, if anything in the way of game turned up, I did not lose a chance ; and if a messenger was required, or anything was to be done, an active fellow was always ready. More than once I have in this way brought home a buck ; and many is the good run I have had with wolf, hyena, and wild boar. It would have no doubt enhanced the pleasure to have had a friend with whom to contest the spear, and to talk over the turns and chances of the field when ended. Still, when I look back on those days, it is surprising how much I enjoyed them in my comparative solitude. Nor was I thus always lonely. At times a friend or two from the near- est station would pass a week with me, or a rendezvous on the borders of contiguous districts would be arranged among us, and then the woods would ring with whoop and cry and wild halloa. Oh, those were pleas- ant days ! I hope some are still in store for me, for the easy, quiet, jog- trot life does not answer for one who has lived a life of action. I recom- mend all my friends to think twice before they leave India; at any rate, until they feel themselves growing old, or want a pair of crutches. It is but a melancholy pleasure, after all, merely looking back upon such scenes. However, to return to my story, from which I have strangely digressed My follower was instructed to ride at a respectful distance, so that I might freely converse with anyone I might pick up by the way. One or more of the headmen, or some of the proprietors of the village I was visiting, usually mounted his mare, and rode with me to the next vil- lage ; thus acting as a guide, and at the same time beguiling the tedium of the way, often with useful information, at any rate with amusing gossip. I had one morning mounted my horse for such an expedition, but had not proceeded far when I met the kotwal, or chief police-officer, of the neighbouring town, bustling along in quite unwonted haste. On seeing me, after making the usual salutations, he reported that a burglary had occurred in the town during the previous night, and that he was anxious that I should visit the spot myself, as neither he nor any of the police could make anything of the case. I at once assented, and as we rode along I ascertained that the party robbed was a poor widow, who, with her niece, lived in a large and sub- 74 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 stantial but rather dilapidated house in the neighbouring town. The robbery, it seemed, had created much sensation, from the circumstance that the widow asserted that she had lost a large sum of money, whereas she had hitherto been deemed miserably poor. ‘ Some of the neighbours,’ remarked the policeman, ‘ deny that she has been robbed at all, and indeed to me it appears suspicious ; I suspect there is some fareb (de- ceit) in the matter. Where could such a helpless creature get so much money ? It was but the other day that she was exempted from her quota of the watch-tax, as mooflis (a beggar), and now she asserts that she has lost one thousand and fifty rupees.’ ‘ Well, well,’ said I, ‘ that will do ; we will hear what she has to say for herself. Don’t you pretend to make out that she was not robbed. I suppose there are marks about the house of a forcible entry ? ’ * Oh, yes,’ he replied, ‘ I don’t deny there is a hole in the wall by which the door has been opened. There were two marks of footsteps about the interior of the courtyard, but the ground was so hard, we could make nothing of it. I have, however, sent for the khojia (tracker), and if anything is to be discovered, I am sure he is the man to do it.’ By this time we had arrived at the house, where we found some police- men, some of the neighbours, and the widow. The khojia, or personage celebrated far and near for his powers of recognising and tracing the marks of biped and quadruped, had already examined the premises. He informed me that the footsteps were difficult to trace, from the hardness of the soil, as well as from the passing and repassing of the people ; but that he had satisfied himself that there had been two thieves, that the two had entered the house, but that only one appeared to have left it, and that he had followed those traces, through various turnings and windings, till they finally stopped at the house of a man who was said to be the nephew of the widow herself. He then showed me the different marks, from the interior of the widow’s house up to the very threshold of that of the nephew. There were certainly some traces, but so very indistinct to my eye that I could form no opinion. The tracker, how- ever, seemed perfectly convinced. ‘ One foot,’ he observed, ‘ is small and delicate, which goes to the nephew’s house ; the other, a large, broad foot, I cannot trace beyond the courtyard.’ The nephew was summoned, his foot was compared with the print, the khojia insisted that it exactly corresponded, and it certainly answered to the description he had previously given. We then entered the house and carefully examined the premises. The thieves, it seemed, had picked a small hole in the side of the wall, so as to admit a man’s hand, and had thus opened the outer door. It was clear that the theft was perpetrated by some one who was well ac- quainted with the premises, for the money had been concealed in three earthen pots, buried in the ground floor within a small recess. The ground had been dug up in the exact spot where the pots lay, and it must have been the work of only a few minutes, for they were close to the surface. It seemed that there was some suspicion of the nephew in 1 834—37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 75 the mind of both the old woman and her neighbours, for he was a man of reckless and dissolute habits. 4 But, widow,’ I said, ‘ did he know of your treasures ? — did he know of the place where you concealed them ? ’ ‘ No,’ she replied to my query, 4 I can’t say he did. I never let him come into the house for many years, though he has sometimes come as near as the door, and asked me to make friends ; but I was afraid of him, and never let him pass my threshold.’ 4 Well,’ 1 remarked, 4 it seems a bad business. That you have been robbed is evident, but there seems no clue as to who did it ; and as to your loss, you must have told a lie, for I hear it was only a few months ago that, under the plea of destitution, you were exempted from the watch-tax.’ 4 My lord,’ replied the widow, 4 it is very true that I pleaded poverty, and poor enough I am ; nevertheless I have been robbed of a thousand and fifty rupees. You may believe me or not, as you please; my history is this. Some forty years ago, or more, my husband was a merchant, well-to-do in this town ; but after a time his affairs fell into disorder, and when he died his creditors seized everything but this house in payment for his debts. When dying, he told me that certain moneys had long been due to him in the holy city of Muttra. Accordingly I went there, and collected something more than two thousand rupees, with which I returned here, and I have lived ever since on this sum.’ 4 What,’ I interrupted, 4 have you lived on this money for forty years, and yet have a thousand and fifty rupees, nearly half, left? ’ 4 Yes,’ said she, 4 I opened my treasure once a month, and took out two rupees, which lasted me and my niece for the month.’ 4 Why,’ I remarked, 4 at this rate you had enough for the next forty years ; why could you not pay the tax ? — how much was it?’ 4 Two pyce a month,’ she replied, 4 and all widows are exempt.’ 4 Yes,’ remarked a bystander, 4 if they are poor ; but you are as rich as Lakhsmi (the Hindu goddess of fortune). I believe that Kali has sent this misfortune on you for your lying ; do you recollect when you were assessed at one anna, how you wept and tore your hair, and said you were starving? You are a sad liar, by your own account, and are well served. 1 hope if you ever recover your money the Sahib will make you pay it up with arrears.’ 4 Oh,’ said the widow, clasping her hands, 4 re- store me my money, and I will pay for the rest of my life.’ As I suspected, from the different circumstances which had trans- pired, that the nephew was in some way connected with the robbery, I directed his house to be searched, but nothing which could in any way implicate him was found. Despairing, then, of discovering the crimi- nal, I mounted my horse, and after telling the police to be on the look- out, I set off towards my tents. I had ridden some little way, conning the matter over in my mind, when it struck me how very singular it was that the khojia should persist in it that only one of the thieves had left the house. As the walls were very high, and as there was but the one door to the courtyard, it seemed as if the thief must still be inside. 4 Pooh, pooh ! ’ I cried, 4 the thing is out of the question ; did we not search the house ? And, after all, what could a thief be doing there ? 76 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1834-37 The khojia is trying to mystify me.’ However, I was not satisfied ; after riding a little farther, I turned round and galloped back. I said to the police, who had not yet left, ‘ We must have another search,’ and upon this my myrmidons spread themselves over the premises. While they were searching I began to pace up and down, with some little impa- tience, I confess, as the thought struck me of the bootless errand on which I had returned. Suddenly I heard a policeman exclaim, ‘ I have not seen him, but I have seen his eye,’ and as he spoke he pointed to one side of the court- yard near where he stood. On examining the spot we discovered what appeared to be a small air-hole to some vaults, and from this the man persisted he had seen an eye glisten. Turning to the widow, I demanded what places there were underground, when she explained that there were subterraneous vaults which had never been open since her husband’s death, and which she had not thought of mentioning when we first searched the house. ‘ A second case of Guy Fawkes,’ thought I. ‘ Show me the entrance. I dare say some one is down there ; though why any- one should be such a fool as to hide there passes my understanding.’ The old dame accordingly showed me a small door in a retired part of the courtyard, which had hitherto escaped observation. By it we de- scended to some very extensive vaults, and after some search, dragged out a man. He had not the money about his person, but after some little hesitation showed us where it was concealed, at the foot of one of the pillars. He confessed that he belonged to a village in the vicinity, that the nephew had induced him to join in robbing the old lady, whose treasures he had for a long time suspected. It seemed that the thief had slept part of the night in the nephew’s house, and that they had been prevented from effecting the robbery till late in the night from the num- bers of the people who were about, and consequently the morning had broken before they had time to divide the booty, or dispose of it in any safe place. In the hurry and confusion it had seemed best that he should hide in the vaults, where it was supposed that none would think of looking ; for the nephew was afraid to conceal him in his own house, or to allow him to pass out of the town with such a large sum in silver, lest, being recognised by some of the guards at the postern as a stran- ger, he should be stopped and searched. When the nephew was con- fronted with his accomplice, his effrontery forsook him, and he confessed that he had seen the old woman smoothing the earth in the recess one day as he stood at the threshold ; and from this circumstance, coupled with her always being in that part of the house, he had suspected that she had property concealed. When the coin was produced, the woman recognised her money-bags; and on opening and counting the money, we found the exact sum she had stated, namely, one thousand and fifty rupees, or about one hun- dred and five pounds in English money ; so that this poor creature had lived on about four shillings a month, and even supported part of that time a little niece ! While the money was being counted and her re- 1834-37 LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT PANIPUT. 77 ceipt written out, I said : * You had much better give this money to a banker, who will allow you seven or eight per cent, for it, and in whose hands it will be perfectly safe ; otherwise now that folks know you are so rich, being a lonely helpless old woman, you will certainly have your throat cut.’ ‘ No, no ! ’ cried the old harridan, as she grasped her bags in an agony lest I should take them from her, ‘ no, no! I will bury it where no one will ever know.’ I accordingly allowed her to go off with her treasures ; and out she tottered, bending under the weight of her money-bags. I may have failed in giving an interest to this story, but it certainly made a considerable impression on my mind at the time. The avarice and parsimony of the old woman who, bending under the weight of old age, and possessed of wealth which she could never hope to enjoy, yet grudged the payment of two pyce a month to defend her from spoliation, if not from being murdered ; the villany of the nephew, with his utter want of common sense and prudence in concealing his accomplice in the very premises which they had just robbed ; the acuteness and discern- ment of the tracker, in so ably, I may say, deciphering the history of the transaction from the very faint footmarks, altogether formed a pic- ture which it was not uninteresting to contemplate. Of the subsequent fate of the widow I do not recollect anything, as I shortly afterwards left that part of the country ; but if she escaped being robbed, she concealed her treasures in some out-of-the-way place, which, when she dies, her heirs will fail to discover. In this way, no doubt, large sums are an- nually lost, for although property is remarkably safe in this country, and a very large rate of interest always to be got, the people are very much addicted to concealing coin and jewels, probably from habits they ac- quired in former times, when seldom a year passed that a village or even town was not laid under contribution, or stormed and plundered by the Mahratta and Pindari hordes. Delhi : April 14. 1845. CHAPTER IV. LIFE AND ADVENTURES AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 1837— 1S40. The disappointment which befell John Lawrence when in 1837 he was compelled to leave the Paniput district, the field of his hard work and his success, and to fall back on his subordinate position at Delhi, is one to which any civilian in India who takes an ‘acting’ appointment, as it is called, is liable. So few people are able to descend with anything like good grace to lower work when they have already proved themselves capable, and more than capable, of higher, that it is not to be wondered at that there is a general feeling in India against taking such temporary appointments. This, however, was not John Law- rence’s feeling; for when, in 1842, he was returning to India after his first furlough, the bit of practical advice which most impressed itself on the mind of a young civilian who was then going out for the first time, and with whom he had much talk, was to the following effect : — Never let an acting appointment, if it should be offered to you, slip by. People will tell you that such appointments are to be avoided, and are more plague than profit. It is true that you may occasionally be disappointed, and you will certainly not gain continuous promotion in that line, but you will get what is more valuable, experience, and great variety of it ; and this will fit you for whatever may come afterwards. I have never let an ‘acting’ appointment go by, and I am now very glad that I have not. The young civilian to whom John Lawrence gave this part- ing advice between Malta and Alexandria was W. S. Seton- Karr, who, though he was not destined to see much of his ad- viser for many years to come, was, in his subordinate position under Lord Dalhousie, to hear not a little of his fame, and to read not a few of his masterly minutes, and was, many years later, when John Lawrence had risen to be Governor-General, to be his Foreign Secretary ; after that was to be one of the 1837-40 life at gorgaon and etawa. 7 9 most constant and welcome visitors at his house at Queen's Gate, ending only with the Sunday before his death ; and then at the great meeting of the Mansion House, called to raise a national monument to the hero who was gone, was to deliver one of the most eloquent and appreciative of a series of admir- able speeches, which in themselves form the most splendid of tributes to Lord Lawrence’s memory. Since then once more — as it seems specially suitable that I should acknowledge here — he has given a still more signal proof of his attachment to his former chief ; for by a careful perusal of the whole of the revised manuscripts of these volumes, he has enabled me to correct many inaccuracies as well as given me the benefit of many sound criticisms and useful suggestions. The sting of the descent to lower work did not last long ; for after three months spent in his old appointment at Delhi John Lawrence was promoted to the grade of ‘joint magistrate and deputy-collector of the southern division of the Delhi terri- tory,’ while he was also to be the ‘acting’ magistrate and col- lector of the city itself. After discharging this latter office, which his previous acquaintance with all classes in Delhi must have made comparatively easy, for six months, he went off, in July, 1836, to his ‘substantive’ appointment in the southern di- vision. The work, the country, the people of the southern division, differed in many respects from the northern, and so tended to give him that variety of experience on which the re- mark that I have just quoted shows that he placed so much value. Extending as it did over an area of about 2,000 square miles and containing a population of 700,000 souls, of whom probably one half were Hindus, the other half Mohammedans, it included representatives of all the races with whom he had become acquainted in Paniput. But, besides these, there were many others, such as the Meenas and Mehwatties, of whom he had no previous knowl- edge. These people were great robbers, perhaps the greatest in Northern India. In former times they had been organised plunderers, roaming about the country almost in small armies, and harrying the villages with fire and sword up to the very walls of Delhi. Even now, though restrained from open vio- lence and proving under a strong government almost a docile people, they were very thievish in their propensities, and gave abundant proof that they only wanted opportunity to fall back on their old habits. Like the Ranghurs of the northern dis- 8o LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 trict, they were all Mohammedans converted from Hinduism as late as the time of Aurungzebe, and of course retained many of their Hindu customs and traditions. Many a conversation did John Lawrence have with them on those good old times. They talked as freely with him as he with them, and frankly avowed that they looked back regretfully on the palmy days when, to use the words of their favourite adage, ‘ the buffalo belonged to him who held the bludgeon ’ — Jishee lattee oosee ha hhains. The district was particularly well adapted for the indulgence of their predatory propensities. It was irregularly shaped, was bordered on two sides by independent chieftainships, and was intersected by many low ranges of hills, and by the deep beds of hill-torrents, which ran dry in all seasons except during the rains, and, like the wadies of the Arabian or Syrian deserts, served as the resort of banditti, who sallied out thence on any travellers who ventured to pass without sufficient escort. ‘ Many a strange story,’ says John Lawrence, ‘did the people of the country tell of the doings of their ancestors in this way.' The difficulties of ruling such a people were not lessened by the calamitous drought which in 1837-38 had fallen on many parts of Upper India and, following so soon after that of 1 833-34, had caused great suffering, even when it did not reach the dread extremity of. actual starvation. The chief force of the visitation fell on the native states of Rajpootana, Bhurt- pore, and Bundelkhund ; but the Agra division of the North- West Provinces, including the districts of Agra, Etawa, and Mynpoorie, also suffered much, and there was terrible loss of life. In John Laurence’s own district, though the distress was great, no lives were lost. The soil, unlike the clay of many parts of Northern India, which bakes as hard as iron, is of a light porous character, and does not need much rain. More- over, the district was well supplied with wells and jheels which could be used for the purpose of irrigation. Thus it happened that, owing to the constant care and energy of John Lawrence and his colleague, the well-known Martin Gubbins, notwith- standing the general distress and the predatory and warlike character of the people ; notwithstanding also the fact that not one single soldier was stationed in the district ; yet crime and violence were kept within moderate limits. If they did not actually decrease they did not increase, and there arc times and occasions when to be able to say with truth that crimes of 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 8l violence have not increased is tantamount to saying that extra- ordinary exertions have been crowned by the success which they deserve. And here I may insert a story which gives a forcible picture of one of the difficulties with which a magistrate had in those days to deal almost singlehanded — a difficulty, moreover, which, as recent events in Mooltan and elsewhere have shown, has not, even now, wholly disappeared. I give it with some consider- able abridgment, but, as far as possible, in John Lawrence’s own words, for they show the man throughout, and exhibit in strong relief his courage, his vigour, and his readiness of re- source. Passive Resistance. In the spring of 1838, when the famine which had for some time af- flicted the north-western provinces of India was still raging, it happened that I was encamped not far from the town of Rewari. The pergunnah (or barony) was just surveyed, and I had come down to that part of the country to settle the land revenue for a term of thirty years. While I was there, a feud arose between the Mussulman and Hindu inhabitants of the town, which, but for the interference of the authorities on the spot, would most unquestionably have ended in bloodshed, if not in a partial insurrection. The point in dispute arose from a well-known pre- judice of the Hindus against the slaughter of the ox, which they hold to be a sacred animal. The Mussulmans, on the other hand, wished to eat beef, as it was cheaper than either mutton or goat ; and though they formed only a small minority of the population, they seemed determined now at length to get their way. Year after year they had begged for permission to kill the forbidden animal within the walls, or even at any reasonable distance outside. But it had all been in vain, for the Hindus vowed that they would have recourse to force if their religious scruples were disregarded, and so the Mussulmans remained dissatisfied and op- pressed. At last the leading members of the Mussulman population brought me one day, when I was in camp, a fresh entreaty worded in somewhat the following manner : ‘ Hail, cherisher of the poor! Be it known unto your enlightened excellency, that for many years the Hindus of this town have, by their lying and deceitful representations to the highest authori- ties, prevented the Mussulmans from killing cattle, under the plea that those animals are sacred. Our lords, the English, have hitherto made it their rule to prevent one class of their subjects from tyrannising over another, and have dealt out impartial justice to all, making no distinc- tion between caste, creed, colour, or race. Indeed, such is the protec- tion which all enjoy, that it may be said that the wolf and the lamb drink from the same ghaut. What, then, have we oppressed creatures Vol. I.— 6 82 • LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 clone, that we arc denied the benefits which all others enjoy ? Trusting that you will take our grievous case into speedy consideration, and issue an order enabling us to eat beef, we pray that on you the sun of pros- perity may ever shine gloriously.’ Such was the petition which on that day was read out in open court before several hundreds of Hindus and Mussulmans. Everyone around could see and hear all that was going on, as the canvas walls of the tent were taken down on three sides. While the petition was being read, the audience preserved a respect- ful silence; the Mussulmans stood anxiously expecting my decision, and I observed the Hindus furtively glancing at my countenance to read, if possible, therein, the order about to be issued. I may here remark that no people in the world are more observant of character, or more quick or able judges of it than those of Hindustan. They seem by a kind of intuition to understand every movement and every gesture. Nor is this surprising. Subject for so many centuries to rulers whose will is law, the ability to comprehend the character and anticipate the thoughts of their masters has become a necessary part of their education. I felt that both law and equity were on the side of the Mussulmans, but seeing how strong was the feeling of opposition among the Hindus, and what an infringement of a long-standing custom it would be, I ad- vised them to make a formal application to the Commissioner, as super- intendent of police, who forthwith sent an order permitting the slaughter of cattle. I fixed upon a spot for this operation about three-quarters of a mile from the town, hoping thus to soften the blow to the Hindus. But their rage and indignation knew no bounds, and I was continually beset wherever I moved with petitioners. Finding me inexorable they returned to their homes, to deliberate with their friends. They waited in ominous peace until the festival of the Mohurram, six weeks later, came round, then suddenly rose and attacked the Mussulman procession with all manner of weapons, bricks, stones, and even dead pigs and dogs, animals to which ‘ the faithful ’ have the greatest abhorrence. The confusion and tumult which ensued were tremendous, and a des- perate affray and loss of life would have been the result, had not the tahsildar, a native of much force of character and self-won influence in the place, hastily summoned the police to the spot, and put himself, though a Hindu and a Brahmin, at the head of the Mussulman proces- sion, and conducted it in safety through the town. The parties sepa- rated, mutually breathing vengeance against each other ; the Muslims swearing by their fathers’ graves that they would wash out the insult in the blood of every Hindu in the town, even if they died to a man the martyr’s death. The tahsildar was thankful for his success so far, but felt that the presence of the magistrate alone could arrest further mischief, and ac- cordingly sent special messengers for me to the place where business had called me. I was in camp forty miles off, in a straight line, but with a range of steep and pathless hills between, necessitating a circuitous route some twenty miles longer ; so the information did not reach me 1 837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 83 till about noon the following day. Here was a pleasant communication for me ; the hot wind was blowing a perfect simoom, and it required no small spirit of adventure at such a season to face the heat and sand over that wild country. Something, however, was to be done, and that quickly ; so, after taking ten minutes to consider, I summoned some of the neighbouring villagers, and asked if they knew the direct paths over the hills, and whether they would engage to conduct me across. They replied that they knew the way well enough, but that it was quite im- practicable for any but men on foot, or for goats. * Never mind,’ 1 replied, ‘ I can go and you can show me the way.’ When a Sahib says he will do a thing, a native is too polite to oppose it, and acquiesces. The servants were at once sent forward with some clothes to push on as best they could ; the others with the camp and baggage were to follow later ; while a guide started at once to wait at the base of the hill till the heat of the day had sufficiently subsided for me to venture across the plain. At three p.m. I mounted my best Arab, and with one mounted orderly started for the hill, at the foot of which I found the guide waiting. We dismounted, and led our horses up the steep ascent. Before wejiad gone far the orderly’s horse fell ; we left him to his fate, as there was no time for delay. The path now became more and more precipitous. In places it seemed all but impassable ; and had there been room to turn my horse, I felt almost inclined to give it up and go back. Yet wc pushed on and on till we reached the top. If it was a labor for my poor horse to scramble up, the difficulty and danger of descending the other side was much greater ; any slip would hurl him headlong down ; but by dint of care, what with sliding and slipping on his haunches, we at last reached the bottom without serious damage. It was six o’clock by the time the descent was accomplished, so that there was little more than an hour of daylight remaining, with more than thirty miles of sandy trackless plain intersected by ravines to traverse, and nothing but a western star and information from an occasional village to guide me. But, trusting to the speed and endurance of my gallant steed, well tried in many a hard day’s run before, I dismissed the guide and set off at a hard gallop. Towards ten o’clock at night I discerned the thousand little twinkling lamps which light an Indian city, and riding into the town found the people all on the alert, and was soon recognised, my horse and myself being well known there. * Larens sahib is come,’ was repeated from mouth to mouth with much surprise, as they knew I was at Rewari the day before. My sudden appearance scared them, and they slunk away to their houses. After parading the streets for a short time till they were quiet, I went to the tahsildar and heard from him of the commotion having increased throughout that day. I sent messengers to collect all the police from the neighbourhood, and then repaired to the somewhat rough quarters of a hostelry (serai) just outside the walls. Here I luckily found an officer belonging to the political department, Captain R , 84 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 who, being in ill health, was glad to recruit in rather more comfort than in tents ; for I had repaired and slightly furnished two or three rooms in thq serai, in case of an emergency like the present. After seeing my horse well rubbed down and fed I retired to rest. In the morning I stationed police at the gates, at the market-place, and at other central spots, that they might be ready in case the Hindus should have recourse to arms, and there they remained for three weeks. Thus the danger passed by, for the Mussulmans with their more ac- tive, warlike habits, backed by the European forces, were too strong for their opponents ; so, after receiving a decided rebuff to a fresh petition from me, the Hindus tried a wholly new method. By a preconcerted and simultaneous movement they shut up all the shops, suspended trade and business of every description, and declared that until the obnoxious order was rescinded, they would neither buy nor sell, nor indeed hold any communication with the opposite party. This plan of passive resistance was by far the most effectual they could have adopted. It completely paralysed their enemies, and alarmed the magistrate more than he would have liked to own ; for they had com- plete control of the supplies, being the wholesale as well as retail dealers of tl^e town. The next morning, when not only the Mussulmans but the lower orders of Hindus came as usual to purchase the day’s provisions, they found all the shops closed. Living from hand to mouth as they do, they were in blank despair, and, adjourning to my house, they implored my leave to break open the granaries and help themselves, if I could not compel the traders to open their shops. I replied that the traders had done nothing contrary to law, and that I had no power to compel them in any way. I felt also that it would lead to general anarchy and plunder if I did not restrain them from attacking the granaries. Yet food they must have, and that at once. A plan occurred to me which would give me time to reason with the Hindus, and possibly bring them to a better state of mind. I collected many waggon-loads of grain from the country round, at my own risk, trusting that the Government would refund me when the peril was made known to them. This grain I stored, and gave out by letters of credit to retail dealers, whom I chose myself and placed in the streets. In this way all the slight wants of an Asiatic were supplied, and so careful was the organisation of the whole thing, that there was no ultimate loss to the Government. Meanwhile I published proclamations warning the Hindus against blind allegiance to their priests, and telling them that any act of violence would meet with prompt retribution. This I was frequently able to do in isolated cases, as combination was now impos- sible for them. They first sent petitions to the Commissioner, and then to the seat of government itself in the hills, complaining both of me, their magistrate, and the tahsildar. These were in due time returned to me for explanation. I did not think it necessary to answer their charges against myself, but successfully vindicated the tahsildar. For twenty-two days the Hindu traders held out, till I was much worn 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 85 and harassed with the constant work of inspection, repression, and writing answers to complaints. At last the poorer Hindus found that they were injuring themselves as well as the Mussulmans ; gradually a shop was opened here and there, and on the evening of the twenty- second day, a crowd of Hindus came to me in a humble frame of mind, owning that they had been led away by their priests, begging for par- don, and solemnly promising never to repeat the offence, and offering to open their shops at once. I agreed to this, and thus a combination which had threatened to produce a general uproar was quietly and peaceably put down. I was able to satisfy the inquiries of Government as to my somewhat independent action in the matter, and so to estab- lish the conduct of the tahsildar that he received special thanks for all ' he had done. He did not, however, long survive to enjoy his recovered credit. A few months afterwards he died from a sudden attack of cholera. From the southern division of the Delhi district, which had been spared, as I have already shown, the full fury of the fam- ine which had visited the North-West, John Lawrence was called off unexpectedly to a district in which it had done its worst. He was specially selected, in November, 1838, for the post of ‘ settlement officer’ at Etawa by Robert Mertins Bird, a man whose name is little known to Englishmen generally, and who, it is to be feared, is, at this distance of time, little remem- bered even among the 23,000,000 inhabitants of the North-West Provinces whom he did so much to save from miser)' and ruin. But his services are not to be measured by the little noise they made in the world, or by the little or no reward which they re- ceived. After serving for twenty years of his life as a judge, he suddenly joined the Revenue Department, a department which has proved to so many the study and despair of a life- time. He was soon recognised as the chief living authority on the subject, and he managed, during the next thirteen years, to plan and to carry through a measure which was as complicated and difficult as it was vast and complete, the survey and settle- ment of the whole of the North-West Provinces. On returning to England, after thirty-three years’ service, amidst the warm appreciation of all who knew what he had done, and how he had done it, he lived quite unnoticed, and passed to his grave without a single external mark of distinction. Such is the lot — the lot borne uncomplainingly and even grate- fully— of many of our best Indian administrators. One here, and one there, rise to fame and honour, but the rest live a life of unceasing toil, wield a power which, within its sphere, is such 86 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 as few European sovereigns wield, and with an absolute devo- tion to the good of their subjects such as few European sover- eigns show. They have to be separated from. their children during the most impressible period of their life, and the wife is often obliged to prefer the claims of the children to those of her husband. India can thus be no longer, in any true sense of the word, a home to them, and when at length they return to Eng- land, they do so, too often, broken in health, find themselves unnoticed and unknown, strangers even to their own children, and settle down from a position of semi-regal influence into, say, a semi-detached villa, visited by few save some half-dozen old civilians like themselves, who have borne with them the bur- den and heat of the Indian sun, and now drop in from time to time to talk over old days and interests which are all in all to them, but of which the outside world knows nothing at all. Verily they have their reward ; but it is a reward such as few outsiders can understand or appreciate. To have been selected by Robert Bird as a helper in the great work in which he was engaged was looked upon, ever after- wards, as a feather in the cap even of those who, from luck or otherwisej were destined soon to eclipse the fame of their old patron. John Lawrence, afterwards a first-rate revenue author- ity himself, was reluctant to leave his harder and therefore, as he deemed it, pleasanter work at Gorgaon, but he felt that a call by Robert Bird was a call to be obeyed. He learned in his school, fully sympathised with his noble motives, and to a great extent adopted his views. It is doubly incumbent, therefore, on the biographer of John Lawrence to pay a warm, if only a humble and a passing tribute, to a man to whom he owed so much and of whom his countrymen know so little. Sir John Kaye tells a story of a Frenchman, Victor Jacque- mont, who, after the manner of the more frivolous part of his nation, asked Ilolt Mackenzie, one of the highest revenue au- thorities in India, to explain to him in a five minutes’ conversa- tion the various systems of land revenue obtaining in different parts of the country ! The experienced civilian replied that he had been for twenty years endeavouring to understand the sub- ject, and had not mastered it yet. A warning taken to heart by Sir John Kaye may well serve to order an ordinary Englishman clean off the ground on which with heedless steps he may have been preparing to venture. But my object is a simpler and humbler one. It is not to explain the inexplicable, or express 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 87 the inexpressible, but merely to show what was the general na- ture of the evils from which Bird and his .associates were en- deavouring to save the country, and to indicate in very general terms the character of that ‘ settlement ’ of the North-West Pro- vinces by Bird, which afterwards had so material an influence on the settlement of the Punjab by the Lawrences. When, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, the con- quests of Sir Arthur Wellesley and Lord Lake had laid so large a part of Northern India at our feet, the first question that pressed for decision was the method in which the cost of its administration could best be met. The theory in all Eastern states is that a certain proportion — very variable in amount — of the produce of the land belongs of right to the Government, and in India the theory is supplemented by the clear under- standing that if the owner pays that proportion to the Govern- ment he cannot be disturbed in possession. But with whom was the agreement for the payment of the state dues to be made? In other words, who were the rightful owners? In Bengal, at all events, we had set ourselves an example for all future time of how not to do it. For, under the auspices of Lord Cornwallis, a ‘permanent settlement’ of the land revenue had been made, very possibly with the best motives, but with the worst results — at the cost, that is, of ‘permanent’ injury alike to the Government and to the best portion of its subjects. It had been made without sufficient inquiry as to who the true proprietors were, or what the future capabilities of the soil might be. It seemed more natural, and was certainly more easy, for Government to make an agreement with the one big man who made himself out to be the richest and most in- fluential inhabitant, than with a large number of smaller men ; with one zemindar, as he was called in Bengal, rather than with a hundred ryots or their representatives. And, as the result of the ‘permanent settlement,’ these zemindars woke up one morning and found themselves transformed by us into land- owners — superseding, that is, the true hereditary proprietors, and reducing them to the rank of tenants-at-will, or little better, and often at exorbitant rents. These very zemindars, however, were, owing to the introduction of the ‘law of sale,’ liable, in their turn, to be evicted by other capitalists or speculators less scrupulous even than themselves. These were mistakes, which it might have been supposed that, taught by experience, we could easily avoid, in the revenue 88 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 arrangements for the North-West. We only succeeded, how- ever, in very partially avoiding them. We had become con- scious of our ignorance of the conditions under which alone a permanent settlement might advantageously be thought of, and so had taken the initial step towards knowledge. Settlements were accordingly now made, not in perpetuity, but only for a short term of years, and not till after some inquiry had been made as to who the true owners were. But unfortunately the men we pitched upon as the proper landowners turned out again, in many cases, to be nothing of the kind. The ‘ sale law,’ as though it had not done injustice enough in Bengal, was transported into the North-West, and the assessments made were extortionately high, often amounting to a half of the gross produce. In vain did the proprietors rush to the local courts for protection. Protection the judges of the local courts could not give, bound down as they were by strict legal rules and ignorant of the history and peculiarities of the people. What scanty means of subsistence remained to the true proprietor, the meshes of the law carried off. Confusion became worse confounded. Estates were often put up for sale in the ignorance of the owner, and bought at merely nominal prices by intrigu- ing native officers. And then, when the mischief had been half done, we tried to undo it. Rhadamanthus-like, though with anything but rhadamanthine motives, we punished first, and discovered what the offence was, or was not, afterwards. Castigatque auditque dolos subigitque fateri. In 1822 Holt Mackenzie introduced what has been justly called the ‘ Magna Charta of the village communities in India,’ all the more justly, perhaps, that, like Magna Charta, its pro- visions were not at once carried out into practice, and that, like Magna Charta also, it needed to be renewed and devel- oped in later times. From various causes, which need not be mentioned here, the revision of the settlement, as arranged by him, made little progress for some ten years, but at last, in 1833, under the Governor-Generalship of Lord William Ben- tinck, the man for the work was found in Robert Bird. He threw inexhaustible energy and fire into a task for which he had been long prepared, alike by an extensive knowledge of the inhabitants of the North-West Provinces, and by a special, though quite unofficial, study of the subject. He avoided most of the mistakes which had crippled the execution of his prede- 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 89 cessor’s project, and suggested a simple method for determining, cheaply and at once, the interminable disputes as to ownership and boundaries by the summoning of a village jury on the spot under the supervision of the Commissioner. Allowed to choose his own men, he selected the very best for the purpose that could be found in the whole of India, whether from the civil service or the army. Witness it the names of Thomason, Reade, and Mansel, of Edmondstone, and of James Abbott, of Henry and of John Lawrence. In a few years every village over an area of 72,000 square miles was measured, every field mapped, the nature of the so{l recorded, and the assessment fixed at a moderate rate for a period of some twenty years.1 Such was the great work in which John Lawrence was now called to bear a part. It is not to be supposed that a work so gigantic could be carried through without man)’- mistakes and without involv- ing, in special cases, considerable injustice. A change of gov- ernment always implies injustice. In Eastern countries it has too often implied a total overthrow of all existing rights. And, apart from this, Eastern notions are in many ways so essen- tially different from Western, that what is the highest right in our eyes may well seem the highest wrong in theirs. Now the governing principle of the new settlement was, that the true proprietors were the village cultivators, and that any middle- men who came between them and the Government, as contract- ors for the revenue, were interlopers, drones who consumed the honey in a hive which was not too well stocked with it. No one will deny that there was much truth in this ; few, on the other hand, will now be found to say — not even the most thorough-going of the settlement officers of this time who still survive — that it was the whole truth. The hereditary revenue contractors, talukdars as they were called, in the North-West, zemindars as they were called in Bengal, were not necessarily proprietors as well. They might, or might not, be owners in part or the whole of the district for which they contracted. But though the two things were quite independent of each other, it is important to note here that each involved in the Eastern mind notions of property. Property in land is, all the world over, the most cherished and the most sacred kind of property, but it is not the only 1 See the whole subject discussed in Raikes’ North- West Provinces of India, chap, ii. , and Kaye's Sepoy War, vol. i. chap. iv. 90 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 kind. To disturb an arrangement affecting property which has gone on for many years, perhaps for generations, is a very- strong step, as all history — the history of the Agrarian Laws and the reforms of the Gracchi at Rome above all — bears wit- ness. At Rome the ‘public land’ was undoubtedly in law and in fact the property of the state, which might at any time resume, for purposes of its own, what, for purposes of its own, it had granted out. The word used in Roman law for the en- joyment of the ‘public land’ by- a private individual (possessio) was a word which carefully excluded the notion of ownership and conveyed only that of occupation. Still, the state had so long forborne to exercise its right of resumption that the idea of property had stealthily crept in. These lands had passed bv will from one generation to another ; they had been bought and sold ; they had been fenced and drained ; farm-buildings had been erected upon them ; their enjoyment was consecrated by most of the ties and obligations which bind the proprietor to his landed property. To disturb, as the Gracchi proposed to do, an arrangement which appeared so stable and so immemorial was, disguise it as we may, a revolution. Righteous and im- peratively necessary it might be, but it was a revolution still. In the North-West Provinces it was certainty high time to make a settlement of some kind, for anything would be better than the uncertainty and the want of method which had pre- vailed for upwards of a quarter of a century. Now, in every elaborate scheme there must be some one or more governing principles, and, on the whole, the governing principle selected by Robert Bird was as near the truth as any general principle could be, and, whatever its shortcomings, was more likely to secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number than any other. But it is said 1 to have been carried out by some of the officers concerned too sweepingty and with too little consider- ation. They looked upon every talukdar as if he had necessarily- gained his position by force or fraud. In their opinion, there- fore, he was lucky enough if he got any money compensation for his loss of territorial influence ; he deserved rather to be made to disgorge what he and his family had been wrongfully devouring during a long course of years. It can be easily understood how good men might take oppo- 1 E.g. by Kaye, vol. i. p. 160. Sir John Lawrence, in many letters which I find among his papers, is disposed to deny the accuracy of this assertion. 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 91 site views on such a subject as this, and in the settlement of the North-West both sides had able representatives, though the reforming party were in the majority. On the side of the talukdars was Robertson the Lieutenant-Governor of the North- West, Robert C. Hamilton, Commissioner of Agra, and, in a subordinate capacity, Henry Lawrence, a host in himself, who had lately obtained an appointment in the survey on the rec- ommendation of his brother George. On the side of the village communities was the still higher authority of the Revenue Board, with Robert Bird at its head, Thomason the future Lieutenant- Governor of the North-West, and most of the rank and file of the settlement officers, reinforced now by another Lawrence, who was also a host in himself — John Lawrence. And, as in the case of the more famous Board which administered the Punjab later on, it may be hoped that where both sides were so ably represented something like an equilibrium was established, and that the injustice which would have been done by either par- ty, if it had had its own way entirely, was reduced to a mini- mum by the keen criticism which each proposition received from those who opposed it. The district of Etawa, which fell to John Lawrence’s charge, lay on the left bank of the Jumna and adjoined Agra and Myn- poorie. It was in no way a delectable place, as the following description will show. * In no part of India,’ says a well-known Anglo-Indian Book of Reference, ‘ do hot winds blow with greater fury'. They commence in March and rage throughout the whole of April and of May'. The wind usually rises about eight a.m. and subsides at sunset ; though it sometimes blows at night as well. Every' article of furniture is burning to the touch ; the hardest wood, if not well covered with damp blank- ets, will split with a report like that of a pistol ; and linen taken from a press is as if just removed from the kitchen fire. But, terrible as are the days, the nights are infinitely worse : each apartment becomes heated to excess, and can only' be compared to an oven. The hot winds are succeeded by the monsoon, or periodical rains, the transition being marked by' a furious tor- nado. At midday', darkness as of night sets in, caused by the dense clouds of dust ; and so loud is the roar of the storm, that incessant peals of thunder are heard only at rare intervals, whilst the flashes of forked lightning seldom pierce the gloom. At last the rain descends in torrents, floods the country, and re- freshes, for a while, the animal and vegetable world.’ 92 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 Etawa had suffered dreadfully from the drought, and was still feeling its effects when, in November, 1838, John Lawrence arrived as its ‘settlement officer.’ The land revenue had, of course, completely broken down, and the land tenures were in great disorder. Here John Lawrence saw for the first time, with his own eyes, the horrors of an Indian famine ; here by daily contact with the starving people, he learned to sympathise with their sufferings in their full intensity ; and here, once more, he gathered together and treasured up for future use those maxims which he was afterwards to apply in so careful and yet so magnificent a manner, in his administration of the Punjab — the duty of a rigid economy in all the departments of government which admit of it, in order that the expenditure may be all the more lavish on the best and the only means of avoiding such terrible calamities for the future — the construc- tion of tanks and canals, of roads and bridges. The population of India, it must always be remembered, are almost entirely agricultural ; their wealth consists of their la- bour and their flocks alone, and in a year of famine the value of these falls at once to zero. From a commercial people a famine cuts off only one out of many sources of subsistence ; from an agricultural it cuts off all at once. At such times the prices of food for cattle range even higher than those of food for man. In this particular year, while corn rose to about ten, hay and other food for cattle rose to not less than sixteen times their usual value. A good cow could be bought for a rupee. Artificial irrigation, in the extent to which it has now been car- ried in India, ensures, even in the worst seasons, a considerable supply of grain ; whereas the grass lands, which receive no help either from earth or heaven, are utterly scorched up. Indeed, it is not the least tragical part of the prolonged tragedy of an Indian famine, that there are often considerable stores of food within reach of the starving people which they have no means of procuring. They see, but they may not taste thereof. Like Tantalus, they starve in the midst of plenty. ‘ It is owing to the agricultural character of the population and the difficult means of communication,’ says John Lawrence, as he looked back in 1845 from his post of Magistrate and Col- lector of Delhi on what he had witnessed at Gorgaon and Etawa seven years before, ‘that India suffers so dreadfully from famine, and not, as has been so unreasonably supposed, from the exactions of the English Government. The demands of 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 93 Government, if not particularly moderate in themselves, seem moderate when compared with those of the native govern- ments, and with the little that, under those governments, the people get in return. Give India good roads and canals, in- crease in every way the facilities of communication, and en- courage the employment of capital on its resources, and then more will be done to obviate the recurrence of famines than in any other way that can be devised.’ So jnuch has been done since 1845 in the direction here pointea out that John Law- rence’s words read now like truisms. But they were not tru- isms then. And at the moment at which I write (1880), when all expenditure on public works is stopped, in order that mil- lions of money, the ‘Famine Fund’ included, may be thrown away amidst the barren rocks of Afghanistan, it may be ques- tioned whether the paramount importance of such considera- tions is, even at this day, adequately realised. Thousands of natives in these two disastrous years (1838-39) left their homes in the North-West Provinces and wandered from place to place in the vain hope of getting food. Many lay down and died by the roadside, and it was no uncommon thing for John Lawrence, as he went for his morning ride, to see the bodies of those who had perished in the preceding night half-eaten by wolves or jackals which, lured by the scent of human carrion, went prowling about the country in packs, and held a ghastly revelry over the gaunt victims of the famine. It was a remark often made in his hearing, that the taste for human flesh acquired by these usually skulking and cowardly animals gave them, for years to come, courage to invade the haunts of men, and invested them for the nonce with the awe- inspiring attributes of man-eating or child-eating tigers. Here is one incident of this time of trouble. It is common- place enough in some of its details, and such as might be matched by the experience of any English officer whose melan- choly fate it has been to watch over a famine-stricken district and to witness the tide of human misery which he is powerless to stop, and can only hope, to some very slight extent, to alle- viate. It gives, however, such an insight into the daily life and kindly feelings of John Lawrence at this period, and brings before us so vividly so many characteristics of the people of India, that it seems to me to be well worth preserving. I have again condensed the story as much as possible, but, wherever it was practicable, have kept near to John Lawrence’s own words. 94 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 The people of India are essentially a people given to pil- grimages. Jumnotri and Gangotri, situated in the Himalayas, at the sources respectively of the Jumna and the Ganges; Allahabad, where they unite ; Benares, further down the sacred stream ; Juggernauth in Cuttack, on the shores of the Bay of Bengal ; — all these sacred spots attract to themselves thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of devout pilgrims year by year ; and, as in other parts of the world, so in India, these religious resorts become also marts of commerce. The Hindu pilgrim often returns from Benares or Allahabad just as the Haji of Central Asia or Africa often returns from Mecca — rich, not in the odour of sanctity alone. The sacred shrine presents at certain seasons of the year the appearance of a huge fair. Booths are erected on an extensive scale, and merchandise from all the neighbouring countries is exposed for sale. Ghur- mukhtesir, on the banks of the Ganges, not very far from the spot where it bursts out from the hills into the vast plain, is at once a great resort of pilgrims and the best horse-mart in Upper India. Here John Lawrence, with his passionate love of the animal, doubtless made not a few purchases of his favourite Arab or Kabuli horses. But, besides these great resorts of pilgrims known to all the world, there are many other shrines of much less but still of considerable local celebrity. Such a one there happened to be not half-a-mile from John Lawrence’s house ; and as the great road from the South-West, which led by the shrine, passed close under his windows, he had no difficulty in observing the manners and customs of the pilgrims. And a very rich study of Indian nature — nay, of human nature at large — did they give him. The shrine was that of ‘ Situla,’ or Small-pox — that is to say, of the goddess who presides over and controls the disease Avhose ravages are more fatal than those of any other in India. It has been calculated that in Delhi, the most populous city in North-Western India, two-thirds of all the children under two years of age who die of disease die of small-pox. What wonder, then, that so terrible a goddess should be resorted to by parents from far and near who were anxious to save their children from so ldathsome a death ? Intimately acquainted though John Lawrence was with the natives, and living, as he had done for some time, within twenty miles of the place, he was wholly ignorant even of the existence of this shrine till lie came to live close beside it. ‘So true is it,’ 1837-4° LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 95 he remarks, ‘ that what is intensely interesting to the people themselves is often utterly unknown to the Europeans who live among them.’ As each mother presented her child she offered also a male lamb, which she entreated the goddess to accept as a substitute for the more precious victim. Cor pro corde precor, pro fibris sumite libras ; Hanc animam vobis pro meliore damus. And at the same time to propitiate the attendant priests, and through them the deity, she presented such other offerings, in money or in kind, as she was able to afford. These offerings were, however, devoted to the adornment neither of the shrine nor of the goddess. Far from it. There she stood in the middle of her temple, the same misshapen log of wood on which in all its hideous deformity the Brahmins had from time imme- morial been accustomed to pour oil and paint ; and before her the people bowed and prayed in their thousands. Nothing could shake their implicit faith in the power of Situla. If a child who had been presented by its parents subsequently took the small-pox and recovered, or if it escaped the disease alto- gether, here was an incontestable proof of her goddess-ship: she had heard their prayer and had saved them from their distress. If, on the contrary, the child sank under the malady, it would only be still more incumbent on the parents to revisit the shrine with their next infant and propitiate the goddess with even larger offerings. A picture pathetic enough this ! — the earnest faith, the willing offering, the answer given or denied, and in either case the deepened faith, the redoubled fervor, the more abundant offerings. Pathetic enough ; but it is not confined to India, it is wide-spread as human nature. On great occasions the concourse of people was so large that it was found necessary to increase the police force, to patrol the country, and to make arrangements for the protection of pil- grims, as well against the plunderers as against themselves. In order to secure the pfoper performance of these duties, John Lawrence often rode down to the shrine in person, and watched everything that went on there, and we can fancy the grim humour with which, amongst these crowded pilgrims, he played something of the part of the Turkish soldiers at the Holy Sepulchre, when at the annual descent of the sacred fire, they endeavour by the free use of their Avhips, to keep the peace be- tween half-a-dozen sects of Christians. 96 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 Seated on his horse, he watched the women, as, one by one, they anxiously approached the goddess, with a child in one arm, and the scape-goat, as it might be called, in the other. Never accustomed to conceal his thoughts, he would sometimes indulge in a quiet and kindly smile at the object of their wor- ship. ‘ How is your demon to day ? Is she propitious ? How many children has she murdered this week ? ’ — these were ques- tions he often put, not to the devout worshippers, but to the fat and sleek and burly Brahmins who were in attendance. These old fellows never showed any annoyance, for they were much too prosperous in their trade to feel angry at his jokes. But had he himself at any time fallen a victim to the malady, he would doubtless have been held up by them as an awful example of the Sahib who had scoffed at the goddess and had felt her power. The loss of life and property in these pilgrimages was very great. The people generally travelled on foot, not so much from poverty as because the pains and fatigues and dangers of such a mode of travelling were considered to be meritorious and likely to propitiate the deity. The rate of travelling was necessarily slow. There were then in India no public convey- ances of any kind, no inns, hardly even any decent roads. There were, in fact, no conveniences for travelling beyond, here and there, the bare walls of some serai, set up, in times long gone by, by some Mussulman ruler, with its open courtyard, guarded by a gate which was always shut and barred at night, and its collection of cells, each furnished with a ‘ charpoi,’ or frame of a bedstead, some six feet long and two broad, without mattress, pillow, or any other furniture. This accommodation, such as it was, could generally be procured for the moderate sum of two pyce. Everyone carried with him his own mat, and his own brass vessels for drinking and washing, articles which, though they were neither numerous nor heavy, yet formed a considera- ble burden for a pedestrian ; and it may well be understood how a journey of a few hundred miles might be the business of several months. Nor were these discomforts the worst evils that beset the poor pilgrim. Everyone used to travel armed, prepared to resist at- tacks on life and property, though it seldom happened when the time came that they had the pluck to do so. Sometimes a whole party of petty merchants, or some other peaceful caste, would allow themselves to be stopped and plundered by a few 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 97 resolute men without making even a show of resistance. Their credulity and blind confidence passed belief. They allowed al- most anyone to join their party, if he professed to belong to their caste ; and thus they fell an easy prey to thugs, dacoits, and vagabonds of every description. With a little address and civility these rascals contrived to insinuate themselves into the confidence of the travellers, learned all their secrets, the place whither they were going, and the wealth of each member of the party, and then they selected their victims with discretion. The approaches to all the more famous places of pilgrimage used to be infested by characters of this description, and hun- dreds of pilgrims were robbed or murdered, and often left no sign behind them. Poor travellers, unable to bear the expense of applying to the police, found it better to put up with their losses and struggle on towards the goal which they had in view, subsisting by the help of their fellow-pilgrims, or begging at the villages near the high roads. ‘All classes,’ remarks John Lawrence, ‘ are charitable, and particularly the, poorer ones. Charity is universally inculcated by both the Mussulman and the Hindu religions, and the kindly and amiable feelings of the people cheerfully respond to the beggar’s petition.’ One touching case of the kind John Lawrence came across in his wanderings over his district early in 1838, in the person of a pilgrim who was on his way to pay his respects to the goddess Situla. He had sent forward his tents to a fine copse of ber trees, where there was a splendid tank which, even in that year of drought, was filled with water. The Hindus were bathing there, and John Lawrence, in rambling through the adjoining plantation, came upon a lump which seemed to be a dead body, but which, on looking at it more closely, showed some signs of life. It was the body of an old man of venerable appearance, full seventy years of age, in a most emaciated state, covered with filth and dirt, and with scarcely a rag to cover him. He had neither bag nor wallet nor property of any description, and he seemed to be in the last stage of disease. John Lawrence en- deavoured in vain to rouse his attention : his mind was wander- ing, he could not speak distinctly, and his glazed eye indicated the near approach of death unless immediate steps were taken to stave it off. John hurried off to his tent for assistance ; but his servants hesitated to touch a body — though they saw by his sacred thread that it was that of a Brahmin — so begrimed with filth and in so hopeless a condition. At last he prevailed on Vol. I.— 7 98 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 them to help him in conveying the sufferer to his tent, and there he tended him with his own hands, placed him on a bed, and gave him food. In the course of the day the pilgrim so far ral- lied as to be able to tell his story, and a very touching one it was. It appeared that he had left his home in the south of India some thirteen months before, with his wife and child, to visit the shrine of the dread goddess, of whose very existence, as I have said, John Lawrence had remained in ignorance till he found himself her next neighbour. On the way they all fell ill, and the boy, the prime object of the toil- some pilgrimage, died before he had obtained the protection of the goddess. The mother struggled on for a little while, and then she too died. The father, left quite alone in the north of India, where he knew no one and no one knew him, determined to press on to Lahore, which lay far beyond what was then the British frontier — for there a brother of his had settled some tw'enty years previously. He had already travelled some 900 miles on foot in the manner I have de- scribed, and Lahore was still several hundred miles distant. Wearied and travel-worn he continued his journey, and had actually arrived within two stages of that city when he was attacked by robbers, plundered of his little remaining property, and wounded. Here his courage seemed to have forsaken him ; he could struggle on no further ; he did not attempt to accomplish the object for which he had toiled so far, but directly he was able to move, turned his face homewards with- out seeing his brother. Being a pilgrim, and still more, a Brahmin, he fared pretty well at first, for he was helped by the hospitality and alms of the villagers on the way. At last he recrossed the Sutlej, and was once again in the British provinces. Here he found the famine raging, and now his troubles thickened. He had managed to press on to the place where I found him, about one-third of his way home, when he was attacked with dysentery. He told me he had remained under the ber tree where I found him for fifteen days, too weak to crawl any further, and that none of the people would take him into their houses ; but that now and then some women passing to and fro from the village would bring him a little food, and fill his ‘lotah’ with water. During one of his fits of insensibility his few remaining things had been carried off, and for the last two days he had eaten nothing, and, feeling himself dying, had resigned himself to his fate, when it pleased ‘Narayan’ to send me there. ‘ Now,’ added the old man, ‘ that I have eaten, I feel strong. I shall live to return home and be able to accomplish the mar- riage of my two daughters ; and this good deed of yours, Sahib, may yet be the cause of my house flourishing. I may yet have a grandson to perform the last rites for me.’ The old man av length seemed exhausted, he laid his head down and 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 99 fell asleep. In half-an-hour my servant came in and said, ‘ the old Brahmin is dead.’ I went and looked at his body : he appeared to have died in his sleep, probably from mere exhaustion, at the very moment when he had gone to sleep with the happy consciousness that his troubles were at an end. John Lawrence’s work at Etawa was, as I have said, of a much less absorbing kind than any which he had hitherto un- dertaken, and he disliked it proportionately. Before he could get to his proper duties it was necessary that the whole country should be surveyed in a scientific manner, and the boundaries of all the villages determined. While this was being done by native officers, John Lawrence managed to find some employ- ment for himself in giving temporary relief, in superintending the detailed field measurements on which the revised settle- ments were to be founded, and in hearing all disputes con- nected with proprietary and tenant rights or with village boundaries. Work of this kind was not new to him, for in the transitional state in which the Delhi district then was, he had managed to combine, both at Paniput and Gorgaon, much of the work of a settlement officer with that of a collector. I was fortunate enough in the case of Paniput to be able to quote the testimony of the one man who could speak from direct per- sonal experience of John Lawrence’s work there. So, now, in the case of Etawa, I am able to give a few particulars of his work and doings which have been communicated to me by the only Englishman who had any opportunity of observing them. I am afraid (writes Mr. J. Cumine of Rathray, Aberdeenshire) that I am the only person now living who can tell you anything of Lawrence during the year 1838-39, in which he and I lived in the closest intimacy at Etawa, he being the settlement officer, while I was the magistrate and collector. It was then a newly formed district, and houses being very scarce, the one occupied by me was the only one available for Lawrence to live in. We, of course, shared it together. He did not like the ap- pointment, as he had been far more actively employed before in various parts of the Delhi territory ; but being specially selected by Robert Bird, who had a very high opinion of him, he accepted it. The initial busi- ness of a settlement imposes little work upon the officer in charge, and Lawrence fretted under the want of it. I may here remark that, in a letter which has come into my hands, written by Lawrence to this same friend from Lahore in 1846, after describing the various places in which he had taken IOO LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 temporary work since his return to India from furlough, he thus refers to his life at Etawa : ‘ I took particular care to avoid that hole Etawa, where you and I were so nearly buried seven years ago.’ A commonplace expression enough, but I quote it for two reasons : first, because, in a correspondence of many thou- sand letters which I have read carefully, this is the one occasion on which John Lawrence speaks of his post of duty by a name which is the very first to rise to the lips of too many public officers when they happen to be posted to a place which does not quite take their fancy ; and, secondly, because the feelings of dislike with which he undoubtedly regarded Etawa, and which betrayed him in this one instance into the use of the word in question, were aroused, not because it brought him too much discomfort, or difficulty, or work, but because it brought him too little. ‘ He joined (Mr. Cumine goes on to say) most heartily and happily in all the few recreations which in the intervals of work were available in such a dull place, and which now seem somewhat boyish. In the morning there was pigeon-shooting on the shady side of the house ’ — an amusement in which it may safely be said he would not have joined had it involved any of its more odious and more modern associations of cruelty and gambling, and worse — ‘ in the afternoon there would be games of quoits, or swimming in a large bath accompanied by some rough horse-play. Lawrence was an excellent shot, but the game was of a much tamer kind than the nobler animals in the pursuit of which he afterwards so much distinguished himself in the Jullundur Doab. It consisted only of quails, hares, and grey and black partridges. He was as pleasant a companion and friend as I ever met with. We were nearly of the same age, and as we were both keenly interested in everything relating to our work, we were never separated except when we were at our respective offices. Our very charpoys at night were under the same punkah. I observed the clear decided way in which he formed a judg- ment upon all subjects, and the energy with which he set about his work. His resemblance to Cromwell in these and other respects struck me so much that I called him Oliver, thus jocularly expressing my sense of his vigour and determination.’ The many points of resemblance between John Lawrence and one of the greatest and most downright and God-fearing of Englishmen did not strike this early friend alone. They have struck portrait-painters and sculptors and friends without num- ber, and, now that he has been taken from us full of years and honours, they have been pointed out in scores of newspaper articles and periodicals and sermons ; but it is not without in- 1837-40 life at gorgaon and ETAWA. IOI terest to note how early in life the parallel first suggested itself, and to point out the friend whom, as it seems, it was the first to strike. Like Cromwell, John Lawrence was rough and downright in all he said and did. Like Cromwell, he cared naught for ap- pearances, spoke his mind freely, swept all cobwebs out of his path, worked like a horse himself, and insisted on hard work in others. The natives, if they did not love him, regarded him with veneration and with trust, at all events, as somebody to be obeyed. They respect a man who will be down upon them in a moment for anything that is wrong, provided only that he is scrupulously just, and this John Lawrence always was. II is voice was loud, his presence commanding ; his grey eye, deep- set and kindly as it was, glared terribly when it was aroused by anything mean or cowardly or wrong. His temper — the Law- rences were all naturally quick-tempered — was generally well under control ; but when he felt, like Jonah, ‘that he did well to be angry,’ there was no mistake at all about it. ‘What do you think of John Lawrence up at Etawa?’ asked his old schoolfellow, Robert Montgomery — who was then magistrate at Cawnporeand had not seen him much since he came to India — of one of the native settlement officers whom John had sent thither; ‘ What do you think of John Lawrence ? Does he work well and keep you at it ? ’ ‘ Doesn’t he ! ’ replied the awe- stricken native ; 1 when he is in anger his voice is like a tiger’s roar, and the pens tremble in the hands of the writers all round the room.’ 1 During his year’s residence at Etawa, Lawrence paid frequent visits to the house of his immediate superior — Robert North Collie Hamilton, the Commissioner of Agra. Hamilton be- longed to the school in revefiue matters which held doctrines the opposite to those which were just then in vogue. He thought that the talukdars and chieftains, especially the Raja of Mynpoorie and Etawa itself, were being hardly dealt with, for they were to lose henceforward all power in their taluk- daries, and to be restricted to a percentage or fixed sum in cash (malikana). He pointed out that such a policy tended to deprive the Government of the support of those natives who could have done most to help them in their measures for edu- cation, for police, and for public works, and that the power of 1 Jub ghoose men t'he, goya sherbubber kee awauz ! tub-to mootussuddeeon kee haut'h men kullumon t'hurt hurate the ! 102 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 these natural rulers would slip into the hands of far less scrupu- lous persons — the village bankers and money-lenders. But these differences of opinion in no way affected the friendship of the two men ; and Hamilton, as we shall hereafter see, went out of his way to give John Lawrence an excellent start again after his return from furlough — a service which John Lawrence ever afterwards remembered and gratefully acknowledged. One of the most important duties which fell to his lot as settlement officer at Etawa was the demarcation of the village boundaries when there was a dispute respecting them which the native agents, who were usually employed in the first in- stance, were unable to decide. The work was by no means new to him ; for, from his early days at Paniput, he had set himself to study the native society of India in all its aspects, and in particular that most characteristic and essential element of all — the village community. It was to conversations with Lord Lawrence upon this subject that, some forty years later, Sir Henry Maine, in his preface to his well-known work on 1 Village Communities in the East and West,’ tells us that he owed much of the knowledge of the phenomena of Indian so- ciety which enabled him to write it ; and, as he truly observes, it was the patient study of the ideas and usages of the natives of India during his early career which so eminently fitted Lord Lawrence for the supreme rule of the country. The story of one case of a disputed boundary decided by John Lawrence while he was at Etawa is, in my judgment, well worth preserving, both for the sake of the light that it throws upon a state of things which, under our rule, seems likely soon to be a thing of the past, and because it brings into conspicuous relief the patience, the sagacity, and the resolution of the chief actor in it. The Disputed Boundary. Among the many fruitful sources of crime in India, few are more bane- ful in their results than the disputes which, until a recent period, com- monly prevailed throughout the country regarding village boundaries. Feuds originating in such disputes were handed down from father to son, embittered by constant acts of mutual violence. The most des- perate affrays occurred, which were seldom quelled before numbers on either side were killed and wounded ; and even when temporarily ad- justed, unless settled by general consent, they too often broke out with increased animosity. In quarters where strong feeling for their clan pre- vailed, the feud would spread throughout all the villages in the vicinity, 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 103 whose inhabitants then ranged themselves on either side as their preju- dices, arising from caste or religion, dictated. Among all castes their love for the soil, and veneration for everything connected with the village, is remarkable. These local attachments seem, indeed, to me to supply the place of love of country. It may be said that a native of India does not feel that he has a country. He cares nought for what is passing in the world or who is his ruler. His love, his hatred, his fears, his hopes, are confined to the village circle. He knows little and cares less for what goes on beyond it. So many different dynasties have governed his country ; it has so often been transferred from one ruler to another, that so long as no one interferes with village matters, he is indifferent. On the other hand, let any attack be made upon the village, let a claim be preferred to a single acre of the most barren and unproductive of its lands, and everyone is up in arms, ready to risk his life or spend his fortune in preserving those possessions invi- olate. The following remarks, though more or less applicable to different parts of British India, more particularly refer to the North-West Pro- vinces, and especially to that portion which lies along the right bank of the river Jumna. Here the people are independent and warlike. The village institutions, having never been meddled with, are more complete than in most parts of our possessions. The soil is fertile, having facili- ties for irrigation both from the river and from canals. It is subdivided among a great number of proprietors, who cultivate their lands with their own hands. The majority in every village are either actually related or are, at any rate, of the same caste. Situated in the vicinity of the Sikh and Rajpoot states, with whose people they are even now at constant feud, and previous to our rule were at open warfare, circumstances have fos- tered the bonds of clan and kindred to a very remarkable extent. In this country, then, there are extensive tracts o.f land reserved for grazing. In them large herds of cattle are kept by all classes. The cultivated lands lie round or near the village, and are divided among and owned by individuals. That reserved for pasturage is more usually held in common and, extending to the village boundaries, lies unenclosed, and it is here that affrays most frequently occur. The village cowherds collect the cattle every morning after milking- time and lead them out to graze, bringing them back at night to their respective owners. In that pastoral country, villagers often own many thousand head of cattle. Where the cattle are numerous and the area enclosed, the cowherds are tempted to encroach on the possessions of neighbouring villages, particularly when the inhabitants are less numer- ous and powerful than their own. The boundaries were often ill-defined, and affrays were consequently very frequent. Perhaps one party, after repeatedly warning off the intruders, attempt to seize their cattle. In- stantly the shrill cries of the cowherds convey the alarm, and the whole community pour forth like bees from a hive. Men, women, and even children rush to the rescue, armed with swords, spears, bludgeons — in 104 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 short, with the first weapon that comes to hand. Their opponents are supported by their own friends, and a desperate conflict ensues. The value of the land in question is of little consequence. It may be, and often is, valueless. This is not the question. It is a point of honour, and every man is ready to lay down his life rather than give up a single foot of the hereditary soil. No cases are more intricate or difficult to decide than these. The magistrate is completely bewildered ; witnesses on either side are ready to swear anything which may be required for their own parties. I have known more than one instance where, what with those who have been killed or wounded, those who have run away to escape justice, as being active parties in the fight, and those who have been sentenced to impris- onment, a village community has been completely broken up for the sake of a piece of land worth perhaps a few shillings. The Government, fully aware for many years how much these evils affected the peace and prosperity of the country, were most anxious to have the village boundaries carefully defined. A scientific survey has been in progress for many years in the upper provinces, and is now (1840) nearly concluded. The boundaries were all determined and marked off previous to the survey, and thus nearly a complete stop was put to all affrays arising from this cause. It is true that now and then these old disputes break out, but this is not often the case, and when it does hap- pen, a local officer can easily, with the assistance of the village map, ad- just them peaceably. The survey, I may here observe, has been of infinite value, as enabling the Government to apportion fairly the land revenue ; but if it had done nothing more than necessitate the settlement of the village boundaries, it would have conferred an inestimable benefit on the people. During several years I was employed in apportioning the land revenues of differ- ent districts, and among other duties had to superintend tire settlement and demarcation of the village boundaries. Respectable native officers were employed ; they went from village to village, collected the head- men, and, if there was no dispute, marked off and defined the boundary in the presence of all parties, causing charcoal to be buried or landmarks erected. When there was any dispute, the officer endeavoured to settle it, arid if he was unable to do so, he reported it to his superior and went on to the next village. Another class, a superior grade, then took up the unadjusted cases, of which, after much trouble and delay, they were able to decide perhaps nine-tenths. The remainder lay over for the European officer, who visited the spot himself, and then obliged the people to settle it by arbitration of some kind or other. In this way thousands of boundaries were fixed and decided in a very short space of time. In most cases, when the officer is on the spot, the matter is tolerably easily decided ; but I have known instances when he has been detained days, and even weeks, about a single boundary. In such cases he pitches his camp near the village, carries on his other duties, and remains as patiently as he can till the matter is settled. The 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 105 tricks, the schemes, the deceit, the lies, to which each party has recourse in order to deceive, or to evade a decision when likely to go against themselves, though to him a source of infinite annoyance, would be amusing to a looker on. It is vain for him to endeavour to settle the question himself, for he knows nothing of its merits, and as to taking evidence in the matter, it would be useless. He might fill volumes with depositions, and in the end be a great deal more in the dark than when he began. I don’t know that I can do better than relate one of the many hundred cases of the kind in which I have been personally engaged. It was a dispute which, as far as I can recollect at this distant period, had re- mained pending for some twenty years. Though several of the district officers had at different times visited the spot, and endeavoured to ad- just the quarrel, it had baffled and wearied them out. In this case the right to several hundred acres of very fine land in the vicinity of the river was disputed, so that the property as well as the honour of both parties was involved. The rival villages were inhabited by people of the same caste, who were very powerful in that part of the country, and thus the matter excited general interest. What made the dispute more difficult to adjust was that the one village belonged to the British Government, the other to a neighbouring chief ; so that the dis- pute involved the settlement of the ‘ district ’ as well as the village boundary. The lands in both villages were held under a ‘ coparcenary ’ tenure — that is, by a brotherhood descended from a common ancestor. There were probably not less than five hundred proprietors, holding among them some eight or ten thousand acres in either village, all of which they occupied themselves ; the cultivated land being subdivided and owned ; while the jungle was held in common. The village which could muster most fighting men' was naturally least inclined to a legal adjust- ment of the question. They had appropriated the whole of the disputed area, and were powerful enough to retain possession. Any decision, therefore, they considered, could do them but little good and might in- jure them materially. I had determined, however, that the question should now be set at rest for ever. So, writing to the chief to depute one of his confidential offi- cers to meet me on the border, I set off for the spot, and pitched my camp in the neighbourhood. The chief gladly acceded to my proposition, and I was waited on by a venerable greybeard of some seventy years of age, who, after presenting his credentials, said that his party was in attendance, and was both ready and anxious for the adjustment of the dispute. This appeared pleasant enough. I immediately put a stop to all other matters, and, collecting the leaders of the two villages, they squatted themselves on the ground in a large circle round us. I quickly, however, saw, from the spirit dis- played by both sides, that there was little prospect of the case being speedily settled. Accordingly, I left them for a few days to discuss io6 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 matters among themselves, but strictly enforced their attendance from morning until evening. When I thought they must be both well tired of each other, I would, now and then, look in to see how matters were advancing. At the end of the third day, I found that things were literally in statu quo. They had talked till they were tired, and, now, as they sat on their haunches, they were smoking away in perfect resignation and contentment. It is usual in these cases for a jury of twelve persons to be appointed, six of either party. But each village proposed to nominate such in- veterate partisans, that it became clearly hopeless to get a unanimous decision. In fact, there would have been much difficulty in finding any impartial person in the neighbourhood who possessed local knowledge sufficiently accurate to enable him to decide the boundary. Everyone seemed to be enlisted on one side or the other. At last, when things seemed well-nigh desperate, I proposed to both parties that they should put the matter into the hands of one person, whose decision should be final ; that our village should select a man of theirs, or that their village should select a man of ours. This was agreed to, and so far the question was narrowed. The discussion then arose, from which village the um- pire should be chosen. It had at first struck me that the anxiety would be to have the selection of the umpire. On the contrary, however, either party wished their opponents to choose, being fully satisfied that there was no one in their respective villages so base as not to be willing to perjure himself for the general weal. The old chief, my co-commis- sioner, was a venerable, and indeed respectable old man in his way, but acted as a mere partisan, not scrupling to use his influence and money in supporting his own party. The elders of the village, and indeed the whole community, were anxious to have any settlement of the business which would give them even a portion of the land. On the other hand, they were rather afraid that I was zealous for the success of my own side, for it could not enter into their thoughts that I was simply anxious for the speedy adjustment of the boundary. My own party, who knew me better, were not so satisfied of my intentions towards them. Indeed, they well knew, from previous discussions, that I should not hesitate to uphold any settlement, however injurious to their interests, if I deemed it to be just. When both sides were fairly wearied out, the weaker party, seeing that if they failed in obtaining a decision now their case was gone for ever, with many fears and doubts for the result, at last agreed to select an umpire from their rivals. This appeared a great triumph to the British villagers, who already fancied themselves secure of victory. A day was given for consultation with the brethren preparatory to selecting the umpire. Ten o’clock A.M. on the following day was fixed, when all parties were to assemble, and, after appointing this important personage and signing a few simple papers in which everyone agreed to abide by the decision under heavy penalties, we were all to adjourn to the spot and, in the presence of the elders of the surrounding villages, to super- intend the demarcation of the boundary. 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 107 Accordingly, early on the following morning, everyone was in attend- ance close to my tent, in a fine shady grove, which, for freshness of air and ample space, was much more pleasant than a confined tent. Here, then, I joined them at once, and called on our opponents to name their man. The elders all stood forth, and one venerable greybeard thus ad- dressed me: ‘Just one of the age ! In obedience to your instructions last night, we assembled in our choupal (public hall) the whole brother- hood, joint proprietors of our village lands. We explained to them the labour we had endured and the toils we had suffered in fighting the common cause in your court. We reminded them of the years which had passed since we had been wrongfully deprived of all use of the disputed lands. We enumerated the sums we had expended in fruitless attempts to obtain justice. We recalled to their remembrance the many sahibs who had visited the spot, and attempted, but all in vain, to define the boundary, so strong and mighty were our tyrants. We pointed out that now, by the special interposition of the Deity and our good fortune, a Sahib had arrived, in whose eyes both parties were alike, and who would never see the weak and friendless oppressed ; that now was the time to secure a settlement of our claims, for if we permitted the opportunity to pass, we might despair of ever getting our rights ; that accordingly we had determined to select an umpire, even from the adversaries’ village, but had delayed finally doing so until we could gather the opinion of all who were interested.’ The speaker then added that the whole village had unanimously ap- proved of the proposal, and that he was ready to name the umpire, pro- vided that the opposite party bound themselves, and that I promised that if the person so chosen failed to decide the boundary, I would de- cide it myself. To this' I assented, and my villagers cordially agreed. The elder then said, ‘ We select Sahib Sing, son of Bulram, for our um- pire, and we desire that he take his only son in his arms, and, laying his hand on his head, solemnly swear that he will faithfully and truly decide the boundary ; that if he perjures himself he hopes that his son may die, that he may never again have a child, that he may perish root and branch, and that he may have neither any of kin to perform his fu- neral rites, nor offspring to continue his line to posterity.’ I may here remark that among all classes, but particularly among the Hindus, the first duty of a man, in a religious point of view, is to beget a son. To die and leave no son to perform the funeral rites to deliver the father from the hell called ‘ Put,’ is considered the greatest of mis- fortunes. The natives of India are most attached parents, but the feel- ing to the male offspring is quite extravagant. I recollect a merchant whose only son died. The loss turned the unfortunate father’s head ; he destroyed his wife and two little girls, and then hanged himself. But to resume. When the old man had finished speaking, he folded his arms and stepped back among his companions. * Well, Sahib Sing,’ said I, ‘ what say you ? — do you consent ? ’ Sahib Sing was a fine stout fellow of thirty, the son of one of the lately deceased headmen, and io8 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 leader of one of the strongest and most influential ‘ thoks’ or sub- divisions of our village. Sahib Sing instantly agreed. All the docu- ments, which had been previously prepared were then signed, and things at last seemed in a fair train for settlement. An orderly was forthwith despatched to Sahib Sing’s house for his son. After waiting for half-an-hour a second was despatched, but still no child made its appearance. At length, when more than an hour had expired, the two orderlies returned, saying that the child was not to be found, and that both its mother and its grandmother said that they did not know what had become of it. Here was a new obstacle in our way. However, being too well acquainted with the ways of the people to be so easily baffled, I told our party to depute two of their number to search out the child, telling them that I would give them half-an-hour to pro- duce it, and that if they failed to do so the cause should be decided by myself. On this they hurried off, accompanied by the orderlies, and in a very short time returned with the boy, whom, it seems, his mother had concealed in a wooden chest, but produced on being threatened by the headman. I w'as greatly pleased, and commended them for their expe- dition, to which they, with seeming sincerity, replied that they were as eager to have the matter brought to an issue as I could be, and that all they wanted was justice. Anxious to lose no more time we all mounted our horses. The little boy was put on the elephant with the old chief, and accompanied by hundreds of the villagers, many of them mounted on their brood mares and still more on foot, we took our way to the disputed boundary. Our road took us near the village, and as we approached we were met by some hundreds of the women, headed by Sahib Sing’s mother and wife, who insisted on the child’s being given up, and reviled Sahib Sing, the headman, and indeed myself, with all the abuse in which the Hindu- stani language is so fluent. Nothing could exceed the uproar. They beat their breasts, tore their hair, and filled the air with their cries and lamentations. For some time I could hear nought but volleys of abuse, but at last gathered that the women, being fully impressed with the con- viction that Sahib Sing’s decision would cause the death of his child, were determined at all hazards to rescue it from destruction. It was in vain that I pointed out to them that everything depended on the father himself, that his child’s life was in his own hands, and that it was clearly out of the question that he would give any but a just decision, in which case the boy was perfectly safe. They were by no means satisfied, and with tears and entreaties implored me to restore the boy to his mother. Sahib Sing in the meantime sat on his mare in dogged silence, and gave no assistance one way or the other. Seeing that all explanation was utterly useless, I desired the cavalcade to proceed, upon which these viragoes seized my horse by the reins, declaring we should not proceed till the child was given up. It was with great difficulty and much delay we finally got free from these ladies. Indeed, 1 believe that they would have succeeded in carrying off the child had he not been perched out of their reach. 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 109 Many will doubtless exclaim against my conduct in thus lending my- self to the miserable superstition of the people. To this I reply that the ordeal was their own proposition, not mine, and that nothing short of it would have satisfied the parties interested. They had often heard me laugh at different absurdities of their religion, on which occasions I had reasoned with them, but in vain. * No, no,’ they said ; ‘ you English are very wise, we will allow, but you do not understand our religion.’ In fact, as far as my experience goes, time and labour are utterly lost in such discussions. The only way that will ever bring the natives to truer and more enlightened ideas, is the gradual progress of infant education. The attempts to change the faith of the adult population have hitherto failed, and will, I am afraid, continue to fail. To resume my story. Having shaken off our assailants, we hurried on to the boundary, where, after duly examining and identifying the spot up to the point where the undisputed boundary of either village ex- tended, Sahib Sing was called to do his duty as umpire — to take his child in his arms and point out the ancient boundary line. In these discussions it is usual for the umpires, after examining, if necessary, the landmarks and features of the surrounding country, and satisfying themselves, to commence at the last undisputed landmark of the two villages, or, if the whole line is disputed, from the * toka,’ or spot which marks the boundary of their contiguous villages. From this point he walks forward, and whatever route he takes is considered to be the boundary. The arbitrator is, of course, permitted to question parties or make any inquiries he may deem necessary. This, however, is sel- dom done, as he is usually selected for his intimate local knowledge. In the present case not only Sahib Sing but, I verily believe, every man in the two villages, was perfectly acquainted with the true and ancient boundary. Sahib Sing accordingly stood forward, took his child in his arms, looked at it, then at the surrounding multitude, turned again to his child, and, after a few moments’ hesitation, put it down quietly, saying, * I cannot decide the boundary.’ There was a general murmur from the one side, and a half-suppressed cry of exultation from their opponents. I rode up immediately and called out, ‘Come, come, Sahib Sing! this trick won’t do ; you shall decide the boundary or take the conse- quences.’ Sahib Sing threw himself down, crying out, ‘ You may take my life, you may cut me in pieces, you may do with me what you please, but I never will decide the boundary.’ * Very good,’ I replied, and turn- ing to the headmen of his party, said, ‘You have now exhausted every subterfuge and pretence, you have brought me to the spot, and the boun- dary must and shall be decided. I will give you one ghurree (twenty- four minutes): if you can induce Sahib Sing to do the duty, which he has voluntarily undertaken, which you have all refused to any of your oppo- nents, and which they as a last resource have given up to you, well and good ; if not, I will myself decide the boundary, and you know well what will be the result. 1 10 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 After saying this I jumped off my horse and, throwing the reins to my groom, sat down to smoke a cigar, and ruminate as to what was most ad- visable to do in the event, which seemed probable, of Sahib Sing persist- ing in not deciding the boundary. For some reasons I would have been willing to undertake the decision. From all that I had gathered during the constant discussions, I was perfectly satisfied that my own party were in the wrong. Our opponents had in a measure trusted their case in my hands, and I was loth to see them injured. I was satisfied in my own mind that it was the intention of the arbitrator to decide the line in favour of his own party. The anx- iety of that party that he should act, his own bearing during the discus- sion, the fears of the women for the child, all plainly indicated the probable result of the arbitration. I could not, it is true, have ascer- tained the precise position of the ancient landmarks, but, by making either party point out what they respectively deemed to be their own rights, and by collecting the opinions of the most respectable of the elders of neighbouring villages, I might have decided on a line approxi- mating to the true one. Such a decision, however, would not have been popular ; it would have disgusted my ow’n people completely ; and though I cared little about this, it would, in all probability, have led to future quarrels, and perhaps to the destruction of the boundary at some future period. It was a grand point, if possible, to secure a decision which would have the force of public opinion in its favour, a decision also which, being their own free act, either party would be ashamed to violate. The object, in short, was to make a settlement to which neither party could fairly object, and thereby secure the peace and tran- quillity of this part of the district ; and this seemed more likely to be ob- tained by Sahib Sing’s decision than by any other means. If he gave it against his own people their mouths were shut forever, and if the other party lost they lost by their owrn act, and after all were in no worse posi- tion than before. While such reflections were passing in my mind, I no\v and then over- heard the headmen whispering and talking with Sahib Sing a little on one side. They were evidently urging and even threatening him, and lie was as vehemently refusing. At last Sahib Sing jumped up exclaiming, ‘ You are a set of double-faced rascals : you want me to kill my child to secure your boundary ; you tell the Sahib one thing and me another ; you have forced me to it — I will settle the boundary, but in a way you won’t like.’ Saying this he hastily seized the child in his arms, and called out, ‘ I am ready, I will show you the boundary ! ’ I had jumped up on hearing his voice, and seeing by his excited manner that he was evidently in earnest, called to him, ‘ Well done, Sahib Sing ! don’t you be afraid of these fellows, I will protect you ; only let us have the true boundary.’ The interest of all parties was now very great. The grass being ratlier high in some parts, Sahib Sing mounted his horse, with his child in front of him and with one of my orderlies to lead the animal according to his iS37-4° LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 1 1 1 directions. As we rode forward, previous to reaching a particular point it was doubtful how he intended to act, but when he passed that mark and turned to the right, the howl of execration which burst from our vil- lagers showed that Sahib Sing, for once in his life at least, had acted fairly. ‘Nevermind!’ I exclaimed ; ‘ go on, Sahib Sing ; don’t mind these fellows.’ The tumult which now ensued was very great. The vil- lagers began pelting him with stones and clods of earth, and pressing on all sides towards him. I had some mounted men with me, and perhaps twice as many footmen, who endeavoured to keep back the crowd. It was to no purpose that I roared out and threatened them ; the clamour drowned my voice ; a few minutes’ delay and Sahib Sing would have been pulled from his mare. Seeing matters in such a state, I galloped up to one of the rioters, who was making himself very conspicuous in front of his party, urging and exciting them to the attack. The fellow, nothing daunted, stood his ground. Seeing that it was the critical mo- ment on which everything depended, I let the butt-end of my heavy hunt- ing whip fall with such force on his head that he was down in an instant. His followers, seeing his fate, turned immediately and fell back. Order was quickly restored, and the boundary was carried to the end without further interruption. The boundary being once defined, everything went on smoothly. Charcoal was buried at intervals, and pillars of strong masonry erected at particular points where the line suddenly bent, and a sketch map of the country, roughly though correctly prepared, was duly recorded. To this no opposition was offered. The battle had been fought and won, and either side had done their best. It was fate and not any neglect on their part which had decided it against my people. I saw Sahib Sing a few days after, and, on questioning him, he told me that though some had grumbled, on the whole his people were not dissatisfied. The gen- eral feeling seemed to be, ‘ What could he do ? — he could not kill his own child.’ The fact was, Sahib Sing had a strong following of friends and relatives in the village, so that the most sulky found it necessary to be satisfied with the common loss. Shere Sing, whose head I had so summarily broken, had also the audacity to make his appearance before I left. The fellow actually seemed to make a boast of his broken pate. ‘ Shere Sing,’ said I, * take warning and do not get into anymore rows ; it was well for you the other day that you did not lose your life.’ ‘ Oh ! ’ said he smiling, * I have no excuse to make ; I could never have shown my face in the village had I not resisted. That blow of yours, though it was rather too heavy, saved my honour. Everyone declared that I had shown myself a real supporter of the village interests. May your Honor live a thousand years, but don’t strike so hard another time.’ I will here conclude by remarking that the decision and the way in which it was brought about was highly lauded far and near, and, what was still better, it facilitated the settlement of many similar disputes. I had not an- other contested boundary that season. Delhi : March 20, 1845. 1 12 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 Towards the end of 1839, before the time had come for the heavier portion of the settlement work at Etawa, John Law- rence and his friend Cumine were both taken seriously ill, and the district found itself deprived at once of its collector and its settlement officer. Cumine was the first to recover, and was at once moved down to a healthier climate at Allahabad, but John Lawrence’s illness was much more severe. It was an attack of jungle fever. During nearly a month his life was in danger, and for a time it was despaired of. And here I may give an anecdote which he used to tell himself, and is not a little char- acteristic of his energy and determination. He had often been heard to say, in the abounding and jubilant strength of his youth, that he was sure that many a man need not die, if he made up his mind not to do so. But he was now rapidly becoming worse and appeared to be in a state of collapse. One day the doctor who had been attending him told him that he feared he could hardly live till the following morning, and took leave of him accordingly. No sooner was he gone than his patient roused himself to the emergency. Now was the chance of putting his favourite maxim to the test. He determined not to die, and bade his servant give him a bottle of burgundy which lay in a box beneath his bed. He drank it off, and next day when the doctor called, by way of form, expecting to find that all was over, he found John Lawrence sitting up at his desk, clothed and in his right mind, and actually casting up his settlement accounts ! It is recorded of one of the best of the Roman emperors, who had given his whole life to the performance of his duties, that, when he felt death coming upon him, he bade his servants set him on his feet, * for an emperor ought to leave the world standing’; and standing he actually died. It was a truly im- perial resolve. The result was different, but the spirit, the force of will, the keenness of the intellect, the strength of the affections which dies not with the dying physical powers — nay, is often strung in that supreme moment to its greatest tension, and is, surely, not the weakest earnest of a life be- yond the grave — were the same in eadh. The Roman emperor had done his work, and the only thing that remained for him to do was to die like an emperor and like a man. Lawrence, whether he felt it or not — and it is hardly possible that he did not feel it — had but just finished the preparation for his great work. IS37-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 113 Something ere the end, Some work of noble note may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. Tho’ much is taken, much abides, and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven ; that which we are, we are ; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Such were the thoughts that John Lawrence may well have had in his mind. If they, or anything like them, did occur to him, he read in them his own character correctly enough. If they did not, the spirit, the mettle, the temper they imply were still there, and in any case, he lived long enough abundantly to justify them. As soon as he was sufficiently recovered from his illness to bear the fatigue of moving, he was driven down, for the last time, through the ‘ familiar streets of old ruinous Etawa ’ to the ghaut, was put on board a boat, and, in company with his friend, Major Wroughton, who had helped to nurse him through his illness, dropped down the ‘clear, cold stream of the Jumna’ to Allahabad. Here he rejoined his colleague Cumine, who had gone thither in a country cargo-boat shortly before, and had spent a fortnight on the voyage. On November 19 they all set off again down the Ganges for Calcutta. The change of air and rest brought back health and strength apace, and gave them after their long starvation, as Cumine expressed it, the ‘ap- petite of an ostrich.’ At Ghazeepore they met Robert Tucker, who was afterwards murdered in his own house during the Mutiny. They spent one day with him, a second at Dinapore, and a third at Monghir, walking about ‘ its grassy plain, for- merly the bustling interior of the fort.’ One night they passed at Chandernagore, and they arrived in Calcutta, at Spence’s Hotel, on December 22. Here John Lawrence had a dangerous relapse, and on his recovery he was ordered by his doctor to go on furlough for three years, and after a three months’ stay in Cal- cutta necessitated by his weak state, and another three months spent on the voyage home, he arrived in England in June, 1840. Here, then, ends the first stage of John Lawrence’s Indian career, the period of his training and probation. He had passed through all the grades of a young civilian’s education, not in Vol. I. — 8 “LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1837-40 1 14 their regular order, but, as often happened in the Delhi terri- tory, piled one upon the other and mixed up together in such a way as to give him the greatest possible amount and variety of experience in the smallest possible space of time. He was for- tunate, certainly, in the places to which he had been posted — Delhi, Paniput, Gorgaon, Etawa — and he was fortunate also, on the whole, in the men with whom, whether as his superiors or his colleagues, he had hitherto been brought into contact. But here the work of fortune ended. His own energy, his own en- durance, his own courage, his own self-reliance, his own enthu- siasm for work, above all, his own sympathy with the natives, had done all the rest. If in these first ten years he had risen, as one who had the best right to speak expressed it, ‘ half a head above his fellows,’ he owed that rise not to high birth or- patron- age or favour or luck of any kind, but to his own intrinsic merits. And perhaps I cannot better end these chapters which I have dedicated to the earlier and more adventurous, and probably, in some respects, the happier part of his career, than by quoting the graphic sketch given of it by one who afterwards served under him for many years in the Punjab, was one of his most intimate and trusted friends, and was selected by him to write the life of his illustrious brother, Sir Henry Lawrence. John Lawrence (says Sir Herbert Edwardes) soon had to leave head- quarters at Delhi and go out into the district ; and it was there, away from all Europeans, thrown upon the natives for help, obedience, useful- ness, success, and even sympathy, that the John Lawrence of great days was trained. He worked hard and made his * omlah’ — native function- ary— do the same, ever on the watch to bar bribery, by being sole master in his own court. Then was his day of details — a day that comes once, and only once, to all apprentices — and he seized it, laying up a store of knowledge of all kinds, official, revenue, judicial, social, agricultural, commercial ; learning, in fact, to know the races which it was his lot to rule. Work over, out into the fields with horse or gun ; for his strong frame and hardy spirit loved wild sports. But ever an eye to business — some jungle lair of cutthroats to be explored, some scene of criirte to be examined by the way, some slippery underling to be surprised. And so home at sunset, with fine appetite for the simple meal that he eats who has others in the world to help. After that more air — for the nights are hot — an easy chair outside in the bright moonlight, with our large John in it, without coat or waistcoat, and shirt-sleeves up over his elbows, his legs on another chair, a bowl of tea by his side, and a tobacco weed in his mouth, smoking grandly ; altogether much at home, a giant in the act of refreshment. One by one the greybeards of the district drop in too; 1837-40 LIFE AT GORGAON AND ETAWA. 1 1 5 not particular in dress, but just as the end of the day left them, uninvited, but quite welcome, and squat, Eastern fashion, on their heels and ankles, in a respectfully feudal ring, about their Saxon khan, each wishing ‘peace’ as he sits down. A pleasant scene this of human black and white mingling into grey under an Indian moon. The chat is all about the district and the people, by-gone traditions of the last conquest by the Moguls, and how they parcelled it out to their great lords, who built those red-brick towers near the wells, still standing, though happily de- cayed by peace ; the changes they have all seen since they were young ; the beating of the sword and spear into the ploughshare ; the disappear- ance of that celebrated breed of long-winded horses ; the increase of buffaloes ; the capture year by year, and one by one, of those renowned dacoits, of whom John Lawrence himself rode down the last ; the great famine, and which villages died off and which lived through, as witness their present state, known to all sitting here ; the debts and lawsuits that grew therefrom, and the endless case that’s coming on in court to-mor- row, about which John, listening, picks up some truths ; and so on till midnight, when, the air being cool enough for sleep, the white khan yawns and the dark elders take their leave, much content with this kind of Englishman. CHAPTER V. FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 1840—1842. The great difficulty with which the biographer of John Law- rence has to contend throughout his work, the absence of all journals, and of nearly all strictly private correspondence, is nowhere more felt than when, as now, at the time of his three years’ furlough, his public life crosses and becomes intertwined with that of his family. It might have been expected that it would have been easier, to say the least, to give an adequate description of John Lawrence in the midst of his family at Clifton than to picture him, the one white man among thou- sands of dusky faces in the wilds of Paniput or among the rob- ber tribes of Gorgaon. But such, unfortunately, is not the case. It is only from a few waifs and strays of information which it has probably cost me as many weeks to collect and to winnow as it will take my readers minutes to glance through, that I am able to say anything at all of John Lawrence’s family, of the changes which lie must have found in them, and they in him, after his ten years’ absence, and of the way in which he employed his unwonted time of leisure. And this paucity of the materials on which a biographer usually most depends seems all the more strange, when contrasted with the super- abundant wealth of the materials which the biographer of Sir Ilenry Lawrence found ready to his hand. Besides the inestim- able advantage of an intimate and lifelong acquaintance with the subject of his memoir, and his presence at many of the scenes which he describes, Sir Herbert Edwardes appears to have had in his possession an unlimited number of private letters written by Sir Ilenry Lawrence to the different members of his family, and by the different members of his family to him ; of journals kept by Sir Henry himself, by his mother, and by his wife ; finally, of letters written by that talented wife to his and her friends in various parts of the world, and giving graphic pictures, drawn on the spot, of the various actions in which he 1840-43 FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 117 bore a part. Of all these advantages I am in great part desti- tute, and all that I can do is to make the best of such scanty materials as I have been able to get together. It has been suggested, whether malevolently or otherwise, as an explanation of the abundance of materials for the inner life of Henry and of their paucity for that of John, that, in quite early days, the friends and relations of the elder brother fore- saw that he would be a great man, while they failed to descry any indications of a brilliant future in the younger ; they there- fore preserved the letters of the one and destroyed those of the other. There may be some truth in this, for there can be no doubt that John was of a tardier development than Henry, and that some of the qualities which fascinated people most in the elder brother were wanting in the younger, or at all events lay deeper beneath the surface. But, apart from this, the differ- ences in the character and temperament of the two brothers will go far, I think, to account for the different nature of their correspondence. Henry, his brain seething with half-developed thoughts and his heart stirred by warm and over-mastering emotions, found habitual relief in pouring them forth in letters. John felt no such need, or not to the same degree. He seldom wrote without an immediate and practical object. When this was to be secured his pen was that of a forcible as well as of a ready writer. And once more it will be remembered, also, that the letters which he did write continuously throughout his life to his favourite sister, and in which he, undoubtedly, did pour out without restraint all that he thought and felt, were, as I have already related, deliberately destroyed by him after her death. John Lawrence reached his home at Clifton. But it was not the home which he had left. No one, I suppose, ever returned to his home after an absence of ten years, especially if his fam- ily happened to have been a large one, without finding at least as much cause to miss the absent as to rejoice in those that are present. Of those who loved him, and whom he loved best, he will be likely to find That the old friends all are fled, And the young friends all are wed, and that, even of those who are neither the one nor the other, some at least will necessarily be dead to him. Ten years are a large slice, as many a returned Anglo-Indian has found to his 1 18 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1840-42 cost, of the allotted threescore and ten, and the gap made by them in interests and occupations and sympathies, even be- tween hearts that are naturally loving and sympathetic, is so wide that the currents of life, which have issued from the same fountain-head, and are destined, it may be, like the two great rivers of China, to approach one another again towards their close, are often found, in the dead level of middle life, to be meandering, like those same two rivers, in channels which are far apart. Two great changes had taken place in the Clifton home since John Lawrence had left it. The fine old father, who had enter- tained his son during his youthful walks with so many stories of his adventurous campaigns, and who might, had he lived, have listened now in his turn, in the chair of dozing age, to stories of adventures at least as strange and as stirring from the lips of that same son, had ended his rugged life in peace in May, 1835, at the age of seventy-three. His eldest son Alexander, who is said to have been his favourite, had returned from Madras just in time to gladden his father’s eyes, and then to close them in death. The other change was almost as great. John’s eldest sister Letitia, whose pre-eminent claims on their affection and respect had from their earliest youth been so promptly recognised by all her brothers, had herself left the parental home, and married a venerable old clergyman, Mr. Hayes, who seems to have been unknown to the family before. Happily the kind and simple-hearted mother whom I have described at the outset of this biography, was still living and in comparative comfort, though not upon the fortune left her by her husband. Ever ready, as he had been in his Irish generos- ity, to share his last crust or his last shilling with a friend, the old veteran had left her nothing but his name, his spirit and his sons. She was living therefore on the proceeds of a fund which, all unknown to her, had, for years past, been gradually accumulating, from the contributions of her four gallant sons — not one of whom had more than a bare sufficiency of this world’s goods — in India. It was called by them the ‘ Lawrence Fupd,’ and had been started in the first instance by Henry. It was Henry who — to quote the words of a letter of his own — ‘had rather dunned’ the more tardy and cautious John into taking it up at first, but had soon found, as the same letter generously goes on to acknowledge, that, once committed to the 1840-42 FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 119 scheme, John had put ‘all the other brothers to shame’ by the zeal that he had thrown into it. It was John henceforward who managed the fund, who contributed largely to it, who di- rected the successive investments, and, more than this, acted as the financier of the family generally. Henry, lavishly generous, like his father, of his money and careless of the future, would not, as he often admitted, have saved the barest competency for his wife and family had it not been for his brother John’s taking his affairs in hand. John, on the other hand, had a sense of the true value of money. He was not niggardly — far from it, as one or two out of a hundred anecdotes which I hope hereafter to quote will show. He was at all times most generous. But his generosity was tempered by prudence, and by a sense of the relative claims of others upon him. And, better far than being prodigal of his money, he was prodigal of the pains that he took in saving and in securing it for other people. He managed in this way, purely as a labour of love, the incomes of a large number of persons quite uncon- nected with him, who were unable, or thought they were un- able, to manage them for themselves. A third change in the family at Clifton must not be passed over. The old nurse Margaret, who had tended all the mem- bers of the family from infancy up to manhood, whose room had been a sanctuary of peace and tenderness and repose in a somewhat stiff and stern household, and who had, of course, continued to live on with the family long after her proper work was done, as the member most indispensable to each and all of them, had passed away. There are few ties more sacred and more indissoluble than those which unite the younger, aye, and the elder, members of a family to an old and trusted nurse. Witness it some of the most exquisite passages in all literature, from the time of Deborah the aged nurse of Rebekah, in the Book of Genesis, and Allon Bachuth, ‘ the oak of tears,’ or from Eurykleia, the nurse and confidante alike of Telemachus and Penelope in the ‘ Odyssey,’ right down to the ‘ Lord of the Isles ’ and the ‘ Lady of the Lake,’ or again to Tennyson’s ‘ nurse of ninety years,’ whose true childward instincts tapped the fountain of the newly widowed mother’s tears, and reminded her that her husband’s child was something which made life still worth living. John Lawrence would have been quite unlike himself had he not felt the blank deeply. But it is not the least touching trait 120 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 840-42 in a character so strong, so active, so practical, and which could, when occasion required, be so stern, so unbending, so iron, that his first journey after his return to England was a pil- grimage to the spot in a distant county in which his old nurse was buried. Many memories must have been awakened within him as he stood beside her grave, but perhaps none so freshly as that morning in Ostend in the year of the battle of Waterloo, when his childish championship of his nurse disarmed the sus- picions of the magistrate, and he returned proudly home with her, thinking that henceforward he must take charge of her rather than she of him. What wonder that many years later, in India, her memory was still fresh within him, and that he could find no fitter name for one of his daughters than that of his old nurse Margaret ? How the aged mother welcomed her son John, the chief man- ager of the family purse and a generous contributor to her in- come, we do not know from any written document, for I have been unable to meet with any letter, or entry, at all analogous to that in which she notes the change which three years’ absence had produced in her elder son Henry, when he had first re- turned from India. It is clear that he did not recover from the effects of his illness for some time. But all the accounts which have reached me, represent him as in the most exuberant spirits, travelling about from one country to another, seeing all that was to be seen, in full pursuit of what is commonly sup- posed to be the leading object of a young civilian on furlough from India, and enjoying all the vicissitudes of the pursuit, its ups and its downs, its hopes and its fears, in a way which is highly indicative of his good-humoured frankness and manly directness of character. In August, two months after he landed, we find him at Glas- gow. There he met his Etawa friend, Cumine, and took a tour with him through the Western Highlands — a tour which was doubly interesting to him, as Sir Walter Scott’s names and lo- calities were always fresh in his memory. Of Scott, indeed, in common with so many of his generation, he was passionately and justly fond. His boyhood had been nursed upon ‘ the great enchanter’s’ writings, especially upon the more historical of his novels. They were among the few books which he was either able, or disposed, to read in the heyday of his working life in India ; and one of the very last books read to him by his lady secretary, Miss Gastcr, long after his sight had gone, and not a 1 840-42 FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 121 few premonitory symptoms of his approaching end had come upon him, was ‘Guy Mannering’ — read then for I am afraid to say what number of times ! In September he went to Ireland, and revisited Foyle College and the ramparts of Londonderry. And it was while lie was on a visit to Mr. Young of Culdaff House, in County Donegal, the squire of the parish, and near neighbour of its rector, the Rev. Richard Hamilton, that he met for the first time the lady who was eventually to share his destinies. Nothing appears to have been either said or done then which at all implied what was to follow a year later ; but ‘ all the Hamilton family felt that a new and wonderful element had come into their lives, and his vivacity and stories were a theme of constant conversation among them.’ The red-hot Tory creed, in which they had been naturally brought up, received many a rough and kindly shock from the reforming views of the young Indian civilian. Later on in the autumn John Lawrence paid a visit to the continent, and took up his quarters for some months at Bonn with his sister-in-law, Mrs. George Lawrence, whose husband was in Afghanistan. ‘ He kept open house,’ says Colonel Ram- say, who met him there for the first time, ‘ and was a great favourite with many of the students. Amongst them were Prince Holstein, now the King of Denmark, Prince Frederick of Hesse, his future brother-in-law, Prince Mecklenberg- Schwerin, the present Sir Vincent Corbet, myself, and others, and many a pleasant evening we passed in his house. Years afterwards, when I was on the Headquarters Staff at the Horse Guards, on the arrival in this country of Prince Christian of Denmark, formerly Prince Holstein, with his daughter, now the Princess of Wales, and the Prince of Hesse, they all, remember- ing me as a fellow-student at Bonn, asked with much interest what had become of Mr. John Lawrence, of whose hospitalities they retained so pleasant a recollection.’ These hospitalities, it will be easily understood, soon exhausted his purse, which was not at that time a heavy one, and he was obliged early in the year to return to England and live more economically among his friends. In the April following he paid a fortnight’s visit to Mr. and Mrs. Hayes, who were then living in Marlborough Buildings, Bath ; and I am fortunately able to quote here some graphic reminiscences of him as he then was, contributed by Mrs. Ken- sington, who as a young girl was living with Mrs. Hayes, and LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 122 i 840-42 managed during this fortnight to lay the foundation of a life- long friendship with him. John Lawrence (she says) spent a fortnight in the house, and the gen- eral impression which he left on my mind is one of wonderful energy and straightforward going at whatever was to be done. The two great objects of his life just then were to recover his health, and to find a wife fit to be a helpmeet indeed, and it was the great amusement of my sister and my- self to watch the business-like way in which he pursued both objects. He still looked rather gaunt and ill, and as he had already won a con- siderable reputation I had at first been inclined to think him formid- able, till I saw him on the sofa with his arm round his sister, whom he always called, ‘ Lettice dear.’ His love for her was a distinguishing feature, and used to be displayed in a way that was surprising to those who regarded her, as we did, as a woman far removed from the light- ness of ordinary mortals. He would romp with her and keep up a per- petual chaff, finding a continual source of fun in the age and peculi- arities of Mr. Hayes, for whom he had nevertheless a great respect, though he used to take great delight in teasing her about him, and say- ing that he was the very model of a decoy thug. His conversation was always lively and interesting, abounding in anecdotes of his curious experiences in India, of the natives, and of horses, of which last he was specially fond. He was very indifferent to any of the luxuries of life or refinements of society, and disposed to mock at those who laid much stress on them as necessaries. A ‘ cakey-man ’ was his favourite term of contempt for anyone who pretended to much elegance and refinement. At breakfast it was his habit to cut off the crust of the loaf, and, having made his meal upon it and a single cup of tea, he was ready for conver- sation, and would keep us all amused with his account of his adventures the night before at the various parties he went to in the hope of meeting with the possible wife, who was always spoken of as ‘ the calamity.’ He had very decided and clear ideas as to the style of woman he wished for his companion. Good health, good temper, and good sense, were the three essential requisites, and if they happened to be combined with good looks so much the better ; but he at once rejected all temptation to be fascinated by the regular ball-going beauties of Bath. Hath, it will be recollected, not the least by the readers of Jane Austen’s novels, was still then one of the most fashionable places in England. His manners and appearance were utterly unlike the ordinary young men we met in Bath. It was difficult not to feel a little shocked at first by his roughness and absence of conventionality; still there was so much force and originality apparent in his whole character, that one soon for- got the defects of manner, and became interested in his conversation. As 1 remember him he seemed to me to embody Professor Henry 840-42 FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 123 Morley’s notion of the qualities which have given to Englishmen their proud position in the world, namely, ‘the determination to find out the right and get it done ; find out the wrong and get it undone.’ I have a lively recollection of the pains he took to convince me of the justice of admitting Jews into Parliament. Much of his talk was about his horses — how he would keep them loose in his tent, and how the natives who came in, always made their salaam to the horse after paying their re- spects to him. He would tell also how, when he wanted game to shoot, he would set the native musicians to play in the woods to frighten the pigs. Later on in the same year (1841) we saw him again at Lyn- ton, in North Devon, where Mr. and Mrs. Hayes always spent the sum- mer. The matter of finding a ‘calamity’ was still undecided, and he was still on the search. It was during his stay at Lynton that John Lawrence paid a visit to his friend and relative, the famous John Sterling, who was then living at Falmouth. In the near neighbourhood of Falmouth was Penjerrick, the now almost classic abode of the Fox family — the home of everything that was pure and lovely and of good report. It was not likely that Sterling would allow John Lawrence to leave his house without introducing him to a family amongst whom he was so frequent and welcome a visi- tor ; and in the ‘Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox,’ one of the most lovable of women, I find the following entry referring to the visit of the young Indian civilian : — 1841. May 10. Amusing day. J. Sterling has a friend and connec- tion here, a Mr. Lawrence, an Indian Judge, and he brought him to call. India the principal topic. Lawrence was describing an illness in which he was most tenderly nursed and borne with by his native servants. ‘Yes,’ said Sterling, ‘patience, submission, and fortitude are the virtues which characterise an enslaved nation ; their magnanimity and heroism are all of the passive kind.’ Lawrence spoke of the stationary kind of progress which Christianity was making amongst them. When a native embraces this new creed, he retains his old inveterate prejudices and superadds only the liberty of the new faith. This Lawrence has re- peatedly proved, so much so that he would on no account take one of these converts into his service. All his hope is in the education of the children, who are bright and intelligent. The Indians will from polite- ness believe all you tell them, and if you speak of any of Christ’s mir- acles, they make no difficulty, but directly detail one more marvellous of which Mohammed was the author, and expect your civility of cred- ence to keep pace with theirs. If you try to convince them of any ab- surdities or inconsistencies in the Koran, they stop you with, ‘Do you think that such an one as I should presume to understand it ? ’ Sterl- ing remarked, ‘ Have you never heard anything like that in England ? ’ 124 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1 840-42 May 24. — Joseph Bonaparte, his son and grandson, in the harbour (Falmouth) ; Barclay and Lawrence visited them under the shade of the American Consulate. They shook hands and conversed with the old man for some time, and admired exceedingly for some time the little boy, who is the image of Napoleon. His father, the Prince Charles Bonaparte, a fine-looking man.1 Once more, in June, 1844, John Lawrence returned to Ire- land, leaving the fashionable and ball-going beauties of Bath and Cheltenham and Lynton — for some three careless moons The summer pilots of an empty heart Unto the shores of nothing — without regret behind him ; and there, on his renewed meet- ing with the young Irish maiden, the best part of whose life had been passed in the wilds of Donegal, and who combined, as the result proved, all the charms which we usually associate with a beautiful Irish girl — simplicity, sprightliness, vivacity, and grace — with those more solid qualities which were to make her the worthy companion and sharer and comforter of the most laborious and heroic of lives, even to the very end, he found, as the result of his prolonged ‘ search ’ among girls who might have momentarily attracted him, that Such touches were but embassies of love, To tamper with the feelings ere he found Empire for life. An empire for life indeed it was, as the course of this biog- raphy, without, it is to be hoped, lifting too much of the veil which hangs, and ought to hang, before the bridal chambers of the heart, will abundantly show. And John Lawrence found that love henceforward not only ruled his life, but trebled it within him. But of what stock did Harriette Catherine Hamilton come ? There is no part of a biography which is apt to appear so tedious and unnecessary to the general reader as the, perhaps, inevitable paragraphs which give the genealogy of its subject. Yet even the most democratic of critics will admit that family and descent count for not a little in the formation of character. While I avoid, therefore, such details as may be found in Sir > Caroline Fox: Her Journals and Letters , p. 238, etc. Edited by Horace N. Pym. Smith, Elder, & Co. 1882. 840-42 FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 125 Bernard Burke and similar authorities, I propose to say just so much of the ancestry and antecedents of the Mrs. John Law- rence that was to be, as may show the kind of family in which her husband was to find so worthy a companion. The Hamiltons, offshoots of the ducal family of that name in Scotland, had first crossed into Ireland in the time of Queen Elizabeth. One of them, who had done good service to King James in the country of his adoption, was rewarded by him with large estates in County Down, and was created Viscount Clan- deboye and Dufferin. His other brothers also became large landowners in Ireland, and from one of these Harriette Hamil- ton was directly descended. Her grandfather, James Hamilton, of Sheep Hill in County Dublin, is said to have married three times, and to have been blessed with a family of truly patri- archial dimensions. Sir Bernard Burke credits him with thirty- six sons and daughters ; but the family tradition runs that there were thirty-nine in all — a tradition confirmed by the witticisms current at the time, some of which, turning on the Protestant orthodoxy of a family which owed so much to it, compared them to the Thirty-nine Articles ; while others, taking the prudential view, suggested that they were more akin to the ‘forty stripes save one ! ’ Richard Hamilton, Harriette’s father, was first presented to if living ten miles from Dublin, in County Meath. Like many of the livings of the good old times, it was considered to be a good living because there was so little to do in it. But the new rector was a man of great energy and courage, who, when he found that he had no work to do, would be sure to make it for himself ; and, having been appointed a justice of the peace, he found a field for his superabundant energies in playing, like his future son-in-law, the Collector-Magistrate of Delhi, the double role of policeman and magistrate. At that time the county of Meath was sadly disturbed by a combination of agrarian conspirators called ‘ carders ’ — men who tortured their victims with an implement armed with long steel teeth like the ‘ cards ’ used for dressing wool. Their outrages had produced great consternation in the district, and every effort was required to suppress them. Every night — says a son of his, the present Archdeacon Hamilton — my father used to leave his home, sometimes at the head of a small party, sometimes accompanied only by one trusted servant, his factotum, An- drew Rabb. These night expeditions were much disliked by his house- 126 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i 840-42 hold, who lived in dread from the moment that the chain and bars were closed across the hall door till the return of their master in the early morning ; and many an amusing story he used to tell us of his adven- tures in these patrols. Among others, one especially recurs to my memory. With his trusted attendant he came by chance upon a noto- rious offender, for whom search had long been made, and succeeded in apprehending him. The capture took place at a great distance from his home, and in an unfrequented road which offered abundant opportuni- ties for escape. My father and Rabb were both of them stout large men, and well mounted, but their prisoner was nimble as a hare, and the difficulty was to prevent his escape on the way back. While my father held the two horses, Rabb clung like grim death to his prisoner but exclaimed while doing so, ‘ We shall never be able to get him safe home.’ My father, quick in resource, replied, ‘ Cut the waistband of his breeches,’ these being the nether garments universally worn at that day, and still worn by many of the peasants in County Meath. This done, their prisoner, finding himself, despite his agility, unable to run or jump, surrendered at discretion, and before morning was safely lodged in jail. Would that there were a few hundred men like Richard Hamilton in the outlying districts of Ireland now ! How many outrages would a Spartan rampart of this kind have rendered impossible or promptly punished ; how many measures of coer- cion would it have rendered unnecessary ! What dismay and panic would the neighbourhood of one such man spread among the miserable creatures whose highest deed of prowess is to lurk in groups, with blackened faces, for their unprotected vic- tims behind a loopholed wall, or to maim and mutilate the un- offending cattle of those who have had the courage and the honesty to discharge their obligations ! In the year 1815, this energetic guardian of civil order married Catherine Tipping, a girl of great personal attractions and charm of manner. And a few years later — those being the days of pluralism — he was given the two rich livings of Culdaff and Cloncha in County Donegal, and he moved with his infant family from the rich and populous county of Meath, within ten miles of Dublin, to the remote and bleak coast of Ulster. The young wife’s heart, it is said, sank within her when she first came in sight of her new home, and she burst into a flood of tears. But these were first impressions only, and the warm hearts of the friends she found, and the friends she made there, proved to be in inverse ratio to the bleakness and solitude of its first aspect. She soon came to love Donegal for its own sake, and was loved by the people 1 840-42 FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 127 in turn. It was in this fine bracing climate, with its beautiful and bold sea-coast, that Harriette Hamilton spent her earliest years. Her one sister had been married to Dr. Evory Kennedy, an hereditary friend of the family, whose interesting reminiscen- ces of his own and of the Lawrences’ school-days I have already quoted ; and the chief events in her quiet life were henceforward her visits to her sister’s home in Dublin, and the periodical return of her two brothers from school and college for their vacation. Few girls (she says) lived in a more simple way, but I was very happy, and enjoyed an active out-of-door life, taking in health and strength. My mother was very delicate, and I had plenty to do in looking after her and my father, who had then become an invalid. I used to read a good deal with my mother, and although girls of the present day would have thought this a dull life, somehow or other I never felt it so. Our pleasures were few and simple, but, such as they were, we thoroughly enjoyed them, and our home was most truly a happy one. My mother’s life was full of interest, for she helped my father in all his work. I well remember going about among the poor with her, and how she was wel- comed and loved by them all. My father was, I think, more liberal in his views than the clergy of his day in Ireland usually were, for he warmly approved of the National Education movement, and was always on good terms with the Roman Catholic clergy of the county. My mother would visit among the Roman Catholics as well as amongst our own people, and the priests never made any objection. Thus Harriette Hamilton’s early life passed peacefully on till the arrival of John Lawrence with his unbounded vivacity, his marked originality of character, his splendid physique , and his stories of Indian adventure — with which the hunter-down of the ‘ carders ’ of Meath must have had not a little personal sym- pathy— came across its calm and even current. The engagement lasted two months only, and on August 26, 1841, the marriage took place. It was of course a great event in the little parish ; and rich and poor, high and low, Catholic and Protestant, came from far and near to do honour to the bride and her family. A marriage is never to those who look below the surface a time of unmixed gladness. To the family principally concerned a wedding is only less solemn and less melancholy than a fu- neral. If new ties are formed, old ones are inevitably broken ; and that two people may have a happy future, many more than two have to break a chief link with a happy past. The common saying that the parents of the bride do not lose a daughter, but only gain a son, seldom wholly true, is never less true than in 128 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1840-42 the case of a marriage with an Indian official. Here the pa- rents lose their daughter, and the mere distance of her future home precludes them from feeling that they have, in any true sense of the word, gained a son. Such a marriage, therefore, puts the unselfish love of the parents to the severest possible test. But it was a test which the Hamilton parents were able to stand ; and they would not allow, so far as they could help it, the shadow of a shade to rest upon their daughter’s happi- ness. The day of the wedding was — for the Irish climate — a fine one, and John Lawrence and his wife have often laughed together since over the rapid come-down which they underwent — the start in a carriage and four, amidst the cheering and shouting and loving wishes that followed them ; while, on the second day, the carriage and four was reduced to a carriage and pair ; and that, again, on the third day, to a jaunting-car and single horse ! To the unique and lifelong happiness of the union thus ce- mented, the whole course of this biography will bear witness, direct or indirect. I will quote here two testimonies only, and both shall be those of John Lawrence himself — the one con- scious and deliberate, the other wholly unpremeditated and al- most unconscious. In the fragment of the autobiography which I have so often quoted, and which was written, as I gather, about thirty years later, towards the close of his Vice- royalty, he writes : ‘In August, 1841, I took perhaps the most important, and certainly the happiest, step in my life — in get- ting married. My wife has been to me everything that a man could wish or hope for.’ The other testimony is still more to the point, because, as I have said, it is unconscious, and, in its neatness and its intensity, is eminently characteristic of the man. John Lawrence was sitting one evening in his drawing-room at Southgate, with his wife, his sister Letitia, and other members of the family, and all of them were engaged in reading. Looking up from his book, in which he had been engrossed, he discovered, to his sur- prise, that his wife had left the room. ‘Where’s mother?’ said he to one of his daughters. ‘ She’s upstairs,’ replied the girl. He returned to his book, and, looking up again a few minutes later, put the same question to his daughter, and received the same answer. Once more he returned to his reading, and once more he looked up with the same question on his lips. His sister Letitia here broke in, ‘Why, really, John, it would seem FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 1840-42 129 as if you could not get on for five minutes without your wife.’ ‘That’s why I married her,’ replied he. The honeymoon was spent on the Continent. In a tour, which lasted from September, 1841, to the following March, John Lawrence and his wife visited Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Italy. The birthday of the bride (November 14) was celebrated at Florence, and they reached Rome towards the close of the month. The mornings there were occupied in vigorous sight- seeing, and the evenings in as vigorous studies in Italian, till the unhealthy climate produced the effect that might have been ex- pected on a constitution which had not yet quite recovered from the still worse climate of India ; and a letter of John Lawrence’s to his friend Cumine speaks regretfully of his inability to enjoy life in a place where there was so much to see and do as in Rome.’ .They were accompanied during a part of their tour by Mr. and Mrs. Hayes. ‘The honeymoon is past,’ says Letitia, writing to a friend, ‘and I have not seen a frown on either brow. I find my brother can love his wife, and his sister none the less.’ The terrible news of the rising of the Afghan tribes on our demoralised army at Cabul, and of his brother George’s captiv- ity and too probable death, reached John Lawrence at Naples, and must have brought something more than ‘ a frown ’ to his brow. And in a letter, dashed off in the hottest haste to his sister-in-law, the wife of his brother Henry, he writes as follows. It will be observed that the want of grammar is appalling. But, as in the well-known letter written off by the Duke of Marl- borough to his wife after the battle of Blenheim, where spelling and grammar were, naturally enough, thrown to the winds, these signs of excitement add something to its historical interest. It is the first letter in which he alludes to Afghanistan — a subject which was seldom afterwards to be long absent from his mind — whether he was following in spirit, a few weeks later, from Eng- land the march of the ‘army of vengeance’; whether, as chief ruler of the Punjab, he was primarily responsible for the safety of that most difficult, and perhaps ‘ unscientific,’ but certainly, under his care, well-defended frontier ; whether, as Governor- General, he was taking precautions to avoid all entanglement with its internal politics ; or whether, once more, he was protest- ing, as he did protest with his latest breath, against a policy which — whether he was right or wrong — he thought to be im- politic and unjust, certain to involve calamities like those of which he had heard thirty years before when he was at Naples, Vol. I. — 9 130 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1840-42 and dangerous to the security of our whole Indian Empire. The letter, therefore, is interesting alike from a psychological and from a historical point of view, and I give it without any attempt to improve its grammar or punctuation. The sense is generally clear enough. Naples : March 23, 1842. My dear Honoria, I hardly know how to write to you the last mail has brought us such dreadful accounts the death of Sir Wm. [MacnaghtenJ poor George’s imprisonment and probable death and the reported de- struction of the whole Cabul army. Is certainly an amount of dreadful which has seldom come from India certainly never in my mind. The papers seem to think that neither George’s nor MacKenzie’s life were safe, I think that as they did not kill them at the moment of seizure they will spare their lives to exchange for their own prisoners. We are all here prepared for the worst, tho as long as there is life there is hope. It seems that the whole business was dreadfully mismanaged — the allowing the supplies to be in a place where they could be cut off — the dividing the force ; with a river without Bridge between them and lastly the con- suming and wasting the morale of the force in desultory attacks, instead of attacking them at once. Altogether shows a want of management. I trust that the rumours of the force being attacked and destroyed subse- quent to their evacuation will not prove true. It would seem to me to have been most feasible to have retreated through the open country to Ghuzni. You may fancy our anxiety for news. The general feeling previous to this disaster was that the sooner we get out of Afghanistan the better and Lord Ellenborough was said to have gone out with these views. I do not think now that we can leave the country without wip- ing off our disgrace — however enough of this. I propose leaving Naples on the 28th if the weather is fine for Marseilles by steam and thence to Paris where I shall be two days, and then to England. I am anxious to be there to look after Charlie and her chicks in the event of poor George’s being no more. I heard from Mr. S. a couple of days ago it seemed they had not then told her of the dreadful news — should George be gone I am his executor . . . what you do pray write to me as Henry will have little time for such things pray keep him out of Afghanistan if you can help it. I wish I was back in India all my thoughts and feelings are there. I am heartily tired of Italy. Letitia and Mr. Hayes travel back by land and probably will not be in England before June. They say eleven thousand troops are to be sent out to India though what is wanted with so many I don’t see except with China. I don’t think we have seen the last of that business — it seems quite interminable. This letter goes direct to Naples in the consul’s bag. I wrote two or three by that route. Mind and write any particulars which transpire about George. I still live in hope that he may survive. Yours ever affectionately, John. I S40-42 FURLOUGH AND MARRIAGE. 131 On the same day, and across the same sheet of paper, his sister Letitia writes in similar, but naturally more vehement, strains of distress. * The calamities of India have at last opened upon our family, and one of the best and least selfish is the first victim. The vial is opened, but when and where will it close ? I get up in the morning with fresh hope after communion with our abiding and unchanging Guide and Surety, but throughout the day the feeble heart sinks, and all seems the blackness of despair.’ Then, fearing that her other brother Henry's turn would come next, she turns in an agony of grief to him, implores him to return to England, telling him that he will be sure to find work to do at home, and that all her own and her husband’s property would be willingly shared with him and his. ‘ So come back, be- loved ones, come back ; our poor mother ! I cannot bear to think of her. I know the manner of her grief. As to the poor wife, what can be said for so huge a sorrow ? ’ And so the honeymoon ended, as it did for so many others in that sad year, in sore anxiety, in sickening fears and almost more sickening hopes — for they were to be hopes long deferred — among all the branches of the Lawrence family. John Law- rence and his wife hurried back to London to be ready, in case their worst fears should prove true, to take charge of the widow and her children. But here he was seized with a long and dangerous illness which made his doctors tell him that he must give up all idea of returning to India. This was serious news enough, for his leave was drawing to a close ; there was no ap- parent opening for him in England, and it was necessary to come to a decision at once. With his intense interest in his work in India, it did not probably cost him much to say that, whatever the risk might be, he was resolved to run it. ‘ If I can’t live in India,’ was his characteristic remark, ‘ I must go and die there.’ On his partial recovery he went over to Ireland for a change, and paid a farewell visit to his wife’s relations. He spent Sep- tember at Clifton with his aged mother, whose heart was glad- dened by the sight of ‘ nine of her children, and ten of her grandchildren ’ assembled around her, and he sailed from South- ampton for India, by the Overland Route, on October 1. It was the last meeting, as neither of them could have failed to antici- pate, between the mother and the son, but the pang of parting was lessened, at least to her motherly heart, by the knowledge 132 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1840-42 that he was not returning to India alone. ‘ To see you happily married/ she had written to him while he was at Etawa in June, 1839, ‘will gladden my old heart ere I quit life and on the day before his marriage (on August 25, 1841) she had thus poured out her feelings in a letter to her son Henry : ‘ I can- not express how rejoiced I am that he [John] will, please God, take out with him an honest Irish lass from among his relatives, and so well known to them all. Marcia’s account of her, will, I am sure, bear the test. I wish I could say what I think of her from my own experience, but the knowledge of his happi- ness is enough for me.’ The opportunity for forming her own judgment in the important matter had now come and gone, and had convinced her that her son was not only as happy as he could be, but that he had the best of grounds for be- ing so. And so John Lawrence went out a second time from England to India; still almost unnoticed and unknown; his great ca- pacities still unrecognised, and his brilliant future still not anticipated, even by his most intimate friends and relations, and he himself not a little anxious — and, as the result showed, not without reason — as to the occasion which India might now have for his services. He was to return to England twenty years later, the observed of all observers, with his name a household word in India and in England, and with a whole people, from whose great heart he had sprung, and whose best characteristics he so well combined, flocking from all parts to welcome him, and happy if they could catch but a sight of the grand and now familiar features of the ruler of the Punjab and the man who had done more than any other single man to save our Indian Empire. CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR. 1S38— 1842. During the three years’ absence of John Lawrence in England, the gloomiest and most disgraceful chapter of Anglo-Indian history — it may almost be said of the whole course of English history — had been brought to its close. The story of the Afghan war is a thrice-told tale, and its moral, it is to be hoped, is graven with a pen of iron on the tablets of the nation’s heart. With its design and progress John Lawrence had, of course, nothing to do. At first sight, therefore, it would seem to lie beyond the field, already suffi- ciently vast, of his biography. But, though he exercised no influence on the Afghan war, it exercised so profound an in- fluence on him ; it helped to give so decided a bent to the whole of his subsequent administration, whether as Chief Com- missioner of the Punjab, or as Governor-General of India ; it has so dominated the foreign policy of eight successive Gover- nors-General during a period of some thirty-five years, — that it is essential to a right understanding alike of John Lawrence himself, of his actions, and of his time, to indicate in bare out- line the general causes and the successive steps which prepared the way for the catastrophe. The story is thrilling and yet monotonous — thrilling, for the ruin was so terrible and so complete ; monotonous, for there is no single step from first to last upon which folly, or worse than folly, has not placed its ineffaceable stamp. A fatal infatuation, to which the pen of the greatest of the Greek tragedians could, perhaps, alone have done justice, seems to clog the steps of those whom God has determined to destroy, and has therefore first de- prived of their senses. The Indian career of Lord Auckland began with the first, and ended with the last, act of this pro- longed and gloomy drama. The immediate cause of a state of things which seemed to call for the coolest deliberation and the most straightforward 134 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i 838-42 policy on the part of English statesmen, but served instead to deprive them, for the time, alike of their senses and of their consciences, was the rapid progress of Russia. What was the nature and extent of that progress? Nobody who studies the subject seriously will deny that it was rapid and startling enough. On the side of Europe, within a period of some fifty years, Finland had been conquered ; the Turkish Empire had been overrun and deprived of some of its fairest provinces ; the partition of Poland, that crowning iniquity of modern times, had been planned and carried out, and it was the Russians who had got the lion’s share of the booty. On the side of Asia, Russia had spread southwards from Siberia over the vast steppes traversed by the wandering Kirghis till she had planted her forts on the Jaxartes, had looked wistfully towards the Oxus, and had begun to threaten the independence even of the three ‘ independent ’ khanates of Khiva, Bokhara, and Khokand. More formidable even than this, she had conquered the northern provinces of Persia, and had made that empire a mere puppet in her hands. The repeated embassies and subsidies and pro- mises of the British to the Persian Court — promises, it must be added, which were evaded in a rather questionable manner when the pinch came — had failed to secure an alliance between Persia and England, and the advance, therefore, of the Persians on the semi-independent principality of Herat, which was then, as now, one of the pivots of the eastern problem, might, not unreasonably, be regarded by English statesmen as the advance of the Russians themselves against the one country which still lay between them and the Indus. Here was a great fact or series of facts, a danger or series of dangers, with which Eng- lish statesmanship had to grapple. There was, as I have said, but one country between Persia and India. But its character and that of its inhabitants seemed likely to make it, with decent management, the very best and most sufficient of barriers against any further hostile advance of the Russians. It was a barren, mountainous, inaccessible region, inhabited by people as wild, as poor, and as savage as the country in which they lived. They were split up into in- numerable tribes, each fiercely attached to its independence and to the right of cutting at pleasure its neighbours’ throats, but capable, as their history showed, of being united from time io time into a loose confederacy by one of those brilliant leaders, half-religious and half-military, such as Islam, even in its appar- 1838-42 THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR. 135 ent decadence, seems capable, at pleasure, of bringing to the front. This loose confederacy generally disappeared with the disappearance of the genius who had created it ; and there were two motives, and only two, which seemed capable of welding the scattered members into a compact union of the whole country — hatred of the foreigner, and fear of a foreign invasion. ‘We are content,’ so said an old Afghan chief to Mountstuart Elphinstone, ‘ with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood ; but we will never be content with a foreign master.’ There was seated on the throne of Cabul, in the year 1837, Dost Mohammed, a man of genius, and one whose name will often recur in this biography. A usurper he may have been, according to European ideas, but in a country like Afghanis- tan such a man might fairly claim to be his own ancestry, and as Eastern notions go, he was a wise and just ruler. Here, then, was the very man for our purpose, all ready to our hands. How did we deal with him ? We accredited an envoy, Alexander Burnes by name, to his Court. He was one of the most adventurous and successful of our Eastern explorers, and he soon discovered that the Afghan sovereign was anxious to form an alliance with us, and to reject all proposals for the counter-alliance which Persian and Rus- sian agents had been pressing upon him. He assured his em- ployers of his belief in the Dost’s sincerity, and pressed them to accept his proffered friendship as the best security against more serious dangers beyond. But this was too obvious and straightforward a course for men whom a religious Greek would have represented as blinded by the goddess of Bane, and urged resistlessly onward towards their ruin. The man who was anxious to be our friend must be treated as an enemy. The sovereign chosen by the Afghans must be driven from his throne, and a feeble pretender, whom the Afghans had ex- pelled, and who was living as a pensioner on our bounty, must be put in his place by force of arms. The question of right or wrong seems never to have occurred to the astute diplomatists who elaborated so sublimely foolish a policy. And when Alex- ander Burnes had fallen, some years afterwards, the first victim of the policy which he had disapproved, and when our calami- ties and our shame did compel people at home to raise, when it was too late, the embarrassing question of right or wrong, a Secretary of State was found who was not ashamed to quell the 136 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1838-42 rising storm by garbling the despatches of the dead, and to make him appear to have recommended as politic and just a course of action which he had always deemed impolitic and unjust. A policy disgraceful in itself was thus justified, even after it had been quenched in blood and ruin and had been for- mally disavowed, by means which were still more disgraceful. But meanwhile Shah Soojah was fished by us out of his re- tirement ; we formed an alliance with him and with the Sikhs, the hereditary enemies of the Afghans ; an English army sur- mounted the dangers of the passes, drove Dost Mohammed, after a brave resistance, into exile, and, with the loss of some ' 70,000 camels — the life-blood, it should be remembered, of these inaccessible countries— succeeded in placing our puppet on the throne. Rewards were distributed by the English authorities with a liberal hand; the successful general, Sir John Keane, hastened home with his success and with a peerage ; a large part of our army was recalled to India, and the remainder stayed behind simply to insure the ‘ benefits which we had con- ferred upon a reluctant people ! ’ It was the story of Regulus in Africa over again. The blind feeling of security at home engendered by successes which had been unexpectedly rapid, was the same in each case. The infat- uation of the generals in command was the same. The Roman general wrote back word to Rome that he had ‘ sealed up the gates of Carthage with terror; ’ and as he dictated terms of peace which were intolerable to a prostrate but high-spirited foe, told them roughly that ‘ men who were good for anything should either conquer or submit to their betters.’ The English gene- ral boasted that ‘Afghanistan was as tranquil as Wales,’ at the very moment when he was staying behind to bolster up a ruler whom he knew to be detested by the whole Afghan nation. The fate of the invading armies was much the same. Only, in our case, the ruin was still more sudden, still more terrible, and still more complete ; and who will say that it was not still more deserved ? The genius of Horace has shed a halo of glory round the last days of Regulus ; but it would require more than the genius of Horace to shed a single gleam of light on the last days of Elphinstone or Shelton. It seems to be the fate of an Afghan war that its successes are only less melan- choly, if indeed they are less melancholy, than its failures. Bella gci'i placuit nullos habitura triumphos. 1838-42 THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR. 137 What followed the recall of our troops may be dismissed with almost equal brevity. At first everything went ‘ merry as a -marriage bell.’ Dost Mohammed, after many romantic- adventures in Central Asia, returned at the head of a host of Uzbeks to measure his sword with us, and after an engagement in which, by his gallantry, he deserved the success which he obtained, surprised everybody by his voluntary surrender. Hut it did not follow, because Dost Mohammed had been deposed and was safe in India, that therefore Shah Soojah sat safely on his throne. The announcement had hardly been made that • * Afghanistan was as tranquil as Wales ’ when the first dull murmur of the rising torrent was heard. ‘ You may take Can- dahar and Ghuzni,’ the Khan of Khelat had warned us at the very outset of the war: ‘you may even take Cabul, but you cannot conquer the snows ; and when they fall you will be able neither to maintain your army nor to withdraw it.’ ‘ When your military difficulties are over your real difficulties will begin,’ was the warning of a greater than the Khan of Khelat, and of one who might have claimed a hearing even from the President of the Board of Control and the Governor-General — the great Duke of Wellington. In similar tones of warning had spoken all the most high-minded and the best informed of our Indian administrators — Lord Wellesley, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Lord William Bentinck, and Sir Charles Metcalfe ; in similar tones spoke the Council of the Governor-General, when at last they heard the secret which had been carefully kept from them by their chief ; in similar tones the Court of Directors at home ; but the warning fell upon deaf, because unwilling, ears. Do we seem to be reading the history of 1838 or 1878 ? The expenses of the occupation were becoming unbearable, and yet everybody felt — as perchance they are feeling now at the moment at which I write — that it would be dishonourable to leave the puppet whom we had crowned to his certain fate, and Afghanistan to certain anarchy. So we lingered on a little longer and curtailed our expenses, by dimin- ishing the subsidies hitherto paid to the wild tribes who held the gloomy passes which frowned between us and safety. In- stantly they returned to their immemorial custom of plundering and slaying all passers by, and in a moment we were cut off from India. The river was now running level with its banks and was about to overwhelm us. But still Macnaghten, the Resident at the puppet’s court ; still Elphinstone, the general 138 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1838-42 in command of the troops ; and still Alexander Burnes, the victim, like Cavagnari, of his own resolution and his own chiv- alrous blindness, — refused to take warning. The English troops who ought to have been in the citadel were quartered in ill- constructed cantonments which lay at a distance from the city and were completely commanded by the surrounding moun- tains. The military stores were in a small fort at a distance from both cantonments and citadel ; the royal treasure was in a similar fort in the middle of the city, as though to invite at- tack ; and within the Bala Hissar or citadel cowered the miser- able monarch, making believe to stand upon his dignity and • rule the country, while between him and his only possible protectors, the English army in its cantonments, seethed and surged the fanatical and infuriated mob of the most turbulent of cities. Worse than this, while in subordinate positions among our officers were some of the most intrepid spirits whom our Indian Empire has produced — Alexander Burnes, Vincent Eyre, William Broadfoot, Colin Mackenzie, George Lawrence, and Eldred Pottinger, any one of whom, had he been in command, might still have saved, or at all events would have deserved to save us — the chief authority was vested in General Elphinstone, a brave soldier, but a man wanting in' decision, and now incapacitated doubly by old age and by a torturing disease ; while next to him came Brigadier-General Shelton, a far abler man, but cross-grained and petulant, utterly impracticable, hardly on speaking terms with his chief, and yet unable to act either with him or without him. Everything and everybody in fact seemed to be exactly where they ought not to be, and this at the very crisis of the fate of some 15,000 men ! Burnes, who was living in his own house in the city without an adequate guard, was the first victim. On November 2, an infuriated mob surrounded his house. He sent for aid ro the cantonments. But no aid came, and, after a brave resistance, he was hacked to pieces in his own garden. The stores in the small fort were next attacked, and our troops stood looking on from their cantonments while the fort was stormed, and its contents, the only supplies which could keep them from starva- tion, were carried off. The arrival of Akbar Khan, the favourite son of Dost Mohammed, infused fresh spirit into the Afghans, while the want of energy and spirit shown by our chiefs spread paralysis among the English troops. Once and again they re- 838-42 THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR. 139 fused to obey the word of command, and once and again they fled disgracefully from the field when victory seemed to be in their grasp. Starvation now began to stare them in the face. And there was nothing for it but to make the best terms they could for the evacuation of the country with their relentless foe. The game was in the hands of Akbar Khan ; and if the wolf was ever merciful to the lamb, then the Feringhis might hope for forbearance from the infuriated Ghilzais. In the struggle for dear life Macnaghten, while he was ne- gotiating with some of the Sirdars, was unfortunately induced by the wily Akbar Khan to enter privately into other and in- consistent negotiations with him. It was a trap intended to demonstrate to the assembled Sirdars the faithlessness of the English, and it was successful. Macnaghten was lured to a conference, and in the struggle which ensued was shot dead by Akbar Khan. His head was cut off, and his body paraded through the market of Cabul, while some 5,000 soldiers lin- gered within striking distance, not daring to raise a finger in his defence. There was more delay, more negotiations, more appeals for mercy. ‘In friendship,’ pleaded the suppliants, ‘kindness and consideration are necessary, not overpowering the weak with sufferings.’ It had come then to this ! A younger generation of Englishmen may need to be reminded that the wreak were the English, and that the friendship appealed to was the friendship of the people whose country we had gratuitously invaded and whose ruler we had deliberately de- throned. In vain did Eldred Pottinger dwell on the faithless- ness of the enemy and on the succours that might yet be hoped for from Jellalabad. In vain did he passionately appeal to the generals to allow their men to make one effort more to cut their way through the army, and die, if die they must, a soldier’s death. The hope of life was stronger than any of his argu- ments ; and at last, on December 24, the final agreement for the evacuation of the country was signed. All the guns but six, and all the remaining treasure, were to be given up ; Dost Mohammed was to be restored ; Shah Soojah was to make away with himself whither and how he liked ; Nott was to retire from Candahar and Sale from Jellalabad. On these terms the re- treating army was to be supplied with provisions and to receive a safe-conduct as' far as Jellalabad. It was several days before the treaty was ratified. Snow — • the snow of which the Khan of Khelat had warned us — began 140 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1838-42 to fall ; and on January 6, 4,500 fighting-men, and some 12,000 camp-followers, including many women and children, defiled out of the cantonments. As the last of these left the camp — and unfortunately it was not till late in the evening that they did so — the infuriated and triumphant Afghans rushed in and set fire to the abandoned tents, while the retreating army wound slowly on towards the fearful gorge of the Khurd Cabul. The snow lay thick upon the ground ; and upon the snow, without food or fuel or shelter of any kind, there bivouacked for two nights in succession, in that pitiless climate, the motley and ill- fated host composed of dusky troops drawn from the sun- scorched plains of India, of Englishmen and Englishwomen and babes at the breast. The camp-followers, who brought up the rear of our army, had been the first to feel the attacks of the pursuing Ghilzais ; but when, on the third day, the fore- most columns began to enter the fatal defile, they too fell fast and thick beneath the fire of an enemy whom they.could feel and hear, but could not see. Every rock concealed an Afghan marksman, and everyone who lagged behind or who dropped exhausted on the road was immediately hacked to pieces by Afghan knives. Agreement after agreement was made with Akbar Khan, who hung like a bird of evil omen on our skirts, and concession after concession was wrung from us. First, the subordinate officers who might have done most to sustain the shrinking spirits of the men and, perhaps, might have saved them altogether — Lawrence, Mackenzie, and Pottinger — were given up as hostages ; next came the women and children ; and, last of all, those whom, unfortunately, we could best spare, the officers in command — Elphinstone and Shelton. Lured by the scent of human carnage, and drunk with the blood which they had already gorged, the Ghilzai vultures were not likely, in deference to any stipulations made with Akbar Khan, to spare the prey that was in their power ; and Akbar himself, who might, perhaps, have done something to restrain their fury, was already off with his precious burden of English ladies and generals to Cabul. The retreat had long since be- come a rout, and the army a rabble. The scanty supply of food was gone, and now the ammunition began to fail also. The last desperate stand was made at Gundamuck, a name of ill omen, not wiped out by the treaty which twenty-seven years later has been called after it ; and on January 15, there was espied from the ramparts of Jellalabad, riding on a jaded pony, 1838-42 THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR. 141 which itself seemed but half alive, a single man, half dead with agony of mind and body, exhausted by want of food, by loss of blood, and by fatigue — the one solitary survivor of the 15,000 men who had left Cabul ten days before. Never, surely, in the whole course of history has wrong-doing been more terribly and more deservedly avenged. The one consolation — if indeed it can now be called a consolation — was that we had learned a lesson which we could never need to be taught again. The evil genius of Lord Auckland, who retired, broken- down, to England, seemed to rest for the time even on the en- ergy and courage of his successor. Lord Ellenborough was a man of great ability, but his genius was erratic. He was a splendid orator, but his despatches were often merely grandiose. He was the victim of his own itching ears. And his judgment, his candour, and his caution were often sacrificed to the turn of a sentence, or the rhythm of a peroration. He was always in extremes ; and after a chivalrous proclamation, in which, by candidly avowing our mistakes and wrong-doings, and setting forth the principles of our policy for the future, he had evoked a warm response from one end of India to the other, he straight- way turned the admiration he had excited into disgust and in- dignation, by the order, again and again repeated, to Pollock and Nott at once to withdraw from Afghanistan, leaving the prisoners — our brave officers and their helpless wives and children — to their fate ! But the passive resistance, and inge- nious inability of Nott and Pollock to do what they were bid- den, put off the evil day, and at last brought the famous per- mission to ‘retire ’ from Jellalabad and Candahar, should they think it Advisable, ‘ by way of Cabul ! ’ The permission was greedily seized by the generals ; the capital was occupied by the army of vengeance, and, thanks to the generous exertions of our officers, less summary punishment was inflicted on the in- habitants than might have been expected from the excited feel- ings of our soldiery. The Bala Hissar was blown up; the great bazaar in which Macnaghten’s body had been exposed to insult was destroyed, together with the adjacent mosque ; the shops of the possibly guilty Afghans, and certainly inno- cent Hindus, were given up to loot ; the prisoners who had been sent off to a living death in Turkestan returned, as by a series of miracles, from the heights of the Hindu Kush, and literally dropped into our hands ; and, finally, the sandal-wood gates, as they were then believed to be, of Somnath, were 142 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1838-42 brought back in triumph from Ghuzni ; while the bewildered natives of India were congratulated by the Governor-General — the Mohammedans on the recapture by Christians of what a Mohammedan conqueror had taken away, and the Hindus on the restoration to a temple which had long ceased even to be remembered, of a trophy which was destined to find a fit rest- ing-place at last, not in the restored temple of Somnath, but in the armoury of the Government fort at Agra ! This proclama- tion was greeted with an outburst of derision both in England and in India ; and so, according to approved precedents, the most prolonged tragedy through which the Indian Government had ever passed ended in a tragi-comedy, if not in a downright farce. On October 1, 1838, Lord Auckland had put forth from Simla the famous State paper which, astounding in the audacity and recklessness of its assertions, had declared his objects in the in- vasion of Afghanistan ; and now, by a coincidence which was anything but undesigned, exactly four years later, on October 1, 1842, Lord Ellenborough, who always aimed at theatrical ef- fects, from the very same place, and the very same room, wrote a manifesto which declared that disasters unparalleled in their extent, unless by the errors in which they were originated, and by the treachery by which they were completed, had in one short campaign been avenged upon every scene of past mis- fortune ; that to force a sovereign upon a reluctant people was as incon- sistent with the policy as it was with the principles of the British Govern- ment, tending to place the armies and resources of that people at the disposal of the first invader, and to impose the burden of supporting a sovereign without the prospect of benefit from his alliance ; finally, that the Government of India, content with the limits nature appeared to have assigned to its empire, would henceforward devote all its efforts to the establishment and maintenance of general peace, to the protection of the sovereigns and chiefs its allies, and to the prosperity and happiness of its own faithful subjects ; that the rivers of the Punjab and the Indus, and the mountainous passes and the barbarous tribes of Afghanistan would be placed between the British army and an enemy approaching from the West, and no longer between the army and its supplies. Golden words, but only half true, if the acts and purposes of the English Government of 1878 are the acts and purposes of the English nation ! Meanwhile, on the very day on which Lord Ellenborough wrote his famous proclamation, there started from England on his return voyage to India the young Bengal 1838-42 THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR. 143 civilian, as yet little known to fame, who, the very opposite to Lord Ellenborough in all respects, simple as a child in word, in deed, and in thought, was destined to carry out into act, and with the happiest results to all concerned, the wise and noble policy therein foreshadowed. And so, from this long but, as it appears to me, not unnecessary" digression on the first Afghan war, to John Lawrence, the consistent and indomitable oppo- nent of all future Afghan wars, except for purposes of bona-fide self-defence, I now return. I CHAPTER VII. MAGISTRATE OF DELHI; AND FIRST SIKH WAR. 1842—1846. After the usual roughing of the Overland Route and the forma- tion of several shipboard friendships, one of which, unlike most shipboard friendships — that with Seton-Karr — proved lasting, John Lawrence and his wife arrived at Bombay on November 14, 1842. It was a place new to him as to her; and after ten days of sight-seeing in that bustling Babel of races and lan- guages, finding that a war had broken out in Bundelcund, the direct route to the North-West Provinces, they determined to take the much longer and more difficult route through the little- known central provinces to Allahabad. It was a journey ad- venturous for a man, but doubly adventurous for a woman, whose first experience of India had been a violent attack of cholera from which, under her husband’s careful nursing, she was just recovering. Travelling in India was then slow work under the best of circumstances, for there were no railways, no public conveyances, few serais, and few roads or even tracks. But this journey was exceptionally rough and difficult even for India. No sooner had the cool air and delightful scenery of the Ghauts been left behind, than John Lawrence was himself at- tacked with symptoms of the same terrible disease. ‘We were thus,’ writes Lady Lawrence, ‘about as helpless a pair of travellers in a strange land as could well be found ; but we were young and not easily frightened, and, as my husband knew what to do on the first appearance of illness, the alarming symptoms did not increase, and he was soon quite well again.’ At Poona they stopped for a few days in the house of Sir Charles Napier, who was in command there, but happened to be absent on a tour of inspection. From Aurungabad, their next halting-place, to Nagpore, a distance of three hundred miles, their journey lay through a wild country with a very sparse population, and with no facilities at all for travelling. As far as Ellickpore they went by dawk, that is, in palanquins 1 842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. 145 with relays of bearers. But here their progress was stopped, for there was no regular dawk, and it was with much difficulty that John Lawrence managed to engage a set of forty bearers to carry them thence to Nagpore. Their plan of travelling was to start between three and four p.m. and push on till late at night, when they stopped near a village, arranged for their food and made up their beds, of course in their palanquins. After a few hours’ sleep, they were off again and pressed on till the sun obliged them to stop. It was seldom during this wild journey that they came even upon a traveller’s bungalow. Having only one servant, they had to do almost everything for themselves. The wiry collector, in addition to keeping his forty bearers in order — a task for which his early life at Paniput had well quali- fied him — had often himself to act the part of purveyor, of butcher, and of cook ; in other words, he had to find, to kill, and to cook the lamb, the goat, or the pair of fowls which was to keep them alive, and as he used to relate, many were the shifts and the turns to which he had recourse to conceal the disagreeable preparations for their rough-and-ready meal from his young and tender-hearted wife. On the last day of the year they arrived at Nagpore, much to the astonishment of the Englishmen whom they found there. An enterprising English traveller, Mr. James Bryce, who has scaled alone the almost untrodden peak of Ararat, has recently told us how, when he informed the Archimandrite of the Armen- ian monastery at its foot of what he had done, the venerable old man courteously declined to believe him, and answered with a pleasant smile, ‘No, that cannot be ; no one has been there ; it is impossible.’ Even so the English residents at Nagpore re- fused to believe that a lady could have accomplished so toil- some a journey, and that too, as John Lawrence emphatically declared, without a single murmur under all its hardships and difficulties. In the comfortable quarters at Nagpore more serious troubles came upon John Lawrence, for here he found that his chance of obtaining employment was very slight. Our troops had just returned from Afghanistan, and a brilliant, but, under the cir- cumstances, a very ill-timed and childish pageant had been elaborated by Lord Ellenborough for their reception at Feroze- pore, then our chief station on the Sikh frontier, and a place, as the readers of ‘ Sir Henry Lawrence’s Life ’ 1 know, which Vol. I. — 10 1 Vol. i. p. 206. 146 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 was almost the creation of his energy and zeal. There were painted elephants in vast numbers, there were triumphal arches, there was the waving of banners, there was the roar of artillery — altogether a fine show, but, to those who reflected on what had happened, a sorry sight. One ingredient of the pageant was happily conspicuous by its absence. It had been intend- ed by Lord Ellenborough, in the very worst spirit of Roman pride, that the captive monarch whom we had driven from his throne, and were now driven to replace upon it, should grace with his presence the triumphal procession. But better coun- sels prevailed, and he and we were spared this crowning humil- iation. There was no one in India who did not rejoice that we were quit of Afghanistan — the scene of our success and of our shame — on almost any terms. A feeling of mixed excitement and depression pervaded the country. There was plenty to be done, but there were too many hands to do it. Everyone seemed to be out of work, and John Lawrence wrote in some anxiety from Nagpore to report his arrival to the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces. He wrote privately at the same time to his immediate superior and friend, Robert Hamilton, Commissioner of Agra, begging him to press his claims for an appointment. Meanwhile he pushed on to Allahabad, where he was hospitably entertained by Frederick Currie, who was, in after years, to be brought into such close contact with him in high official posts. Here he bought his first pair of horses. It was a characteristic purchase enough ; for he used often to tell, with something perhaps of shame, but more of amusement or of pride, how, as I have related already, in earlier days at Paniput, he had been so taken by the beauty of a splendid Arab that he had spent his last penny in buying him. It was on Chanda’s back that, far many years afterwards, he had done some of the very best of his work : his ‘cutchcrryon horse- back;’ his pursuit of great criminals; his morning and even- ing canters, varied sometimes by the healthful and exciting chase, albeit he was all alone, of the hyena or the wolf or the wild boar. At Cawnpore he spent a month in the house of Richard, the youngest of the Lawrence brotherhood, who was just then em- ployed in raising troops there. It was a pleasant breathing- space before the more public and responsible portion of his life began. But, anxious about the future, and eager to be at I 842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. 147 work again, he chafed at the want of employment. He had already purchased what was in his eyes the first necessity of life — a pair of horses — and now he furnished himself with what was only less necessary — a second pair ; and then, after buying a buggy, a stock of tents, and stores of various kinds, and en- gaging servants for the future housekeeping, he started forth again, like the patriarch of old, with his long caravan of fol- lowers, not knowing which way he was to go, or where he should find rest, or rather work. It was his wife's first experience of camp life, and very en- joyable she found it. The usual plan was to send the tents in advance some ten or twelve miles, and then to drive that dis- tance in the buggy, arriving in time for breakfast, which would be all ready for them ; and then they would spend the heat of the day in reading, writing, and conversation. At Agra their tents were pitched just outside the gardens of the Taj Mehal, so that they had every opportunity of observing that matchless building — ‘the delight and the despair’ of the architects of the world, in the early morning, in the full blaze of the midday sun, and by the softer light of the moon. This visit was spe- cially recalled to the mind of one at least of the party when, more than twenty years afterwards, they were there once again in all the pomp and splendour of the Vice-regal court. ‘ Great as was then,’ writes Lady Lawrence, ‘my joy and thankful pride in my husband, it could not be greater than the delight of those early days, when the world seemed all before us, and the reality of life had yet hardly touched me, and I lived only in the present happiness.’ On one of their easy marches thence a striking domestic in- cident occurred. John Lawrence and his wife were driving one day towards their tents, when they saw a large encamp- ment near the road, from which, to their indescribable surprise and delight emerged their brother George, who had just re- turned from his long captivity in Afghanistan, and was still dressed as an Afghan. What a family meeting ! And what an outpouring of hearts there must have been ! The incidents of the victorious advance to Cabul, and the disastrous retreat from it, the captivity, the chivalrous self-sacrifice, and the escape as from a living death of the elder ; the hopes deferred, the news from the distant home, always welcome in a foreign land, but perhaps never so welcome as now, brought direct from Eng- land by the younger brother ! What thrilling stories George 14B LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 Lawrence must have had to tell during the one day that he was able to march with John, those who have read his account of ‘Forty Years in India,’ know well. But perhaps no story was so thrilling as one which is not, I think, contained in it, and which, just as I heard it from his own lips, may find a place here. One day while George Lawrence, Eldred Pottinger, and the other captives were sitting together at one end of the room in which they were confined, Akbar Khan — the man who had slain Macnaghten with his own hand, and had made the treacherous compacts with our demoralized troops — came in with other lead- ing Sirdars and proceeded to hold high and animated debate at the other end of the room. Pottinger, the only one of the hos- tages who understood Pushtu, moved towards them and listened attentively. At last he rejoined his own party and said to George Lawrence, ‘Do you know what they are discussing?’ ‘No,’ replied Lawrence. ‘Well,’ said Pottinger quietly, ‘only whether it is better for their own interests to kill us here and now, or to keep us alive ; at present the majority are for killing us.’ ‘You had better go back,’ replied Lawrence with equal self-command : ‘ see how the debate goes, and then come and let us know.’ Pottinger did so, and when the ‘great consult ’ was over, he returned, saying, ‘ The majority arc now the other way, and we are not to be killed at present.’ After this the prisoners were well treated, but it was not the first time that their lives had been in imminent danger. It had been seriously proposed on a previous occasion that each Sirdar should kill one captive with his own hands, thus placing all alike beyond the pale of British forgiveness ; and it was probably not so much due to the clemency as to the enlightened sense of self- interest of Akbar Khan that their lives had, on each occasion, been spared. On parting with his brother, George asked him casually whither he was going. ‘To Meerut,’ replied John. ‘ Why on earth are you going to a place where you are not known ?’ re- joined his brother. ‘ Go to Delhi, where you are known : you are sure to get work there.’ The advice was taken, and while he was on his way thither he heard to his delight that, on the Commissioner of Agra’s recommendation, he had been ap- pointed to the post of Civil and Sessions Judge at Delhi, though only for the period of one month. Thus John Law- rence found himself beginning work once more at the scene of 1 842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. 149 his earliest Indian labours. And it is not to be wondered at, look- ing at the important influence which this return on his own foot- steps had on the whole of his subsequent career, and considering also what a career it was, that I have found that more than one person has been anxious to claim a share of the credit of sending him back there. In any case, years afterwards John Lawrence wrote to Hamilton : ‘Your sending me to Delhi in 1843 was the making of me, and I can never forget it.’ And those cyni- cal people who are ready to think that gratitude may be best defined as ‘a lively anticipation of favours to come’ may be in- terested to know that such, at all events, was not John Lawrence's gratitude ; for years afterwards again, when the Chief Commis- sioner of the Punjab had returned to England, and had become a member of the Indian Council, he wrote to Sir Robert Hamilton in warm recollection of this long bygone service, and offered him his first nomination for his son. ‘ It is a great trait in his character,’ says Sir Robert ; and few will deny that it was so. There were no more easy marches now. John Lawrence and his wife hurried on to Delhi, and, during thfcir month’s stay there, were hospitably entertained by Thomas Metcalfe, the Commissioner, brother-in-law to George Lawrence, and an old friend of John, who, eight years before, had assisted him in bring- ing to justice the murderers of William Fraser, his predecessor in his high office. John was delighted to be at work again in the place which he knew and loved so well, and by the end of the month he received another acting appointment in the Delhi dis- trict, not far from the scene of his old labours at Paniput. His headquarters were to be at Kurnal, which he had known before only as a large military" cantonment ; and the prospect of set- tling down quietly, even for the short period of six months, was pleasant enough. But this was not to be just yet, for disturbances had broken out in the neighbouring state of Khytul. Its Raja having died without an heir, the English Government found it convenient to declare that the territory had lapsed to them. But the re- tainers of the palace, thinking, as well they might, that they had at least as good a right to the palace spoils as the English, stimulated the native troops to resist the transfer, and attacked and overpowered the small force which was sent to take it over. The ungrateful duty of suppressing this disturbance fell upon Henry Lawrence, who, after his exhausting labours at Peshawur in pushing on supplies for Pollock’s army of retri- 150 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 842-46 bution, had recently come back to civil work at Umballa. He was opposed, on principle, to the annexation of native states ; the work therefore was little to his liking, but he had no choice in the matter. He hurried over to Kurnal for reinforcements, which were supplied by his brother John in conjunction with the military authorities, and John, delighted to see his brother, and perhaps also — like David, as Eliab thought — still more de- lighted to see a little fighting, accompanied the force to the scene of action. The resistance of the enemy was trifling enough, but it was a work of more difficulty to keep order among the British troops, some of whom actually plundered the treasures which they had been sent to guard. But I am fortunately able to describe the scene in the graphic words of an eye-witness, my friend Colonel Henry Yule. The family of the Khytul Rajah had refused to give up the palace to the native force sent to receive it. My friend and chief, Sir William Baker, then Captain and Superintendent of Canals, was ordered out to give engineering help if needed, and I with him. We met the troops re- tiring discomfited with some loss. So we had to wait till a considerable force assembled and advanced to Khytul. The fort was found abandoned, and a strange scene of confusion — all the paraphernalia and accumula- tions of odds and ends of a wealthy native family lying about and invit- ing loot. I remember one beautiful crutch-stick of ebony with two rams’ heads in jade. I took it and sent it in to the political authority, intend- ing to buy it when sold. There was a sale, but my crutch never ap- peared ! Somebody had a more developed taste in jade. I remember an Irish officer, rummaging a box, found a book in some native language, with a title-page in English that he could read — after his fashion — for he called out to me, ‘ It’s the Epistle to Powle. I read it on the frontispiece ! ’ On this occasion I saw four distinguished men — Sir George Clerk, Henry Lawrence, R. Napier, and John Lawrence. With the first three 1 made acquaintance, the last I only saw. But he must have even then been a man of mark in some way, from the way he was pointed out to me. Amid the general rummage that was going on, an officer of British in- fantry had been put over a part of the palace supposed to contain treasure, and they — officer and all — were helping themselves. Henry Lawrence was one of the Politicals under (Sir) George Clerk. When the news of this affair came to him I was present. It was in a white marble loggia in the palace, where there was a white marble chair, or throne, on a basement. Lawrence was sitting on this throne in great excitement. He wore an Afghan choga, a sort of dressing-gown gar- ment, and this, and his thin locks and thin goat’s beard, were streaming in the wind. He always dwells in my memory as a sort of pythoness on her tripod under the afflatus ! 1 842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. 151 It need hardly be added that Henry Lawrence took good care to bring the offenders to justice, and then with all the energy of his nature he set to work to reorganise the administration and settle the revenue of the little state. John Lawrence mean- while returned to Kurnal, and here a domestic event of im- portance occurred, for on June 10, 1843, at the very hottest season, his eldest child, Kate, was born. John’s office was in his own house, a privilege rare enough in Indian official life ; and his only complaint was that, owing to the epidemic which was raging in the surrounding district, he could get nobody to do any work. In October, when the court of the Governor-General broke up from Simla, and began to move towards Calcutta, John Lawrence’s house, being the only inhabited one in the canton- ment, was the halting-place of many high officials, with a sprinkling of old friends among them ; and on November 6, his brother Henry and his wife arrived on their way to Nepal. Here was another happy family meeting. It was the first time that the wives had met since they had played together as young girls in the North of Ireland, and each had now the satisfaction of judging for herself of the choice the other had made, and of witnessing the help, the sympathy, and the happi- ness which each gave and received in so abundant a measure. They passed some days together in the one inhabited house, ‘surrounded,’ says Mrs. Henry I^awrence, ‘by long lines of barracks, hospitals, and stables, flagstaff, racquet-court, church, bungalows, gardens, out-offices, all empty, all looking as if a plague had devastated the station in a night.’ 1 A plague had devastated the station, not in a night, but in a year, or rather series of years. Kurnal, when John Lawrence had last known it, had been one of the largest, healthiest, and most popular of the cantonments in India. Its local advantages were great for such a purpose ; for the country was open and suitable for the evolutions of troops ; the soil was light and sandy, and therefore conducive to health ; there was plenty of grass and water ; lastly, the two great roads from Delhi and Meerut converged there, and, standing as the place did on the direct highway between the Punjab and Hindustan, it had been, as I have already pointed out, the historic battlefield of India. What then had turned it into such a city of the dead ? It was Life of Sir Henry Lawrence , vol. i. p. 442. 152 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i 842-46 not that the general condition of the people had deteriorated. On the contrary, there were signs of improvement every- where. In 1833-35, when John Lawrence had been stationed there before, what between the oppressive assessments of pre- vious years and the famine, the people had been at their lowest ebb, and many villages had been completely broken up. But he had not left till he had seen, and had in great measure caused, the turn of the tide. He had brought order out of anarchy, had postponed the payment of the land-tax, and had set on foot its permanent reduction, a work which others had, afterwards, been able satisfactorily to complete. What then was the cause of the epidemic and of the distress which it had brought in its train ? Fretting at the want of work, and finding that some fifty per cent, of the troops were struck down by fever, and that the rest were so enfeebled that ‘ there was not a man of them who would carry his arms or march a stage,’ while the natives in the adjoin- ing villages were suffering equally, he spent his spare time in an elaborate inquiry into the cause of the epidemic and its possible remedies. The results he embodied in a valuable paper, the first of the kind in my possession, which he put together at Delhi in the following spring. The epidemic he traced, not, as so many high authorities have since done, to canal irrigation in itself, thus, rightly or wrongly, discouraging the chief safeguard against famine, and the cheapest means of intercommunication, but rather to the neglect of proper precautions in carrying out that irrigation, to the masses of herbage and brushwood which had been allowed to grow on the canal banks, and to the increased cultivation of rice. The inhabitants of that part of India, it should be re- membered, unlike the natives of Bengal, had till lately been ac- customed to live, not on rice, but on wheat, barley, and pulses of various kinds. These last crops need comparatively little water, whereas rice, to do well, needs to be incessantly flooded. ‘ Rice in fact, grows only in a marsh, and in the last few years it had come to be cultivated literally up to the bungalows.’ The cantonment was quite surrounded on two sides by rice-fields. Here was one fertile source of mischief, and the neglect on the part of the military authorities which allowed this had also al- lowed vast masses of refuse to accumulate. ‘The only scaveng- ers were the kites and vultures, the pariah dogs and pigs.’ The bodies of animals and even of men might be seen lying about where they had died, without even a handful of earth thrown 1 842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. 153 over them, nuisances which John Lawrence used to ferret out for himself in his early rides, and order his own police to re- move. The practical remedies which he suggested for this state of things were the absolute prohibition of rice cultivation within four miles of the cantonments, the regulation of the height of the water in the canals, and the careful removal of herbage from their banks, so that no slimy ground or putrid vegetation might be exposed to the burning rays of the sun ; an improved system of drainage ; a strict system of sanitary police ; the removal of the bazaars to a distance from all barracks, bungalows, and hos- pitals, and their reconstruction with wide wind-swept passages or streets. All this may seem obvious enough now, but it was not so obvious then. It was characteristic of the man, and is histori- cally interesting as showing the strong bent of his mind thus early towards that sanitary reform and that peaceful progress which was the chief aim and the chief triumph — not gunpowder and not glory — of his rule as Viceroy. He did not save the Kurnal cantonment from condemnation by his suggested re- forms. It was condemned already. But the epidemic there, and the stimulus it gave him, did something towards enabling him to save many thousands of lives thereafter throughout India ; just as his bitter experience in early life of red-tape at Paniput, and of the famine-stricken poverty of the masses at Gorgaon and Etawa, did much to determine the strong convic- tion on which he ever afterwards acted, that tools ought always to go to those who could best handle them, and that the first duty of an Indian ruler was not the extension of the empire nor the pampering of the rich few, but the care of the poverty-stricken millions. Two other kindred subjects appear to have attracted John Lawrence’s attention and to have especially touched his heart during his residence at Kurnal— the ‘ purveyance system ’ and the condition of the native women. By the purveyance system I mean the system which obliged the villagers who lay along the route of great personages, like the Governor-General or the Commander-in-Chief, not only to furnish carts and beasts of burden for the use of their gigantic camps, but often to provide them at great loss, with no remuneration at all. The Governor- General had just then, fortunately or unfortunately, discovered that it was always necessary to go to the hills in the hot season, and his huge following must be supported somehow. If the 154 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 native police were employed to collect the carts and animals, they took to plundering the natives themselves ; if they were not employed, no carts or animals were forthcoming. When, as often happened, the animals were called for during ploughing or harvest time, it is clear that no ordinary rate of hire would be an adequate remuneration, and very often this was wanting or fell into the wrong hands. The odium of this, and of other abuses connected with the system, of course fell on the Govern- ment, and rightly enough, argued John Lawrence, ‘in so far as we do not make our servants behave better. Natives in office are particularly bad ; sepoys, policemen, officers of the revenue, all seem to think it part of their perquisites to take everything for nothing.’ He then goes on to suggest remedies which it is unnecessary to particularise, as they have long since been ap- plied. The condition of the native women touched him even more keenly. Men thought nothing of selling their wives or those of their deceased brothers, or forcing them to live with them- selves. At the best, women were mere drudges, hard worked and ill treated, and suicide was very common among them. In Gorgaon in 1835 John had ascertained that upwards of five hundred women had been found drowned in wells, and though accident would account for some of these, the wells in that country being left in a very exposed and dangerous condition, yet it was certain, he thought, that the greater number had committed suicide or had fallen in by foul means. The monot- ony of his hours spent in cutcherry was sometimes relieved by cases which, tragical in themselves, yet wore a semi-comic aspect. One day a man lodged a complaint against a friend for having carried off his wife and sold her to another man for thirty-six rupees ! John Lawrence at first disbelieved the story, but it turned out to be true. The culprit had taken ad- vantage of the absence of the husband and the illness of the wife to put her in a dhoolie and carry her off. The third man acknowledged the purchase, and said the woman had lived with him contentedly as his wife ! The guilty parties were sentenced to six months in gaol, and the husband and wife went away quite satisfied, ‘neither of them appearing to think that they were any the worse for what had happened.’ A much more pathetic story, and one calculated to stir the deepest feelings of the human heart, had come before John Lawrence in cutcherry, during his previous residence in the 1 842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. 155 same district, and may be fitly inserted here. It shall be told in his own language, for it would be difficult to improve upon it. The Leper. Of all diseases that afflict humanity, the leprosy has always appeared to me the most loathsome and hideous. In no disease is the condition of the sufferer more helpless, and yet there is none in which assistance and consolation are so difficult to obtain. So malignant is the disorder, so infectious is its nature, that every one flies from the leper. To touch his skin, nay, even his very clothes, to inhale the same atmosphere, is said to be contagious. Though the effects are so fatal and so certain, its progress is usually slow and insidious. From the first slight speck on the hand or lip, until it spreads over the whole body, years may elapse, and during this period the health of the person does not seem to suffer. He pursues his daily occupations, and though no one will actually touch him or allow him to eat out of the same dish with him, men do not consider it dangerous to associate with him. I recollect a native officer of a cavalry contingent, a good soldier, and a respectable man, who did his duty for many years under this affliction ; and I have often seen the men of his troop lounging on the same cushions with him. As the disease, however, spreads, the leper is gradually shunned. Friends, kinsmen, and relatives, all forsake him. The mother who has nursed him, the wife of his bosom, all fly the leper. A hut is built for him far from the haunts of his fellow-men, and daily his food is placed on a distant stone, to which, on the departure of the ministering hand, he may drag his weary body. These thoughts have been suggested by an extraordinary and horrible incident which happened some years ago in the district where I was magistrate. I was sitting in court, busily engaged in my duty, when a villager in the crowd called out that he had a petition of much impor- tance to present, and prayed that I would listen to it at once. * I would not put it into the petition box,’ said he, ‘ as I was anxious to give it to you with my own hand.’ As I assented to his request, he came up and laid his petition on the table. The complaint was from a leper, a re- lation of the man before me. It ran thus : — ‘ Hail, cherisher of the afflicted ! ‘ Be it known to your enlightened mind that your devoted servant has been a leper for many years. My limbs have fallen off piece by piece ; my whole body has become a mass of corruption. I am weary of life ; I wish to die. My life is a plague and disgust to the whole village, and my death is earnestly longed for. It is well known to all that for a leper to consent to die, to permit himself to be buried alive, is approved of by the gods, who will never afflict another individual of his village with a similar malady. I therefore solicit your permission to be buried alive. The whole village wishes it, and I am happy and con- 156 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 tent to die. You are the ruler of the land, and without your leave it would be criminal. Hoping that I may obtain my prayer, I pray that the sun of prosperity may ever shine on you. * (Signed) Ram Buksh, Leper.’ It certainly takes much to move me, but I confess to have been fairly astounded on hearing this petition. I have seen curious things in my day, and have heard extraordinary requests preferred, but this exceeded anything of the kind. ‘ Who are you ? What is your name ? Are you a relation of the leper ? Is he mad ? He certainly cannot be in his right mind.’ After receiving answers to these and similar enquiries, I asked, ‘ Where is the man ? ’ The villager replied, ‘ He is outside the house. We have had him carried here on a dhoolie — a kind of cot carried on men’s shoulders — if you will come outside you can speak to him and satisfy yourself that what I have stated is true.’ I rose up and followed the man. There was a dhoolie placed under a tree in the shade, and at a little distance stood a group of villagers. ‘ There he is, and there are his father and brothers, with some of the headmen of our village,’ said my guide, pointing to them. I immediately entered into conversation with them, and they all confirmed the first speaker’s statement. The wretched man himself, who appeared to be in an advanced stage of the disease, was a most hideous spectacle. His arms were gone from the elbows downwards, and his 'legs downwards from his knees, and his whole body was a mass of corruption. ‘ O Sahib ! ’ he cried, ‘ for God’s sake listen to my petition ; let me be buried alive. I have lived too long ; let me die ! ’ ‘ My poor fellow,’ I replied, ‘ it is not in my power to comply with your request ; ’tis a sad business, but it would be unlawful ; it would be murder ; it cannot be allowed.’ As the man began to wail and scream I ordered him to be carried away, after charging his relations to take every care of him. After the court was over, being in conversation with an intelligent na- tive, who had been present during the day, and had witnessed the scene, he asked me why I had refused the leper’s petition. ‘ He must die soon ; he is in great misery ; it would have benefited both him and his village,’ remarked the man. ‘ What,’ said I, ‘do you really believe that no one of the community will again be a leper ?’ ‘ Yes,’ replied he, ‘ and so does the whole country.’ ‘ Well,’ I remarked, ‘ there is no reasoning on points of belief, but to me it appears ridiculous. At any rate, under the Company’s rule such an act would be criminal. I have no power to grant the permission, even were I willing.’ ‘ It is all very true what the hazoor has observed; but you will find that the village will bury him alive without leave,’ replied the native, as he made his salaam and retired. Thinking such a thing to be out of the question, I dismissed the mat- ter from my mind. But a few days afterwards I received a report from the police officer of an out station to the effect that, hearing that a man had been buried alive, he had visited the spot, and, to ascertain the fact, 1 842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. 157 had dug up the body, which proved to be that of the leper. On the parties being arrested, it appeared that they were the same individuals who had solicited permission from me in the manner I have described. In the investigation which ensued, I found that on their return from the unsuccessful application to me, they had held a consultation of the whole village, when it was determined that the leper should be buried. This, accordingly, was done in the open day, with all due solemnity, the whole population attending. The headmen of the village, the watchmen, and other local functionaries, were committed to take their trial at the sessions, where they all pleaded guilty, and were condemned to imprison- ment. Punishment was no doubt necessary, though I am happy to say it was lenient. I think the maximum was not more than six months’ confinement in the district jail. I could not but think they were more to be pitied than blamed, and that, however revolting to our feelings was the manner of putting the unfortunate creature to death, in his own words, ‘he had lived too long.’ Delhi : March 7, 1845. The man who could listen to such a tale as this unmoved, or who could pass many years in a position of authority amidst a people so quick-witted and yet so credulous, so impoverished and yet so uncomplaining, so tractable and yet so tenacious of their narrow rights, so long and so often overrun by foreign conquerors, and yet so unalterably attached to their ancestral manners and creeds, and then fail to feel towards them some- what as a father feels to a wayward but a helpless and trustful child, is hardly to be found, and if found he would be little to be envied. Englishmen there have been and still are in India, who, priding themselves on their race or their colour, their superior strength of body or strength of will, despise the natives, keep aloof from them, call them by the opprobrious name of ‘nigger,’ and strike or maltreat them in a way in which they would not venture to treat a European. But such Englishmen have happily always been in a small minority. They may be found sometimes among passing visitors to India, among the youngest and most empty-headed officers of the army, or among the frivolous and fashionable and scandal-loving society of the great towns. But they are not to be found' in the ranks of the civil service, or amongst those soldier statesmen who have built up and have preserved our Indian Empire. It is not in the writ- ings, the conversation, or the acts of men like Sir Thomas Monro or Lord Metcalfe, like Outram or Havelock, like Henry or John Lawrence, and of the hundreds of good men and true of whom these are but the most brilliant representatives, that we can find i58 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 a word or deed indicative of other than the deepest and most affectionate interest in the helpless and voiceless millions over whom they rule. John Lawrence never weighed his words too carefully. If he thought a man a knave or a fool, he generally called him so to his face. If he had to strike at all, he struck a knock-down blow. Yet in the thousands of his letters written off on the spur of the moment, that I have read, I have not come upon a single expression which would wound the pride of the most sensitive of natives ; nor does he, in one single in- stance, use the opprobrious term which is the very first to come to the mouth of too many young officers, or casual visitors in India. These are the men who know the natives, who sympathise with them and have learned to love them ; who, in the spirit of a truly imperial race, look upon themselves as the servants of those whom they rule, and rule by serving them ; who do every- thing that in them lies to bridge over the yawning gulf which, by our fate or by our fault, still separates colour from colour, race from race, and creed from creed. Till that gulf can be, in some measure, bridged over, whatever our good intentions, and whatever the benefits of our rule — and they are neither few nor small — we still, disguise it as we may, hold India by the sword ; and so long as we hold it by the sword alone, we hold it by the least satisfactory and the most precarious of tenures. In November, 1843, the ‘acting’ appointment at Kurnal came to an end, and John Lawrence travelled back, bag and baggage, over the well-known ground, to take up another tem- porary appointment at Delhi. It was not till towards the end of the following year that the ‘substantive ’ post became va- cant, and then, at last, the right man was found in the right place, and John Lawrence became, in his own right, Magistrate and Collector of the two districts of Delhi and Paniput. During these last two years his salary had been less than half of that which he had received before he left India on furlough, and it must have been difficult enough for a man who was so hos- pitable and so liberal, to maintain his wife, his child, his ser- vants, and his two pair of horses on so narrow an income. lie had now just attained in rank and emoluments to the position he had held before he left India invalided ; and in the general depression which prevailed in India as the result of the Afghan war, and that other war which followed, and, if possible, out- stripped it in iniquity — the war with the Ameers of Scinde — his contemporaries found themselves in much the same deadlock 1842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. 159 as he did. In November, 1844, a second daughter, Emily, was born, just at the time when her father’s means became more adequate to his needs and his deserts. Of the work done during the next two years as Magistrate and Collector of Delhi there is, unfortunately, little to tell ; but from what I have been able to record of his work during his earlier sojourn there, we may doubtless infer the general char- acter of the later. There were the same general elements of turbulence, disaffection, and difficulty : the corrupt palace of the effete Mogul, who was now some ten years nearer to his total dissolution ; the swashbucklers who infested his court ; the large criminal class and the mongrel multitude of the his- toric capital. Sir Robert Montgomery recollects the reputa- tion which John Lawrence acquired, and which reached even to Allahabad, by the masterly manoeuvring of a small body of police with whom he descended on a nest of gamblers and cut- throats, ‘ budmashes ’ of every description, and took them all prisoners, without shedding a drop of blood, and without cre- ating even so much as a disturbance. During the spring months of 1845, he found time, with the help of his ever faithful amanuensis and companion, to write down the graphic stories of his earlier life in India, of which I have reproduced so many. He also wrote some excellent letters to the editor of the ‘ Delhi Gazette’ on social subjects, such as jail reform and the organisation of the police ; and from these it may be well to quote a sentence or two, as illustrative of his abrupt style and mode of thought at this period of his life. It had been proposed by Government to appoint a super- intendent of jails in the North-West Provinces. This proposal John Lawrence opposed as expensive and useless, and likely to stop other and more important reforms. To give the North-West Provinces an itinerant superintendent of jails on 2,500 rupees a month, while the darogahs (or governors), who do all the work, receive only twenty-five rupees a month, is to begin your work at the wrong end. What real control can such an ambulatory official possess ? Why, it would take him a year to go round and give each dis- trict a flying visit ! But when at Saharunpore, how is he to know what is going on at Banda, or Benares, or Gorruckpore? — or, when at one of these latter places, how is he to control acts committed in the Rohilcund and Delhi jails ? I suppose some will say that it can be done by state- ments and returns ; that is to say, all the magistrates and joint-magis- trates, in addition to their present duties, will be made to worry their i6o LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i 842-46 brains in drawing out returns, which if prepared are never read, and if read are never digested, and if digested are not worth the trouble they have cost — for five out of six are all fudge. Having demolished what he considered to be a sham reform which could only be carried out at great expense, he goes on to suggest real reforms, such as he was himself able afterwards to set on foot in the Punjab, and indeed throughout India : the establishment of central as well as of district jails ; the classifi- cation of criminals ; the appointment of first-rate jail doctors ; the increase of the pay of those underpaid officials on whom all the drudgery and all the labour falls, and on whose character so much depends. Let the magistrate be ever so active or efficient, if this personage be a rascal (and such he cannot fail to be under the present system, however smooth and plausible matters may appear to the eye), there will not fail to be an undercurrent of roguery going on, which would astonish the un- initiated. In the meantime you might get capital statements drawn out, which would tell you about as much of the real state of your jail as I could tell of Timbuctoo. People are fond of remarking that the natives are great rogues, and no doubt many are, but who makes them so, in great measure ? Who places such temptations in their way that they must be more than men if they resist ? I really believe that the majority of Europeans under similar temptations would not be a whit more hon- est. We all know that it was Lord Cornwallis who made the civilians honest. In 1834, when the great change in the customs took place, and European assistance was so extensively introduced, the first act was to raise the emoluments. In like manner, look at the great body of tahsil- dars (native collectors), how greatly their condition has been ameliorated of late years, and how much their character has improved in consequence. I verily believe that for one respectable tahsildar in those days you will now find ten. In November, 1845, came one of the turning-points in John Lawrence’s life. Up to this time he had owed nothing to the favour or attention of the great. He had helped fortune far more than fortune had helped him. He had passed through all the grades of the Civil Service, perhaps at a slower, certainly not at a faster, rate than the average civilian. Any special amount of experience he had acquired was of his own seeking, and at the cost of enormous labour. 1 1 is fame, so far as it had yet spread, was the result of what he had done, and of nothing else. Unlike Sir Charles Metcalfe, with whom, in view of the high elevation which each ultimately attained, it is most natural 1842-46 MAGISTRATE OF DELHI. l6l to compare him, and who was taken under the wing of Lord Wellesley from the moment of his arrival, and was pushed rap- idly on from one appointment to another, John Lawrence owed nothing to the patronage of Government Mouse. His life in India had covered the greater portion of the careers of three Governors-General — Lord William Bentinck, Lord Auckland, and Lord Ellenborough — and there is nothing to show that any one of these did so much as know him even by name. The con- trast in this respect between him and his brother I lenry is marked. For George Lawrence had obtained for his brother Henry, when he was only twenty-six years of age, an appointment in the Horse Artillery by direct application to the Commander-in- Chief. In the following year, by a similar application to the Governor-General, he had procured him an appointment in the Revenue Survey. In 1839, again, his friend Frederick Currie had procured for him from the succeeding Governor- General an appointment at the frontier station of Feroze- pore, ‘thus helping him,’ as he said, ‘to put his foot into the stirrup, from which he could only have to put himself into the saddle.’ Not that there was a tinge of nepotism or undue fav- ouritism in any one of these appointments. The donors in each instance put one of the best possible men into a place for which he was more than fit ; but what I mean to point out is, that up to this time of his life, John Lawrence’s name, from whatever causes, had not been brought before the dispensers of public patronage, and he owed nothing to them. But more stormy times were now coming on, and by a happy accident he was brought into contact with the new Governor-General at the outset of his Indian career. Lord Ellenborough, with the glory or the shame of the an- nexation of Scinde indelibly attaching to him, had been recalled in the mid-career of his contumacious eccentricities by the mas- ters whom he had throughout resolved to treat as though they were his servants. The laconic and world-famous despatch, ‘ Peccavi, I have Scinde,’ fathered by ‘ Punch’ upon the splen- did and self-willed soldier, was the confession of a grim truth, the whole responsibility for which his proud humility would have been quite content to bear. But this, unfortunately, could not be. It had to be borne by the nation at large, and the an- nexation of Scinde remains, and will always remain, one of the deepest blots on our national escutcheon. An act condemned not only by such chivalrous soldiers as Sir James Outram, and Vol. I.— II i62 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i 842-46 such high civil authorities as Sir Henry Pottinger and Captain Eastwick, who had been for years upon the spot, and whq knew the circumstances best, but unanimously disapproved of, as Mr. Gladstone has recently told us, by a Cabinet which contained men of such varied ability and such vast knowledge as Sir Rob- ert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, as Lord Derby and Sir Henry Hardinge, and Mr. Gladstone himself, when once it was done, could not, it was thought, well be undone. To have un- done it, would have involved— so the Government, looking at their imperial responsibilities, determined — a wrong the more ; and so they were obliged to condone, and to hand down to pos- terity, that most terrible of possessions — a heritage of triumph- ant wrong. Truly, the provincial rulers who use the power which is of necessity entrusted to them in an empire with such vast and such widely scattered dependencies as England, to in- volve it in an unjust war, or an uncalled-for annexation — who thus force the hand and conscience of the nation beforehand, and bind up with its history for all time the consciousness of injustice, — incur the most fearful of responsibilities. It may be necessary to entrust them with the power, and it may, some- times, also be necessary to call it into action, but if they misuse it they should feel that they do so, like the proposers of a new law in the conservative Greek colony of old, with a rope around their necks. The state of the regions beyond the Sutlej, seething with a brave and turbulent soldiery, who, for some years past — ever since, in fact, the strong hand of Runjeet Sing, the lion of the Punjab, had been withdrawn — had set their own government at defiance, and might, it was believed, at any moment burst upon British India, seemed to call for the best soldier at our command to succeed Lord Ellenborough. He was found in the person of the veteran, who, as a subaltern, had received four wounds, had had four horses shot under him, and had won nine medals in the Peninsula ; who, as a Lieutenant-Colonel, had turned the tide in the battle of Albuera — itself the turning- point of the Peninsular War ; had afterwards bled at Ligny, and was the special favourite of both Blucher and Wellington — the high-souled and chivalrous Sir Henry Hardinge. He had been enjoined with more than usual solemnity by the Court of Di- rectors to keep the peace, if peace were possible, and, with pro- bably more than the usual sincerity of newly appointed Gov- crnors-General, he had pledged himself to do so. ‘ A purer 1842-46 FIRST SIKH WAR. 163 man,’ so Mr. Gladstone, the last surviving and the most bril- liant member of the Cabinet in which he served, has recently remarked, ‘a more honourable man, and, great soldier as he was, a man less capable of being dazzled by military glory, never entered the councils of his sovereign.’ But events were too strong for him. He found that the preparations which had been made for the defence of the frontier by his battle-loving predecessor were inadequate to the daily increasing danger ; and with consummate skill, still hoping for peace but preparing for war, he managed, quite unobserved by the Indian public, within little more than a year after he had reached the country, to double the number of our troops on the threatened positions. So true a soldier would not be content without a personal inspection of the frontier line. His road lay through Delhi, and on November n, 1845, he met, for the first time, its Col- lector and Magistrate — the subject of this biography. A sol- dier born and bred, he was not likely to know much of civil matters ; but he was able, as the result showed, to appreciate, almost at a glance, the capacities, military and civil, latent and developed, of John Lawrence. Each at first sight was favourably impressed with the other — the Governer-General with the en- ergy, the sagacity, and the knowledge of the Magistrate, who accompanied him in his rides over the ruined cities which sur- rounded the city of the living, and endeavoured to explain to him all the mysteries of irrigation and of revenue collection ; the Magistrate with the frankness and friendliness and military spirit of the Governor-General. ‘ I went out,’ writes John to his brother Henry, in one of the earliest of his letters which has come into my hands, ‘on the nth to meet the Governor- General. He came in yesterday. I like him much ; he is amia- ble and considerate, but does not give me any idea of being a man of ability. Currie and Benson are the only men of stand- ing about him : the rest are mere logs. Everything breathes a pacific air ; I do not think there will be a war. He leaves here on the 19th, and goes straight to Umballa. He does not seem to me to be much at home on civil matters, or to interest himself on such subjects, but he is wide awake in all military affairs.’ In another letter, written a few days later, November 27, a little light is thrown on his own doings. ‘ The troops from Meerut have been called off in a great hurry, I believe by Broadfoot. Cope is full of warlike ideas, but I believe it is a LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 164 false alarm. Certainly the Governor-General knew nothing of the matter, for some of his own aides-de-camp were here amus- ing themselves at the races. ... I have hardly a moment to myself, for my assistants are all gone, and my joint magistrate, poor fellow, who only married a few months since, is at the point of death. I will send you Alison. You will find him a pleasant writer, but very one-sided ; and though always speak- ing ex cathedra, as it were, not always as right as he thinks.’ It is not difficult to imagine the interest with which John Law- rence, with his fondness for military history, when looking for- ward to the arrival of Sir Henry Hardinge, would have turned to the account given by Alison — whom he so well characterises — of the field of Albuera, and would have found there the young Lieutenant-Colonel, who had now risen to be Governor-Gen- eral, justly described as the ‘ young soldier with the eye of a general and the soul of a hero.’ One or two comments are naturally suggested by the letters I have quoted. First, it should be remembered that the im- pressions formed as to the want of ability of the Governor- General were first impressions only, dashed olf hurriedly, accord- ing to John Lawrence’s manner, and that they were afterwards considerably modified. Indeed, his subsequent estimate of the Governor-General came nearer to the very high one formed, from the most intimate knowledge, by his brother Henry, and published since his death in his collected essays. Secondly, Sir Henry Hardinge was fully conscious of his own ignorance ‘of civil matters,’ and, being conscious of it, wisely forebore to meddle with them. Before leaving England he had sought the advice, as any wise Governor-General would do — and it would be well if all succeeding Governors-General had done the like — of the man who, of all men then living, knew most of India. The leading bit of advice then given him by Mountstuart Elphinstone was ‘ not to meddle with civil de- tails ; ’ and, acting on this advice when he landed in Calcutta, he sent for the Government Secretaries, bade them give him the best advice in writing, and warned them that if they tried to avail themselves of his ignorance in such matters, it would be the worse for them sooner or later.1 Thirdly, ‘ Everything seems pacific ; I do not think there will be a war.’ This reads oddly enough, when we remember that 1 Marshrnan's History of India , vol. iii. p. 272. 1842-46 FIRST SIKH WAR. 165 it was on the very day (November 17) on which it was written that the Durbar at Lahore determined to invade British India ; that it was nothing but the scruples of the astrologers, who said that the stars were not favourable, which delayed operations for a single day ; that on the nth of the following month the Sikh army began to cross the Sutlej, and that by the 15th the whole strength of the famous Khalsa commonwealth — 60,000 soldiers, 40,000 camp-followers, and 150 heavy guns — were safely landed in British territory. We may well ask, How could John Lawrence himself, how could the Governor-General, how could the Commander-in-Chief, and the most experienced officers on the frontier — Littler, Broadfoot, Wheeler, and others — all agree that no immediate danger was to be apprehended ? They thought, indeed, that bands of Akalis — fanatics, akin to the Muslim Ghazis — might rush on their deaths by haphazard in- cursions. But not one of them feared the deliberate and im- mediate invasion of an army. The fact is, that the Sikh Durbar had given secret orders for the invasion, not so much with any hope of conquering British India, as of securing their own safety. They had reason to fear that their tumultuary army, the Praetorian Guard of Lahore, would turn and rend them. Would it not be well to give it vent elsewhere ? If the Sikh army were destroyed in the invasion of India, the Sirdars might still hope for consideration from the British. If it were suc- cessful, they would step quietly in for a share of the spoil. Such reckless and cruel policy it would have been difficult for anyone outside the Durbar itself to have predicted. * No one can tell,’ as John Lawrence pertinently remarks in one of his letters, ‘what fools will do.’ But it is material also to observe in defence of the British authorities, that they had made pre- parations even for what they did not expect ; and hardly had the Sikhs entered British territory, when an army, adequately equipped for anything that seemed to be within the range of possibility, advanced to meet them. Declining the conflict gallantly offered them by Sir John Littler at Ferozepore, the Sikhs, who outnumbered him as six to one, pushed on in two divisions — one to Moodki and the other to Ferozeshah — and on December 18 and 21 followed two pitched battles against foes such as, happily, we had never had to face before in India. The interest attaching to the conflict resembles that which belongs to the war between Rome and Pyrrhus, when, for the first time, the Roman legion met 1 66 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 the Macedonian phalanx, and a national militia found them- selves pitted against a highly trained and veteran army of mer- cenaries. In the Sutlej campaign now opening, the Sikh, trained by French and Italian officers, and inspired by religious as well as by national enthusiasm, crossed swords for the first time with the Bengal Sepoy, who eat the Company’s salt, and fought for us simply because he did so. And if our army had consisted of Sepoys only, the result would certainly not have been in favour of the Sepoys. It needed all the reckless valour of the grand old Commander-in-Chief, Sir Hugh Gough; all the chivalrous devotion of the Governor-General, who, like Scipio Africanus of old, cheerfully waived his pre-eminence and consented to take the second place, to restore the waning for- tunes of the day. It needed all that the imbecility, the coward- ice, and even the treachery of the Sikh commanders, Lai and Tej Sing could do, to compel their dare-devil soldiers to know when they were beaten, and to bend before the storm. But the battle of Moodki was only the prelude to a greater. Three days later the real struggle took place at Ferozeshah. The Sikh army, 33,000 strong, had entrenched itself in a for- midable position, defended by a hundred heavy guns. It was not till nearly four in the afternoon of the shortest day in the year that Sir Hugh Gough, with characteristic recklessness, gave the order to storm their entrenchments. Again and again our battalions charged right up to the muzzles of the enemy's guns ; and again and again they were driven back with heavy loss by the Sikh infantry, who stood unmoved to meet them. It was an experience new for us in Indian warfare, and drove us, for the first time, to respect our foes. As night closed, our troops found themselves half outside and half within the ene- my’s position, unable either to advance or retreat. Regiments were mixed up with regiments, and officers with men, in the wildest confusion. The enemy’s camp was on fire in several places, and was enlivened by frequent explosions ; but their heavy guns still kept playing on our men as they lay exhausted on the frozen ground not three hundred yards off. What the Governor-General did during this ‘ night of terrors,’ as it was justly called, throwing himself down to rest, now by the side of one set of disheartened men, now of another, cheering them up for the morrow’s work, and, anon, leading them himself through the darkness in a desperate charge upon ‘ Futteh Jung,’ the monster gun which was dealing death upon their ranks, and 1842-46 FIRST SIKH WAR. 1 67 triumphantly spiking it,1 reads like the record of some Homeric chieftain, or of an Alexander, a Hannibal or a Caesar come to life again. Well might the veteran of the Peninsular War say that he had ‘ never known a night so extraordinary as this ; ’ and well too, when the morning dawned, might he exclaim, in the words of Pyrrhus, whose romantic conflict with Rome this seemed likely now to resemble in more ways than one, ‘ An- other such victory and we are undone ! ’ Happily for our Indian Empire, the treachery of Lai Sing on the following day was still more pronounced, and the victory which crowned our efforts was much more decisive. The ene- my’s camp was taken ; their army was put to flight ; a new army which came up under Tej Sing from Ferozepore and had not yet drawn a sword, hesitated, for some inscrutable reason, to attack our worn-out troops, who had not tasted food for thirty-six hours and had fired away almost their last round of ammunition ; and by the evening the whole Sikh force was in full retreat. Never, probably, except at the very crisis of the Mutiny, was India in greater danger than during these two days and this night of terror. It was a Cadmean victory that we had won ; and a Cadmean victory it might have remained, had not Sir Henry Hardinge, who had lost a seventh of his army, had seen ten out of his twelve aides-de-camp wounded or killed at his side, and was mourning the loss, among many others equally distinguished in recent Indian history, of D’Arcy Todd and Broadfoot, bethought him of the strenuous and energetic magistrate with whom he had so lately spent those interesting days at Delhi. It was now, at the very crisis of the struggle, that the Governor-General, unable to follow up his victory from the want of ammunition, of siege guns, and of provisions, and unable to fall back towards his base, because to do so would invite another invasion of the still unbroken Sikh army, wrote in his own handwriting, and in hot haste, as its contents show, a pressing note to the Collector and Magistrate of Delhi to come to his aid. The opportunity had thus at length come to the man, and the man was not wanting to the opportunity. He had put his own foot into the stirrup, and it was not likely now that he would fail to leap into the saddle. 1 See the graphic description of the battle in Cunningham’s admirable History of the Sikhs, pp. 301-303. 1 68 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i 842-46 The neighbourhood of Delhi had been already much drained by the preparations for the war, by the marching and counter- marching of troops, and, it must be added, by the passing and repassing, even in years of peace, of the huge camps of the Governor-General or the Commander-in-Chief, as they moved along the great thoroughfare towards the North-West. John Lawrence had not been slow, as I have already shown, to point out the abuses to which the purveyance system was liable, and now, curiously enough, he had to apply that system himself on the most extensive and unprecedented scale. His sensitiveness to right and wrong made him not less, but infinitely more, cap- able for the task that was imposed upon him. He managed, | partly by personal influence, partly by promises of adequate pay, which he took care should reach the hands of the right persons, to raise in that thinly peopled country, within a very short space of time, the extraordinary number of 4,000 carts, each of which, as he arranged, was to be driven by its owner ; and as a result of his admirable arrangements not one of the drivers deserted. As soon as the great magazine of Delhi, in which men worked day and night moulding bullets and cannon-balls and turning out every instrument of death, had done its part, John Law- rence despatched the whole train on its journey of two hundred miles along the great northern road, in time to take a share — the lion’s share — in the crowning victory of Sobraon. Indeed, without his exertions, Sobraon would have been impossible, or, at all events, indefinitely postponed. The Sikhs, encouraged by our inability to follow up our success at Fcrozeshah, and putting it down to cowardice, had again crossed the Sutlej un- der Runjore Sing, had inflicted a severe reverse on Sir Harry Smith at Buddowal, and had been defeated by him in turn, but certainly not disgraced, on January 28, at Aliwal. On February 9, the long train of heavy guns dragged by stately elephants, of ammunition, of treasure and supplies of every kind, reached the camp from Delhi. The spirits of offi- cers and men rose at the sight, and on the following day the decisive battle was fought. The Sikh troops, basely betrayed by their leaders, who had come — so it was said, and not without some appearance of truth — to a secret understanding with us, fought like heroes. One old chief, whose name should be re- corded— Sham Sing — ‘among the faithless faithful only found,’ clothed in white garments, and devoting himself to death, like 1 842-46 FIRST SIKH WAR. 169 Decius of old, called on those around him to strike for God and the Guru, and dealing death everywhere around him, rushed manfully upon his own. The Sikhs were once more in a posi- tion of their own choice, and once more the impetuous Com- mander in-Chief, in defiance of the rules of war, charged with splendid gallantry the guns of the enemy in front. It was in this one respect the battle of Ferozeshah over again. But, taught by experience, Sir Hugh Gough began it at seven in the morning instead of at four in thq afternoon, and by eleven a.m. the fighting was over. The Sikhs had fought with a broad and swollen river in their rear, and many hundreds whom the can- non or the sword would have spared, were swept away in its waters. The battle of Sobraon ended the campaign and the war. The Punjab was prostrate at Lord Hardinge's feet, and the unpro- voked attack of the Khalsa on our territories gave him an un- questioned right to annex the whole. But there were difficul- ties in the way. The advanced season ; the exhaustion of our army, which now contained barely 3,000 European troops ; the probable expense of the administration of so poor and so vast a country ; the salutary dislike of the Company and its best ser- vants to all unnecessary extension of territory ; the advantage of having a brave and partially civilised race between ourselves and the more ferocious and untameable tribes of Afghanistan, wars with whom would bring us neither gain nor glory ; — all these were arguments against annexation, and Sir Henry Har- dinge, with that prudence and moderation which were habitual to him, determined to be content with a part when he might have clutched at the whole, and to give the Sikhs another chance — a bond fide chance — of maintaining their independence. On the outbreak of the war he had formally proclaimed the an- nexation of the protected Sikh states on our side of the Sutlej, and he now determined to cripple the power of the Khalsa for further aggression by confiscating the Jullundur Doab — the ex- tensive district, that is, on the other side of the Sutlej, between it and the Beas — together with the adjacent hill tracts on the other side of the Beas, Kangra, Nurpore, and Nadoun, right up to the borders of Thibet. The expenses of the war were, ac- cording to invariable custom, to fall also upon the vanquished. But these the Durbar, alike profligate and insolvent, professed its inability to pay, and in lieu thereof, the Governor-General arranged to take over the highlands of Jummoo and that earthly 170 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 paradise, the valley of Kashmere. But while the Punjab was independent it was impossible for us to keep a satisfactory hold of Jummoo. And by a very questionable stroke of policy, which had been arranged beforehand, and which has brought woes innumerable on the unhappy Kashmiris ever since, we handed it over to the Dogra Rajpoot Golab Sing, who paid us down at once in the hard cash which he had stolen from the Lahore Durbar. He was an unscrupulous villain, but an able ruler, amenable to our influence, and would now be bound down by the only obligation he would be likely to recognise — his own self-interest — to aid us in checking any further ebulli- tion of Khalsa fury. But who was to rule the country which we had annexed and intended to keep within our grip — the Jullundur Doab ? Who but the sturdy collector who had made his name to be a watchword for ability, order, economy, indefatigable work throughout the Delhi district, and who, it might be confidently hoped, would be able to manage Rajpoots, Gudis, and Kash- miris in the highlands, as he had been already able to manage Jats, Ranghurs, and Goojurs below? With two weak corps of native infantry and one battery of native artillery, he had preserved perfect order during these troublous times in the imperial city, while war was raging, and raging not always to our credit or our advantage, within our own territories, not two hundred miles away. He had ridden about the city during these three months of peril, amidst its turbulent populace, at- tended by his single orderly as though in time of profound peace. In anticipation of the annexation on which he had de- termined, Sir Henry Hardinge had written some time before to Thomason, the distinguished Lieutenant-Governor of the North- West Provinces, asking him to send up John Lawrence for a high executive appointment in the Cis-Sutlej states which had been already annexed. Thomason, who was primarily respon- sible for the safety of his own provinces, thought that John could not be spared from Delhi at such a crisis, and sent up in- stead another officer whom he deemed to be ‘well qualified’ for the post. But the well-qualified officer was sent back without ceremony to the place whence he came, and the peremptory message, ‘Send me up John Lawrence,' showed that the Gov- ernor-General was not to be trifled with ; that he had made up his mind ; and that John Lawrence, and no one else, was, as soon as the war was over, to be the ruler of the Jullundur 1842-46 FIRST SIKH WAR. 171 Doab.' And accordingly, on March 1, 1846, he was ordered to repair to Umritsul, the religious capital of the Sikhs, there to receive the Governor-General’s instructions for the onerous and honourable post for which his merits, and his merits alone, had recommended him. I will end this chapter by giving the drift of a few personal reminiscences contributed by Colonel Balcarres Ramsay, who had made John Lawrence's acquaintance some years before in Bonn, and who happened to come across him again at this turn- ing-point in his career. They give a lively picture of some of the principal personages connected with the Sutlej campaign. On arriving at Delhi, on my way from Bombay to join the headquar- ters camp during the first Sikh war, I found that John Lawrence, my old Bonn friend, was Collector there. I well remember the meeting. He was standing on the stairs outside his house talking to Hindu Rao, a great hanger-on of the English at that time, and a man whose house af- terwards became well known as one of the most critical positions on the ridge before Delhi. John was pulling up his shirt-sleeves and feeling his muscles, a very favourite attitude of his. He seemed delighted to see me, and abruptly dismissed his other guest with, ‘Now you gao Mr. Rao,’ who obsequiously salaamed and disappeared ; and after a chat on old times, he told me that he had just been summoned by Lord Har- dinge to join his camp on important business, and that if I would wait two days we would go up together. Accordingly we started in company, travelling by dawk palanquin. During the night he was seized with a most violent attack of cholera. So ill was he that I feared he would have died on the road. But fortunately we came upon the tents of a civilian, William Ford, who was out in the district, and there we were able to apply energetic remedies which saved his life. So powerful was his constitution, that in a very few hours we were on our journey again. Years afterwards I met him in the streets of London, just after he had been appointed Governor-General. He said to me, ‘ If it had not been for you, I should not now be Governor-General of India,’ alluding to that night. We parted at Loodiana, he making the best of his way to headquar- 1 1 owe this incident in its outlines to an interesting and suggestive pamphlet on Lord Lawrence by John Thornton, who, at the time referred to, was Secretary to the Government of the North-West Provinces. He says of the officer first sent up by Thomason to Lord Hardinge, ' Though a man of much literary and intellectual ability, he had never shown the energy of mind and body which the introduction of our system of government into the new province would have required. Far less could he have carved out for himself such a destiny as Lawrence afterwards achieved. His nomination was, in fact, an error in judgment which was very rare with that just and estimable man, and that unrivalled administrator, James Thoma- son. ' 172 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1842-46 ters, while I, having no official status, was detained for a time. I was, however, destined soon to come across Sir Henry Lawrence, and incur his displeasure. I had an order to impress horses between Loodiana and Ferozepore, belonging to the Puttiala Horse. At one place I took what I thought to be the best animal of the lot, but, unfortunately, it belonged to a Sikh from the Manjha, who, after the treaty, had come down to see a relative in the Puttiala Horse. He fired at me as I was mounting, and I had a narrow escape. I arrived at the camp at Lahore just as the Governor-General and his cortbge were about to meet the young Maharaja, and receive his submission. There was a grand Dur- bar, and when the Koh-i-noor was handed round for our inspection, W. Edwards, the Under-Secretary to Government in the Foreign Depart- ment, was put in charge of it. He was evidently extremely nervous, and took it round himself from one staff officer to another. Just as he had placed it in my hands, Sir Henry Hardinge sent for him. I nat- urally passed it on to the next officer, and when Edwards hurried back and demanded the precious jewel, I never shall forget the agony depicted in his face as he rushed down the ranks of staff officers frantically demand- ing it. That night I dined at the Governor-General’s table, where there was a large and illustrious party assembled, among them Sir Charles Napier, Lord Elphinstone, Lord Gough, Charles West, afterwards Earl de la Warr, Sir Henry Lawrence, Herbert Edwardes, and, I think, John Law- rence. Dazzled by the lights, and desperately fatigued by my long journey from Bombay, I fell asleep almost immediately after sitting down to dinner. Just as I was dozing off, I heard Sir Henry Hardinge say, ‘ Let him sleep, poor boy, he is very tired.’ I was awakened at the close of dinner by a loud burst of laughter, occasioned by the following incident. Herbert Edwardes, who was one of the party, had been writing some powerful articles in the press, under the name of ‘ Brah- miny Bull.’ Towards the close of dinner, Arthur Hardinge — ‘ dear little Arthur,’ his father’s idol — asked him to take a glass of wine with him. Every eye was turned upon Edwardes, Sir Charles Napier’s in particular, as it was said that an appointment which had been recently conferred on the young officer was given with a view to stop his too facile pen. Such was the gossip in camp ; so the amusement of all present may be imagined when ‘ dear little Arthur,’ in his clear boyish accents, shouted from the other end of the table, ‘ I suppose you will not write any more “ Brahminy Bull” articles now, will you, Mr. Edwardes?’ No one laughed more heartily than Lord Hardinge, who shook his fist playfully at his son. After dinner I found myself confronted by a tall, grave-looking man, who said, ‘ You must not be so zubberdust [high-handed] with the na- tives.’ I asked him to what he alluded. He replied, ‘ You seized a Sikh’s horse the other day.’ I said I had an order to use the horses on the road. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but not a Sikh’s.’ ‘ Well, but,’ I remon- strated, ‘ he nearly shot me.’ ‘ Of course,’ replied Sir Henry Lawrence 1842-46 FIRST SIKH WAR. 173 — for he it was — ‘ and he was perfectly justified in so doing. The treaty had just been signed, and he was proceeding to see his friends, when his property was violently taken from him by you.’ I could only bow in as- sent, having nothing to urge in my defence. Poor Sir Charles Napier was much dejected at being too late for all the hard fighting. He asked me to accompany him back to Scinde on my return to the Governor of Bombay’s staff. The night before he went, I was taken ill. Sir Charles rode the first day about thirty-five miles, and the second an equally long distance ; so there was no chance of my overtaking him. This, however, turned out fortunately forme, as Sir Henry Hardinge placed me on his personal staff. I saw a good deal of John Lawrence at that time. He had always had a great deal of fun about him, and it was irrepressible even now. One day I happened to be in the same howdah with him and three or four others, on the back of an elephant going through the streets of Lahore, while our army was encamped before it. Seeing an officer approaching in solitary state on another elephant, he drove his alongside of it and said to me, ‘ Youngster, we are rather crowded here, you are one too many for us, there’s a very nice old gentleman who will welcome you with open arms ; now, jump in quick.’ I confess I had misgivings as to the ‘ nice old gentleman,’ but to save myself from falling between the two elephants, I had to clasp him round the neck, whereupon the ‘ nice old gentleman ’ roared at me, * What do you mean by boarding me in this fashion?’ I said, ‘Sir, it is not my fault; but John Lawrence said you were very amiable, and that you would welcome me with open arms.’ ‘Ah!’ he replied, ‘ I’ll pay off Master John for this.’ The old gentleman in question was Colonel Stuart, the Military Secretary to the Government of India, who, though a most estimable person, could hardly be called ‘ amiable.’ CHAPTER VIII. COMMISSIONER OF TRANS-SUTLEJ STATES. 1846. The point which we have now reached in the life of John J.aw- rence is that at which he emerges from comparatively private into public life ; from posts which, however important, were yet only subordinate, to one in which he stands on his own foundation ; from the care of populations which had long been subject to our rule, to that of a race who had never felt its stress and had just joined in the great, and, at one time almost successful, effort, to oust us from our hold of North-Western India. It was a great leap, which carried him, at the early age of thirty- four years, clear over the heads of all his contemporaries and of many also of his seniors, and roused feelings of natural jealousy in some of those whom he had distanced, which have hardly yet spent their force. Invidia accrevit, privato quae minor esset. The thoughts of John Lawrence, his letters and his acts, no longer now affect his friends or relatives alone, or that portion of the natives over whom he rules. They take a wider sweep. They have a bearing on the government of India and on the momentous events which were coming on. That John Law- rence fully appreciated the significance of the change, and be- gan now to look upon himself as one who might ‘ have a future,’ and need not necessarily ‘be content to wait for it,’ is indicated by his beginning, like other rising officials, to preserve in huge folio volumes copies of those letters which, being neither strictly official nor strictly private, form so large a part of all Indian correspondence, and are known in India by the name of ‘demi-official.’ It was a practice which he never afterwards dropped, and his biographer, whose chief complaint has hither- to been the meagreness of the written materials placed at his disposal, is now inclined to complain of the very opposite, of 175 1846 COMMISSIONER OF TRANS-SUTLEJ STATES. the embarrassing exuberance of materials, which yet never tell their own tale completely, and from which he has to winnow, as best he can, such grains as are of permanent historical in- terest, or throw light on the character of the man. The Jullundur period is one of the busiest of John Law- rence’s life, and it will be rvell to inquire first what were the geographical and historical conditions of the country over which he was called upon to preside. The Jullundur Doab lies between the rivers Sutlej and Beas, and is, for the most part, a rich champaign country inhabited by Juts, who hereabouts, as John Lawrence describes them, were ‘ a most industrious painstaking race, very quiet and orderly, who had cultivated every mile of waste ground and were apparently very glad to submit to our rule. The northern part of the Doab consists of ranges of low hills intersected by narrow valleys, and is inhab- ited by Rajpoot tribes, who, at that time, were split up into many sections and were living under their own chiefs. Besides the Doab proper, there is a vast mountain tract covering an area of some 13,000 square miles, and containing a population of 750,000 souls, which goes stretching away beneath the snowy range with its peaks of 16,000 feet in height, right up to the borders of Ladak in Chinese Tartar}'. This alpine country contains every variety of scenery, of climate, of soil, and of race, from the lordly Rajpoot down to the lowly Goojur and Jolaha, and is the birthplace of three of the great Punjab rivers — the Beas, the Ravi, and the Chenab. The town which has given to this region its chief historical celebrity, and which I shall presently have to describe in detail, is the famous fortress of Kangra. But the whole country bristled with little hill for- tresses, which were strong by nature if not by art, and were gen- erally held by independent chiefs whose subjects were remark- able for their courage and their high sense of honour. Would these hundred little fortresses yield to the newly appointed Commissioner backed by an armed force, in the peaceful man- ner in which the walled village had yielded some years before to the importunity of the solitary Collector of Delhi ? John Lawrence lost no time in buckling down to his work. It was on March 1, 1846, that he received his appointment from the Governor-General at Umritsur, and by the 30th of the same month the Governor was paying him a return visit at Jullun- dur, where he had already got well on with the most important and the most difficult task of the ruler of a newly annexed LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1846 176 province, the settlement — of course, at present, only a sum- mary settlement — of its revenue. He had hoped to complete the work of that particular portion of his province in the first week of April ; but the incursion of a Sikh chief from the other side of the Beas, and the disturbed state of the country bordering on the hills, warned him to drop the pen, to take up the sword, and to move northwards to Hoshiarpore. During this first month he had been working alone in his new dominions. ‘I have not yet been joined,’ he says, ‘by one of my assistants. I work from ten to twelve hours every day, and yet I daily leave much undone.’ By April 10, two out of the four assistants who had been promised him had arrived, the one somewhat impracticable and desultory, a thorn in his side the whole time that he remained with him ; the other a man of great ability and energy, who, though he was uninitiated as yet into the mysteries of revenue, and therefore was unable to help in that department, was destined under John Lawrence’s tuition to become a high authority on the subject. The friendship formed with Robert Cust was a lifelong one, and the circum- stances attending his first interview with his chief have, after the lapse of thirty years, been thus recalled by him : — It seems but yesterday that I first stood before John Lawrence, in April, 1846, at the town of Hoshiarpore, the capital of a district in the Jullundur Doab, which was my first charge. I found him discussing with the Postmaster-General the new lines of postal delivery, and settling with the officer commanding the troops the limits of his cantonments. Harry Lumsdcn, then a young subaltern, was copying letters. Seated round the small knot of Europeans were scores of Sikh and Mohamme- dan landholders, arranging with their new lord the terms of their cash assessment. John Lawrence was full of energy — his coat off, his sleeves turned up above his elbows — and was impressing upon his subjects his principles of a just state demand, and their first elementary ideas of natu- ral equity ; for, as each man touched the pen, the unlettered token of agreement to their leases, he made them repeat aloud the new trilogue of the English Government : ‘ Thou shalt not burn thy widow ; thou shalt not kill thy daughters ; thou shalt not bury alive thy lepers ; ’ 1 and old greybeards, in the families of some of whom there was not a single widow, or a female blood-relative, went away chanting the dogmas of the new Moses, which next year were sternly enforced. Here I learnt 1 In Hindustani : — ■ Bcwa mat jaldo ; Beti mat mdro ; Kori mat dabdo.' 1846 COMMISSIONER OF TRANS-SUTLEJ STATES. 1 77 my first idea of the energetic order and the rapid execution which make up the sum total of good administration. Here I first knew the man, who was my model, my friend, and my master, till, twenty years later, I sat at his Council board in Calcutta, and, thirty years later, consulted him on details of the affairs of the Church Missionary Society, and joined his committee in opposition to what he believed to be the mistaken pol- icy of a second Afghan war. Hercules Scott, another of John Lawrence’s early assistants, also gives a few first impressions of this period which should be preserved. I had been only a few months in harness in India, and had acquired therefore only the most elementary knowledge of my duties, when I found myself, in May, 1846, transferred to the rule of Mr. John Lawrence in the Trans-Sutlej States. In writing to report myself to him, I ex- pressed my desire that he would place me under a civilian, not under a military man. He acknowledged my letter in a few curt lines. * Your aim,’ he wrote, ‘ ought to be employment under a good officer, be his coat red or black.’ With this stern but characteristic remark he directed me to proceed to Jullundur as assistant to the Deputy-Commissioner there. It was not till the close of that year that he was able to come to Jullundur, and I to make his acquaintance. I held him in great awe at first, a feel- ing which was intensified by his strict oversight of all the proceedings of his subordinates, and by a certain ruggedness of manner and exterior, under which, as I afterwards found, the warmest and kindliest of hearts lay concealed. My work must have bristled with irregularities and blun- ders, which were duly cauterised, but he made allowance for the unequal combat which, as a young hand, I had endeavoured to maintain, and re- ported very kindly of me to Government. The illness of the Deputy-Com- missioner brought me henceforward into frequent contact with the Com- missioner. The awe with which he had inspired me soon wore off, and our acquaintance ripened into a thorough confidence and attachment. Press- ing as were his own engagements, it was never the wrong time to apply to him for advice or guidance in carrying out one’s duties. His grasp, both of principles and details, in fiscal, revenue, police, and judicial matters, was at once comprehensive and minute. Nothing pleased him better than to open the stores of his experience for our benefit. His own appe- tite for work was insatiable, and he expected, and I think not in vain, a like devotion from us. A drone or a shirk could not tarry in his sight. There were, as it appeared to me, certain guiding principles which ran through his whole texture, and were constantly impressed on us : duty to Government, consideration for the natives, order and promptitude in work, personal self-sacrifice, justice between man and man. He illus- trated these principles in his own life, and many of his disciples in the Punjab school learned to reflect in their own persons these character- istic features of their head. Vol. I. — 12 178 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1846 Before the energy which John Lawrence threw into his work difficulties seemed to fly, and he had not been in the Doab more than a month when, with that manly frankness and simplicity which marks him throughout his career, he told Frederick Currie, the Secretary to Government in the Foreign Depart- ment, exactly what he had done, what he had not done, and what he thought he would one day be able to do. That which in other people might be put down as self-assertion is in him a bare statement of fact, as far removed from affectation of mod- esty as it is from ostentation or display. As far as I am concerned as supervisor, I could easily manage double the extent of country. It is on the efficiency of the executive that the results must depend. Of five officers nominated under me, three have never joined, and the other two I have had with me but four days. With five men present, I could manage this country in first-rate style, hill and plain, even though everyone, with the exception of , is wholly new to the duty. Mackeson may have a greater extent of territory (the Cis- Sutlej States) than I have, but recollect that two-thirds of his is an old country, which is, or ought to have been, long since settled. 1 only ask you to wait six months, and then contrast the civil management of the two charges After what I have said, I think you ought to give me Harry Lumsden, for he is a good linguist, and a steady fellow. If you send young civilians they cannot be of much use for the first year ; however, do as you think best ; I can only make the most of the instru- ments you put into my hands. The petition thus made was duly complied with, and Harry Lumsden, whose good sword has done service since then in many a border fight, and who was for many years one of the most dashing of John Lawrence’s ‘ wardens of the marches,’ soon appeared. With him came also Lieutenant Edmund Lake of the Bengal Engineers, afterwards one of the most efficient soldier-politicals in the Punjab, and who was now entrusted with the revenue settlement of Nurpore. ‘1 like Lake very well, he is a nice little fellow,’ John writes to his brother Hen- ry ; ‘ but all your politicals look more to politics than to statis- tics and the internal economy of the country.’ It is pleasant to think that four of John Lawrence’s earliest assistants in the Jullundur Doab — Cust, Lumsden, Lake, and Hercules Scott, in spite of his stern rule and his insatiable appetite for work, or it may be, perhaps, because of them — proved his warm friends for life. John Lawrence had hardly finished his work in the plains 1846 COMMISSIONER OF TRANS-SUTLEJ STATES. 179 when news reached him from the hills that the fort of Kote- Kangra had closed its gates, had repaired its defences, and that its determined leader, with a garrison Ht \n Ui HICKANEKU KOH1U lllU’RTPOMB Sail l. lkl ) from Gvcouvrieli . Lon^imdi- Sr all' ul Bii^luhMtlc> X/ N ~ — r " J 1 / / > ** t A 0 ' Ik \/Y ' jL v f SfeX / "' /I 'y CHAPTER X. THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 1848. The second prolonged residence of John Lawrence, while acting for his brother at Lahore, may be dismissed with greater brevity than the first ; for the picture which I have endeavoured to draw of the one may, muta/is mutandis , to a great extent, serve for the other also. The banishment of Lai Sing and of the Oueen- mother had removed some of the chief causes of anxiety. But the more chronic difficulties, the venality and the selfishness, the intrigues and the empty exchequer of the Sirdars, through whom the Resident was bound to work, were the same as ever. They offered a passive resistance to the possibly over-active ef- forts which were made to improve them in European fashion ; and it was more difficult for a man of John Lawrence’s temper- ament to submit with equanimity to such passive resistance than to any amount of active opposition. He found, no doubt, in the full powers conferred on him by treaty, a wider field of use- fulness than had been open to him before ; and of these, with the help of his brother’s assistants who traversed the country, making a summary assessment and endeavouring to eradicate the three great social evils of suttee, female infanticide, and slaverj', he availed himself to the full. The security with which these young Englishmen rode about, quite alone, on their er- rands of mercy, seems strange enough when we recollect the frequent revolutions which had taken place since the death of Runjeet Sing. But, notwithstanding these encouragements, there were cir- cumstances attending John Lawrence's second residence at La- hore which rendered it even more distasteful to him than his former one. He was asked to hold the post, not directly for his brother, as Henry Lawrence had himself desired, but for Fred- erick Currie, who, at some future time not named, was to step in and take it out of his hands. Currie had already been pro- vided with a seat in Council at Calcutta ; he knew little of the 2 1 6 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 Punjab, while Lawrence knew it well ; the Sirdars themselves, moreover, who had, at first, been somewhat nettled by the home thrusts and blunt directness of John, had now come to appreciate the ready humour, the unrestrained intercourse, and the kindly heart which accompanied and set them off. ‘ The Durbar,’ he writes to his brother, * are very melancholy about my going away. Old Tej Sing asked me if he could not get a year’s leave ; even Dena Nath does not like the change ; and I am sure I can be no favourite of his. Yesterday, while talking to me, he said that things would never go on. “ With you,” he said, “we can talk and badger and dispute, you are one of our own ; but what can we do with Currie Sahib ? ” ’ That which made the arrangement proposed by Lord Hardinge all the more unaccountable was that Currie himself did not like it, and thought that he was coming down merely ‘ to oblige the Law- rences.’ There was some soreness on both sides ; but any lin- gering feeling of the kind in the breast of John must have been removed by the cordiality of their meeting when at last Currie arrived, and by the letter written to him by Lord Hardinge just before he set out for England : — Off the Sandheads : January 20, 1848. My dear Lawrence, — Our pilot leaves in an hour, and this my last let- ter from the shores of Bengal is written to express to you the gratification which I feel that you and your brothers, Henry and George Lawrence, have so greatly exceeded all the expectations I had formed originally of your abilities and judgment. I have acknowledged my sense of your val- uable services before I relinquished office, and I have recommended that you should be employed either in Kashmere this year, or Oudh the next, or at Lahore, in the event of Currie’s returning to Calcutta before your brother’s health enables him to resume the government of the Punjab. I mention these points, of which your brother has probably apprised you ; for the decisions in the Lahore arrangements, apparently adverse to your interests, have been made to accomplish more objects than those which meet the eye. . . . Your brother is assuredly much better than he was last year in the cold season at Lahore. If any military vacancy should occur in the Council, I think not merely that he ought, but that he will be the successor to Littler, and his presence in London will for- ward all these just objects of well-merited ambition. He only wants health to be at the top of the tree, and I don’t think there is anything organically wrong. Ever, my dear Lawrence, Yours sincerely, Hardinge. 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 217 But I am anticipating. Soon after the arrival of John Law- rence, in the previous autumn, at Lahore, the Council of Sikh chiefs, with its President, the Dewan Dena Nath, at their head, came to him and, premising that Lord Hardinge was a ‘real father’ to the Maharaja and to the State generally, asked him with true filial confidence to remit the whole sum of money which they had agreed to pay towards the expenses of the British occupation ! They could give us no money, they said, for there was none to give. John replied bluntly that this would not do ; that the revenue, if applied with justice and economy, was ample to meet all demands on the State ; and, going straight to the root of the matter with the directness which was characteristic of him, he wrote to his brother pro- posing that, with a view to ward off financial ruin, the kardars, or tax-gatherers, should be obliged by the Resident to give in their accounts punctually, and, what was more important still, that, without the Resident’s signature, there should be no ex- penditure of money at all. I know that you are anxious to work through the Council themselves as much as possible, and no doubt this is a right principle if it can be done. But I much doubt if it will not be necessary to interfere with de- tails more than we have hitherto done. I think I see my way clearly and know what I would do. You may not have the same views, and I am, at any rate, only a bird of passage. I will therefore interfere as much or as little as may be thought desirable, and either allow things to go on much as they have done, or stir the Durbar up. I shall not write publicly or privately to Government on the subject. You will do whatever you think necessary. Sheikh Imamuddin’s cash arrived from Jullundur to-day. It is the only money in the Treasury. This proposal, carefully guarded though it was, brought down on him, as he expected, a sharp rebuke from his brother, who could never be brought to see the fundamental importance, from a statesman’s point of view, of a clear balance-sheet ; while, in reply, John pointed out that it was the only chance of warding off, — that which each deprecated equally — the last ex- tremity of annexation. One of the assistants to the Residency, Lewin Bowring, after- wards highly distinguished as Chief Commissioner of Mysore, has furnished me with some lively reminiscences of his chief during this period. John Lawrence (he says) was very brusque of speech in those early days ; and what I can best remember of them would develop the rougher 218 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 rather than the gentler side of his character. He used, with a merry twinkle of his eye, to say very sharp things to the Punjab chiefs, under which they winced, although he was half in fun. He certainly had what is called a rough tongue then, and the Sirdars had a wholesome dread of him. Yet, in spite of his curtness of speech, he was so popular with us, his assistants, that there was almost a mutiny among us when we heard that Sir Frederick Currie was to be sent up to take the place of Sir Henry, in supersession of his brother John, in whom we had un- bounded confidence. John had been assisting Henry, during a tempo- rary absence, in his arduous duties, and had taken immense trouble in producing order out of chaos. He was a far abler man at details than his brother, though less considerate, perhaps, towards the Sikh chiefs. He introduced a summary settlement of the land revenue, which was, at the time, in a most disorganised state, accomplished many judicial re- forms, and devised a system analogous to our penny postage, which was of great benefit. In his endeavours to reduce expenditure he insisted on all orders for disbursing money being brought to him for counter- signature, a proceeding to which the Durbar greatly objected, and, perhaps, not without some reason, as it was virtually the assumption of the highest power in the State. When Rai Bhaj Sing, the Vakil of the Durbar, came to him in the morning with papers for signature, he would say to him, ‘ Well, Bhaj Sing, aj kya naya dagha hai ? ’ (‘ What new roguery is there to-day ? ’) And in Durbar he was wont to autoyer the chiefs, and omit all well- turned complimentary phrases, to the great horror of the courtly Noor- ood-deen, one of the members of Council. The Durbar, though they had a great respect for his force of character, did not regard him with as much affection as they did his brother. He was unpretentious in his habits, and used to sit in his room with his shirt-sleeves turned up over his arms and a cigar in his mouth, dictating orders to a native scribe, who, squatting on the ground, read out papers to him, while his wife sat close by doing some needle-work. We all liked his plain, unassuming manner, even though his blunt speaking may at times have given offence to those who were sensitive ; for we all felt that he was a man of com- manding powers. Even in those days he must have been conscious of great capacity to rule, as I remember his saying one day that he would undertake to govern Ireland, which was then passing through a danger- ous crisis, with success. He said this not in a boasting way, but, as he always spoke, with perfect simplicity. The difficulties and annoyances of John’s public duties at La- hore were not lessened by the presence of any extra comforts in his domestic life. Neither at that nor at any other period of their lives did the Lawrence brothers care much for the luxuries or refinements of civilisation. At the Residency house there were very few of the comforts, and notan abundant supply even 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 219 of what are commonly considered to be the necessaries of life. Henry was as careless as John of appearances, and was even more unconscious of his surroundings. The one candle that lighted, or failed to light, the tent in which he and his wife and an assistant would be working at night, was, as I have been told by an eye-witness, placed, not in a candlestick, but in the neck of an empty beer-bottle ; and on one occasion, when a second candle was wanted for the variety of occupations which were going on, Henry, with the utmost simplicity, remarked that some one must first drink another bottle of beer ! A curious com- mentary this on the ‘gorgeous East,’ but one which, peradven- ture, the great Puritan poet himself would have been among the first to appreciate. In his lavish hospitality Henry Lawrence would often ask more people to dinner than by any possibility he had room for, and then, as likely as not, would forget to order the dinner for them. And sometimes a provident friend, who made it his business to look after his chief’s interests, would in- quire privately whether the dinner had been ordered, or en- deavour to supply any deficiencies, surreptitiously, from his own table. When John took his brother’s place at the Residency, there was much more forethought, but there was still little that could be called comfort. His wife and family indeed were with him, a boon of which he had been deprived during nine months of the year 1846, and five of the year 1847. But the house which had sufficed for the ample hospitalities and the simple wants of the Lawrence brothers, and had often given shelter, in patriar- chal fashion, to a goodly band of assistants as well, was not found to be large enough for Currie, who had been designated as their successor. The discomforts of building were thus added to those which were inherent in the place and in the work, and one or two details of the domestic arrangements, which I gather from John Lawrence’s letters, may, perchance, not be without their interest to another and more exacting generation. John Lawrence and his wife, his three children, and a European ser- vant, had only two rooms, twelve feet by fifteen, to divide be- tween them. Henry Lawrence arid Robert Napier, now Lord Napier of Magdala, shared a third ; while the ‘assistants’ were lucky enough if they fared as did their chiefs, and had half a room apiece ! Such was the mode of life, and such the school in which some of the best and greatest of our Indian adminis- trators were trained. The details may seem trivial, but they 220 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 have an interest and importance of their own. For it was here that, — following the example set them by the two brothers, the two master-spirits of Henry and John Lawrence, — a whole band of men learned lessons of simplicity and of contentment, of ab- sorption in their work, and of sympathy with the natives, which they were never afterwards to unlearn, and which may still be said to be a real power in India. It was from such materials, and under such influences, that one of the noblest portions of the great fabric of our Indian Empire was being built up — an Empire as majestic as that of Rome, and ruled, on the whole, with a beneficence of purpose towards its subject races of which few Romans ever dreamed. Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini, Hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit, Scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma. One friendship formed by John Lawrence during this visit to Lahore, and never afterwards interrupted, should be noticed here. Under the peculiar conditions of our occupation of the Punjab, Lahore was the most important military station in India. Sir John Littler, one of our best generals, was in command of the Division, and when Colin Campbell — the famous soldier who had played his part in the retreat to Corunna, had fought at Vittoria, had led the forlorn hope and bled at San Sebastian — was retiring from the scene of military operations in China at the head of his splendid 98th Regiment, Lord Hardinge de- termined to secure his services also for the post of danger, and gave him the command of a brigade at Lahore. Here he be- came a fast friend, first of Henry, and then of John Lawrence. ‘ I am delighted,’ he says in his ‘ Diary,’ * at the prospect of John Lawrence’s remaining at Lahore during his brother’s ab- sence.' He frequently accompanied John during his shooting excursions — an amusement in which the civilian was, from long practice, much more at home than the soldier. John Lawrence was an excellent shot. I have been told by his friends that he would kill a jackal with his pistol from his buggy as he was dri- ving by ; while Colin Campbell regretfully confesses that ‘ he could not touch a feather from the back of an elephant.’ No one of the Lahore officials was more grieved than he, on both public and private grounds, when it was determined that John Lawrence was to give place to Currie. ‘ I am most sorry,’ lie says, ‘ that John Lawrence is going. He is not only a nice ’(one 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 22 I of Colin Campbell’s highest terms of praise, as his biography shows), ‘ friendly, and honest fellow, but he is the sort of politi- cal authority with whom I should like to act if any disturbance were to arise during our stay in the Punjab.’ 1 Lord Dalhousie, the new Governor-General, on his arrival in India on January 12, 1848, was received with the usual hon- ours at Government Mouse, and in the following week Lord Hardinge sailed for England, accompanied by Henry Lawrence, after assuring his successor that, so far as he could see, ‘ it would not be necessary to fire a gun in India for seven. years to come ! ’ But still Currie came not to Lahore, and still John Lawrence worked on cheerfully, though he was anything but satisfied with his position there. ‘ I hope,’ he had written to his successor-designate on November 21, ‘that you will come as soon as you can conveniently do so. As far as I am concerned, the sooner I am out of the Punjab the better I shall be pleased.’ But the following February still found him in harness in the Punjab, and when at last he heard that Currie was actually on his way, he wrote to his brother Henry, offering, with his usual unselfishness, to return to Lahore at any time rather than bring him back from England before his health was re-established. As I said before, sooner than bring you out before your time, I will come back here again if necessary. But I would much rather that Currie stayed the whole time. These frequent changes are a great evil. No man has time to carry out his plans, and therefore to do much good. . . . . It was bad enough when either my own reputation or yours was concerned. But it is worse now ; for no one likes to be made a mere warming-pan of. Government has just written to me to do nothing about Mooltan till Currie comes. Thus six weeks are lost. In two months I would have assessed all Mooltan. Men sent there in the middle of March will only lose their health going about, and not accomplish the work in double the time. These words, as we shall hereafter see, have an immediate bearing on events which were destined to set the Punjab in a flame, and to lead to the annexation of the whole country. Had John Lawrence been allowed to have his way in the matter, he would have sent Arthur Cocks to Mooltan in January, and the second Sikh war, with its unaccountable blunderings and Cad- mean victories, might, possibly, have never taken place at all. The long expected Resident arrived on March 6, and he and 1 Life of Lord Clyde , by General Shadwell, vol. i. pp. 148, 159. 222 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 John Lawrence, in spite of previous heart-burnings, got on capitally together. They discussed all the pressing questions and arrived at a thorough accord. The new buildings had been completed and the ‘ assistants,’ with two exceptions, were cleared out to Mean Meer. The patriarchal period at the Residency had now passed away for ever. * Whereas, in your and my time,’ says John to his brother, ‘ there was neither privacy nor comfort, there will now probably be too much of both.’ On March 17, ‘ St. Patrick’s day,’ — as his father, with, possibly, awakened memories of his lineage and his youthful escapades, remarks with satisfaction, — a second son, Henry, was born, and on April 3, the whole Lawrence family, with the baby, which was then little more than a fortnight old, started for Jullundur, ‘right glad to go.’ John Lawrence, after making a rapid tour through his pro- vince, reached in safety the beautiful hill station of Dhurmsala, where he had bought a house. The prospect of spending a few weeks in that cool climate, with only an occasional visit to the plains when it might be necessary to hold the sessions, seemed too delightful to be true. And, unfortunately, it was too de- lightful to be true. For, before many days had passed, news came that Vans Agnew and Anderson, the two officers who had been deputed to Mooltan, had been foully murdered, and that the Government was in the dilemma which John Lawrence had foreseen, and had, in vain, tried to avert. We must either now enter at once on military movements which might land us in a general war in the middle of the hot season and at the hottest place in India, or, if we postponed operations till the cool season, we must run the even greater risk of appearing to hesi- tate before a foe, and should give time for all the elements of discontent first to concentrate themselves at Mooltan and then to burst into a flame which might envelop the Punjab. What were the circumstances which had placed us in this sad dilemma ? Moolraj, the Dewan of Mooltan, was the son and successor of the famous Sawun Mull, to whom Runjeet Sing had committed the care of the redoubtable fortress which he had at last taken. The fortifications of Mooltan had been known to fame ever since the time of Alexander, and it was not likely that the chief who held it would long remain dependent on anyone else. Sawun Mull had been a good ruler, as East- ern rulers go, and after a reign of twenty years, in which he had amassed an enormous fortune, had died in 1844, leaving his 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 223 son, Moolraj, the heir to his wealth and to his kingdom. The Sikhs, whatever their good qualities, are the money-makers — the Jews or the Armenians— of the Indian peninsula; and Lai Sing, as the representative of the paramount power, demanded from Moolraj a nuzzur, or succession-duty, of acroreof rupees. It was a struggle for money rather than for power on the part of each, and Moolraj long managed to fight off the evil day. But he was at last induced, under a safe-conduct from John Lawrence, to come to Lahore ; and there, after tedious, but not unfriendly, negotiations, the payment of the succession-duty was arranged. But when Moolraj, in a moment of vexation, expressed a wish to resign his post, he was taken at his word. Another Sirdar was appointed in his place, and two English of- ficers were told off to accompany him to Mooltan and act there as they were acting in other parts of 'the Punjab. Arthur Cocks, ‘a fine, resolute, good-tempered fellow,’ as John Law- rence calls him, who knew the Sikhs well, had been selected by both brothers for the ticklish business. But an order from head-quarters to take no step in the matter till the new Resi- dent should arrive, had caused another three months’ delay, and had given the discontent at Mooltan time to come to a head. Currie, on his arrival, selected Vans Agnew, a civilian, and Lieutenant Anderson, brother-in-law to Outram, for the danger- ous duty ; and, supported by a mixed force of five hundred Sikhs and Ghoorkas, they had set out with the new Dewan, to take over the government from Moolraj. Unfortunately they did not go with their escort. They went by water-, while the escort went by land, so that, by the end of the journey, they were hardly known to their natural protectors. What followed is too well known, and has been described by too many pens, to call for a fresh description here. Vans Ag- new and Anderson were treacherously struck down as they were riding through the gateway by the side of Moolraj, and, after they had been heroically defended for some twelve hours by that portion of their escort which remained faithful, were brut- ally murdered and their dead bodies were treated with every kind of indignity. The original attack, like the much more recent one on our embassy at Cabul, seems not to have beer- premeditated by those who struck the blow, still less to have been deliberately planned by the authorities. But in Asiatic cities, even more than in European, the sight of the means to do ill deeds often makes deeds ill done. The more resolute 224 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 and reckless carry away by sheer force of will the half-hearted or well-disposed, and thus a whole city becomes involved in the guilt of a few. But in any case, Moolraj, unlike the late ill-fated ruler of Cabul, made the deed his own by adopting it after it was done, and called by proclamation on all the in- habitants of the Punjab — Sikh, Hindu, and Afghan — to rise against the hated foreigner. Now then, if ever, was the time for prompt and energ'etic ac- tion. It was an occasion to put to the test the knowledge of the native character and the fibre of each man who was in au- thority. What Lord Hardinge and Henry Lawrence would have done under such circumstances is clear enougli from what they had so lately done in the case of Imamuddin in Kashmere. What Currie would have done, had he been left free to act, may be inferred from the steps he did at once take for a movement towards Mooltan, and from the advance which, later on, he carried out against the wishes, if not the positive orders, of his superiors. How John Lawrence would have acted is put be- yond the reach of doubt by the letters which I have before me —letters written, not with that cheap wisdom which comes after the event and points out what the writer would have done when there was no longer any chance of his being able to do it, but sent off in hot haste, on the day on which he received the news, to Elliot the Secretary to Government, to Currie the Resident at Lahore, and to Wheeler the Brigadier-General commanding at Jullundur. This it is my business to bring out, rather than painfully to track the messages which passed and repassed be- tween the Resident, the Governor-General, and the Comman- der-in-chief, and which all ended in their doing nothing at all. How was this ? The Commander-in-Chief was brave and generous as a lion, but he was always in extremes. When his blood was up, and he was within sound of a gun, there was nothing he would not do and dare. When he had cooled down he showed an amount of caution which, in a less heroic nature, might have been put down to inertness or even timidity. The Governor-General was new to India. He was only thirty-six years of age, and, naturally enough, in this, the first burning question which had come before him, he was disposed to trust to the counsels of others rather than to his own keen intelli- gence and masterful will. It was, perhaps, the only occasion in the whole of his Indian career on which he can be accused of having done so. The conclusion to which these two highest 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 225 authorities came, was that it was too late to risk the safety of English troops in any active operations ; in other words, as Henry Lawrence sarcastically put it, they came to a resolution ‘to have a grand shikar (hunt) in the cold season, under the lead of the Governor-General.’ ITad the advice given by John Lawrence, and supported, to a great extent, by Currie, been followed to the end, it is not too much to say that the disturb- ance at .Mooltan might — as we have almost invariably found in India under similar circumstances — very possibly, have ended where it began, and have proved a mere local outbreak. The murder was committed on April 20. On the 30th the news reached John in his remote hill station under the snowy peaks of the Himalayas ; and on that same day he wrote two highly characteristic letters to Elliot and to Currie, extracts from which I proceed to give. We feel as we read how sound were the instincts and how keen the insight of the man who could divine at a glance the exact nature of the outbreak and suggest the measures which would be most certain to suppress it. They are an anticipation of that far greater crisis which he would have to meet hereafter, when, cut off — perhaps happily cut off — from Governors-General and Commanders-in-Chief, it would be his to command rather than to suggest, to act rather than to think, and to break through all the restraints of etiquette and precedence in order that something of infinitely more value than etiquette and precedence might weather the storm. My dear Elliot, — I have just heard from Currie, dated the 25th, of the melancholy affair at Mooltan, and the deaths of poor Agnew and Ander- son. I have written to Currie offering to go over if my services can be of use. I do not want to thrust myself where I may not be wanted. But in such a crisis I think it right to volunteer. Currie seems inclined to leave it to the Durbar, and not to march troops on Mooltan. I send you a copy of my reply to him. The season, no doubt, is terribly bad for moving troops. But the alternative seems worse. The lives of none of our officers in Bunnoo, Peshawur, and Huzara will be safe if speedy retribution does not fall on those scoundrels. It was touch and go in the Kashmere affair two years ago. It was then a question whether the Sheikh surrendered or the troops went over to him. If we do nothing the whole of the disbanded soldiery of the Manjha will flock down and make common cause with the mutineers. On the same day he wrote to Currie : — Bad as the Moolraj’s conduct may have been, I should doubt very much if he has had anything to do with the original outbreak. Depend Vol. I. — 15 226 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 on it he has been forced into it by circumstances. He was notoriously a timid man, and one of the chief points on which he originally so much insisted with me was, that he might be allowed to get away before it could be publicly known that he had given up the country. It has often happened that in a row the Sikhs will not fight against each other, and that the weaker party invariably joins the stronger. Still, it seems in- credible that Khan Sing’s force should have behaved as it has done. 1 much fear now that any troops of the Durbar’s marching on Mooltan will do as Khan’s Sing’s have done. Despite the heat and advanced season of the year, I would counsel action. Otherwise you will have emeutcs, as you fear, in Bunnoo, Huzara, and Peshawur. The officers, willing or not, must go with the soldiers to save their lives. Mooltan is a place of no strength. There is in your office a description of the fortifications, drawn up by poor Anderson. I would have over a brigade from Ferozepore and Jullundur, and march two European corps and six native ones on Mooltan. The place can’t stand a siege. It can be shelled from a small height near it. I see great objection to this course. But I see greater ones in delay. The Durbar neither can do nor will do anything. I never saw them do anything. The initiative must in all cases come from us. Should you think that I can be of use in any way you have only to say so. I could leave Barnes in charge of my office and be over with you in five days from Kangra. I have no personal wish in the matter, but if I can be of use, it is my duty, in such a crisis, to help you. I would come by Denanuggur. On the following day he wrote again : — My dear Currie, — I have been thinking over the Mooltan affair ever since I heard from you. I am still of opinion that our troops should go against the fort, not as supporters of the Sikh troops, but as princi- pals. I would besiege the place, and if the garrison did not surrender at discretion I would storm it and teach them such a lesson as should astonish the Khalsa. If you don’t act till the cold weather you will have the country, I fear, in a flame, and insurrections elsewhere. You will get no revenue out of either that country or the surrounding districts. In fact, it is impossible to say what will happen if you delay. In the event of your not sending our troops, it seems to me that it would be better not to send any Sikhs, for they will assuredly fraternise with the rebels. I cannot understand Moolraj’s having hatched the plot. He had all to lose and nothing to gain. He might have remained at Mool- tan had he chosen ; indeed, you showed him that you would rather he had remained. It may be that, not wishing to give up, and yet not will- ing to hold on our terms of dependency, he allowed what he thought might be a petty emeute to be got up, in order to show us how troublesome it would be to manage the province. Be the cause what it may, I would not delay in making an example of the rascals. The day they hear the 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 22^ troops have left Lahore, they will lose half their strength. Delay will bring thousands to their standard. Yours sincerely, John Lawrence. P.S. — It is not to the Sikh Government that we should look to revenge the death of our officers. It would have been difficult to give sounder advice than that which these letters, written off on the spur of the moment, con- tain. But unhappily it was not acted on, or, if acted on at all, not till it was too late to be of avail. It is true that John Law- rence had been misinformed as to the strength of Mooltan, and, as he admitted a few days later, it would have been unwise to advance upon it without a siege train. But was there not a siege train waiting all ready for action at Ferozepore, which could be carried by water down the Sutlej to within forty miles of the fortress ? — and was it not to guard against precisely such an insurrectionary movement as this that Lord Hardinge had left behind him three movable brigades, ready to take the field at the shortest notice, at Ferozepore, at Jullundur, and at La- hore ? At that time no preparations had been made by Moolraj for a siege, and an immediate advance, combined with the news that the ‘guns were following ’ apace, would, probably, have taken the heart out of such resistance as he was prepared to offer us. As regards the heat, if the English had been unequal to anything but fair-weather campaigns in India, they would never have conquered India at all. Seringapatam had been stormed on May 4 — in the very height, that is, of the hot season ; and, as John Lawrence thought of it, he must have re- called with a thrill of satisfaction that the storming party had been led by his gallant old father, who had been left lying for hours on the breach in the fiery glare of the sun, and yet had weathered the storm. Alighur had been taken, and the battle of Assaye fought, in September, a more unhealthy season still ; and John Lawrence himself recollected our troops marching up to Delhi from Shikawatti in June. Happily, in another part of the Punjab, in the Derajat, there was a young lieutenant, then engaged in the Revenue Survey, who was in full sympathy, not with the Governor-General or the Commander-in-Chief, but with the Commissioner of the Jullundur Doab, and was in favour of immediate action. A few hasty lines from Agnew, addressed ‘to General Van Cortlandt, 228 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 in Bunnoo, or wherever else he may be,’ had reached Herbert Edwardes in his tent at Derra Futteh Khan on April 22, and had informed him of what had happened at Mooltan. Without waiting to refer the matter to any higher authorities, he at once determined to give all the aid he could. Accompanied only by the small force which formed the guard of a revenue officer in that turbulent district, and fully conscious that only a portion of it could be trusted, he collected boats, he crossed the Indus, he occupied Leia, the capital of the Sind Saugar Doab, and there or thereabouts, to use his own words, ‘ like a terrier bark- ing at a tiger,’ he awaited the attack of Moolraj. Availing him- self of the hostility which he knew to exist between the different races in the Punjab, he enrolled 3,000 Pathans ; thus follow- ing the reverse of the process which afterwards stood us in such good stead during the Mutiny. He armed the Mussulmans of the frontier against the Sikhs and Mussulmans of Mooltan, as we afterwards armed the Sikhs against the Mussulmans and Hindus of Delhi. Strengthened by these levies, byVanCort- landt — an able officer who had been in the Sikh service — from Bunnoo, and by some troops from Bahawulpore, under Lake, he defeated Moolraj on June 18, the anniversary of the battle of Waterioo, in a pitched battle on the field of Kyneree, and drove him headlong back towards Mooltan. Following him up he fought and won, a few days later, a second battle at Suddo- sain, and actually penned Moolraj and his forces within the walls of his famous fortress ! ‘ Now is the time to strike,’ he wrote to Currie ; ‘it is painful to see that I have got to the end of my tether.’ ‘ A few heavy guns, a mortar battery, a few sappers and miners, and Major Napier to look after them ’ — this was all the assistance he had asked from the authorities before his advance. But unfortunately it was not forthcoming. He could not ‘ go beyond his tether ; ’ but the exploits which, as a young subaltern, he had already performed were worthy of the man who, a few years later, in still more dangerous times, was to hold so gallantly, against mutineers within and enemies with- out, the all-important frontier post of Peshawur. Hearing of Edwardes’ double victory, the Resident, who was still opposed, or only lukewarmly supported, by the supreme authorities, sent, on his own responsibility, a force from Lahore under General Whish to co-operate with that before Mooltan. But it was too late. It could not prevent a general rising. At best it could only check its progress. And, worse still, the warn- 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 229 ing which John Lawrence had given against employing Sikh troops to coerce their own countrymen was neglected, and with the result which he had foreseen. Shere Sing, the Sikh com- mander, went over at the critical moment to the enemy. The siege of Mooltan, which had just been begun, was raised ; and ‘ the drum of religion,’ whose first tumblings had already been heard in Huzara and at Peshawur, on the north and west, now sounded loud and long at Mooltan in the south, and summoned the Sikhs to rise everywhere and strike for ‘ God and the Guru ’ against the foreigner. The disbanded veterans of Ferozeshah and Sobraon left, once more, the mattock and plough, and hurried to support the renascent Khalsa commonwealth. Nor were they to return to their homes again till the doubtfully con- tested field of Ferozeshah had found its counterpart at Chilli- anwallah, and the crowning victory of the British at Sobraon had been thrown into the shade by their still more crowning victory at Gujerat. The Mooltan outbreak, encouraged by our delays, had thus grown into a revolt of the Punjab, and the work of 1846 had to be begun over again. More than this, beyond the limits of the Punjab, Golab Sing, the monarch of our creation in Kashmere, was said to be only biding his time. And the much more for- midable Dost Mohammed, hating, as well he might, those who had possessed the will to deprive him of his throne, and whose poverty alone had consented to restore it to him, entered into an alliance against us with the most inveterate enemies of his race and creed. It was a case of ‘ water with fire in ruin recon- ciled.’ Sikh and Afghan, for the first time in their history, were to fight side by side ; Peshawur, the most valuable ac- quisition of the Lion of the Punjab, was to revert to the Afghan ; and ‘ the dream and the madness ’ of Dost Mohammed’s life was to be fulfilled. Roused by the extremity of the peril, the British lion began at length to bestir himself in earnest. Large reinforcements were called for from Bombay. Others came hurrying up from Bengal. Lord Dalhousie, shaking off his scruples and his ad- visers, set out in October from Calcutta for the scene of active operations. ‘ Unwarned by precedent,’ he said in public at Bar- ra£kpore just before he started, ‘ uninfluenced by example, the Sikh nation have called for war, and on my word, sirs, they shall have it with a vengeance.’ And in October — exact- ly six months, that is, after the murder of Agnew and Anderson LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 230 1848 — the grand army which was to revenge it mustered at Feroze- pore. With the details of the war just begun, otherwise than as they affected John Lawrence, his province of the Jullundur Doab, his colleagues, and his future, this biography has little to do. A very rapid sketch must suffice. It was not till November that Lord Gough took the com- mand in person of the splendid army which had been collected. It was an army complete in all its branches, well supplied with cavalry, with draught animals, with ammunition, and with guns ; an army which, looking at our long experience in India, people might have been excused for thinking would go anywhere and do anything. But the first action, fought on November 22, at Ramnuggur on the Chenab, ended in a serious check, which, among other heavy losses, cost us the lives of Cureton and W. Havelock. The second action of Sadoolapore, on December 3, though it was boldly claimed as a victory by the Governor-General and the Commander-in-Chief, only in- duced the Sikhs to retire, at their own discretion and in good order, from the Chenab to the Jhelum— from a good position, that is, to a still better one in their rear. And now for six weeks more Lord Gough, on whom the Governor-General, knowing his character, had enjoined strict caution, forebore to advance. At last, on January ir, he moved forward, and at three in the afternoon of the 13th, — his combative instincts aroused by some half-spent cannon-balls which came lumbering in, — the fiery old general, in defiance of the warning given him by the battles of Moodki and Ferozeshah, gave the order to attack. The battle of Chillianwallah was one of those chequered and desperate conflicts which, in spite of the gallantry displayed by a large portion of our troops, was almost more dangerous to us than an out-and-out defeat. The advance of a brigade of in- fantry at a speed which brought them exhausted and breathless among the enemy’s guns and, after exposing them at the same time to the galling crossfire of Sikh marksmen concealed in the jungle, ended in a hasty retreat and heavy loss ; the advance of a brigade of cavalry without skirmishers in front, or supports to follow up behind, while our guns were so placed in their rear that not one of them could fire a shot in its support ; the word bf command heard or misheard, or possibly not heard at all, which suggested to ears that were too ready to hear it a welcome re- treat ; the retreat converted into a same qui pent , in which the 1848 the second sikh war. 231 14th Dragoons remorselessly rode down our own guns and gun- ners and even those who were engaged in works of mercy be- hind them ; the colours of three regiments and four guns taken by the enemy; the terrible total of 89 officers and 2,350 men killed or wounded — these are the chief incidents of the disas- trous battle which, in view, it is to be supposed, of the twelve guns which we had taken, the imagination of the Governor- General and the Commander-in-Chief endeavoured to convert in their public despatches into another victory, but which the Governor-General, in a private letter which lies before me, characterises, together with its predecessors, as * the lamentable succession of three unsatisfactory actions ! ’ The facts were too strong for proclamations. The whole of India knew the truth, and those who can remember the mingled anxiety and indignation which the news of the ‘victory of Chillianwallah ’ aroused in England, will remember also the sense of relief with which the supersession of the brave old soldier, but the reckless general, the Marcellus of our Sikh wars, was received by the English public. Hitherto the conduct of the war by the supreme civil and military authorities had given little cause for satisfaction. But there was another set of men, the founders of the Punjab school, the statesman-soldiers, or soldier-statesmen, who, under the humble name of ‘Assistants to the Resident,’ had been sta- tioned in outlying parts of the Punjab, and who, throughout this gloomy period had covered themselves with honour, and had gone far to retrieve the shortcomings of their superiors. What Herbert Edwardes had done in his district, and beyond it, has already been described. But George Lawrence at Pe- shawur, James Abbott in Huzara, Herbert at the fort of Attock, Reynell Taylor in the Derajat, and John Lawrence in the Jul- lundur Doab — cut off, as most of them were, from all commu- nication with the outer world, or served by troops on whom little dependence could be placed, and, all of them, surrounded by a vast native population whom they had hardly yet had time to know — held on to their posts with heroic courage, hoping to suppress or to postpone the general rising till the su- preme authorities could be induced to recognise accomplished facts and take the field. We turn with pleasure from the mingled vacillation and rashness, from the divided command, from the orders and counter-orders, from the undecided battles, and from the victories that were no victories, of the highest 232 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 authorities, to the resolution, the fearlessness, the energy, the clearness of vision, which marked each and all of these servants of the East India Company. These were the men, some of them connected by family ties, and all of them by ties of friend- ship, of common service, and of sympathy with the subject of this biography, who helped to make Chillianwallah bearable, and Gujerat possible. What they did, side by side with John Lawrence, in the second Sikh war, seems like a preparation for what they or their successors were to do under him, nine years later, in the suppression of the Sepoy Mutiny. The one is a rehearsal for the other, as a brief narrative of what was done by the most conspicuous among them will show. Take first the case of George Lawrence. He had been sta- tioned at Peshawur, and though his troops had been plied with solicitations by their natural ruler, Chuttur Sing, to rise, he asserted and maintained the influence over the Sikhs which seemed to belong, as of right, to all the members of his family. He held on with heroic bravery to his post against Sikhs and Afghans alike, till, on his escape, at the last possible moment, from the beleaguered Residency, he was betrayed into the en- emy’s hands by an Afghan whom Sir Henry Lawrence had laid under special obligations. The Sikhs, a far nobler race, to whom treachery and ingratitude are not naturally congenial, treated him as their honoured guest rather than as their pris- oner ; said they had received nothing but kindness from him and from his brothers ; apologised for such appearance of restraint as they were obliged to put upon him, and allowed him, after an interval, to go on his parole to the British head- quarters. Take the case of Lieutenant Herbert. He had been sent by George Lawrence, when an Afghan invasion seemed imminent, and when Chuttur Sing had already risen in Huzara, to oc- cupy, in succession to Nicholson, the all-important post of Attock on the fords of the Indus. He held on to that dilapi- dated fort for seven weeks, with a small garrison of Pathans, who refused to desert him till Dost Mohammed himself should appear upon the scene ; and when that happened, and they found that their wives and children were in the Ameer’s power, they expressed their sorrow that they could do no more. Take the still more striking case of James Abbott, — the one Englishman who, till very recent times, had set eyes on Khiva — a man often misunderstood or misliked, as we shall see, by 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 233 his superiors, but one of the most kindly and chivalrous of men, and, perhaps, of all his friends the one who has most appreciatively described the character of Ilenry Lawrence.1 * He had been stationed almost alone among the wild and un- tamed inhabitants of Huzara. Unsubdued by the cruelties and oppressions of the Sikhs, who used to keep ten regiments at a time in their country, they had yielded to his fatherly kind- ness, and, supported by them, he now held out for months in the fort of Srikote, against the large Sikh army under Chuttur Sing, and left it only at the end of the war. During his rule of five years which followed, he helped to turn the wildest and most desolate into one of the happiest and most peaceful dis- tricts of the Punjab. And if he received no external mark of honour from the Government he had served, he obtained, what he valued far more, the devoted attachment of his people. For many a year after his disappearance from among them, the na- tives loved to recall how he had fed their children with sweet- meats, which, when he went out, he carried with him for the purpose, or to point with filial veneration to the stone on which he had rested for awhile, saying, ‘ It was on that stone that father Abbott sat.’ 5 A tribute this to the qualities of the man more grateful than the actual worship which, as I shall describe hereafter, was paid by the wild inhabitants of Bunnoo to the heroic Nicholson ! So true is it, that the most lionlike courage is not inconsistent with the gentleness of a woman and the sim- plicity of a child ; and so seldom is it that such qualities miss their true and appropriate reward. 'Once more, take the case of Reynell Taylor. He had been left behind by Edwardes in the Derajat when he marched for Mooltan, and he too proved equal to the emergency. Followed by a raw rabble of Pathan recruits, he cleared the frontier of Sikh soldiers, borrowed a honeycombed piece of ordnance from the Xawab of Tonk, and actually besieged the fort of Lukki, which was held by two regiments of Sikhs with ten guns. Fir- ing round stones from the brook, in default of round shot, from his crazy bit of ordnance, without a single European soldier, with no hope of reinforcements, in the midst of a fanatical Mo- hammedan population and threatened by an army marching down the Kurrum valley from Cabul, he never thought of flinch- ing, and, after a siege of a month, reduced the fort to submis- 1 See his 1 Reminiscence ’ in the Life of Sir Henry Lawrence, voL ii. pp. 146-154. a Raikes’ Revolt in North- West Provinces, p. 26. 234 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 sion, and secured to us forever the possession of the Trans- Indus provinces.1 The story of this heroic act is little known in England. It has not, so far as I am aware, ever been related in any English book, and though it has been followed up by a series of exploits on the frontier not unworthy of it, yet a simple C. S. I. Reynell Taylor still remains. But it is not immaterial to this biography to record that on July 5, 1879, he received an honour which, ‘dashed and flecked with sorrow’ though it was, can hardly have been of less value in his eyes than the high- est official recognition of his services. For on that day he was specially selected from amidst the vast throng of Indian he- roes and statesmen who were following John Lawrence to his grave in Westminster Abbey, to bear the coronet which had been so well won and worn by his friend and chief. Nicholson, Cocks, Lumsden, and Lake, it need hardly be said, had also done their duty right well wherever there was an opening, or wherever they could make one for themselves. But what of John Lawrence himself ? We last saw him pleading with almost passionate earnestness, after the outbreak at Mooltan, with the Governor-General, with the Brigadier at Jullundur, and with the Resident at Lahore, for immediate and strenuous action. His suggestions, from whatever causes, were not complied with, and with the results which he had foreseen. He had been anxious to go to Mooltan in person, but the rapid spread of the revolt made it look much more likely that Mooltan or its emissaries would come to him. He knew that a rising throughout the Punjab must be felt in his own Doab, and he made preparations accordingly. Let us briefly review his position. The province had been annexed for little more than two years ; a short interval this, in which to pacify a brave and energetic people who had been in arms against us ; to sweep away the worst abuses of the old system, and to introduce the elements of anew one, ‘of better manners, purer laws.’ Yet this is what John Lawrence, in spite of his frequent absences at Lahore, had succeeded in doing. And he was now to reap the result. It is of course impossible that any system of gov- ernment can be swept away and another be put in its place without inflicting a considerable amount of hardship. Hun- dreds of place-holders and of hangers-on to the skirts of Gov- 1 See in the Times for July 8, 1879, an article headed ' Anglo-Indians at Lord Law- rence's Funeral.' 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 235 crnment necessarily lose their means of livelihood ; hundreds of soldiers, finding that an era of peace and security has dawned, feel their raison d'etre taken from them ; scores of feudal chief- tains chafe at the loss of their right to govern or misgovern ; and John Lawrence, it should be added, was never the man to shrink from inflicting individual loss where he thought it to be just and necessary for the public good. The wonder is, under the circumstances, not that the discontent was so great, but that, thanks to the wisdom and moderation of the changes he made, it was so little ; not that there were so many and such desperate risings against the yoke which, however light, must needs gall the necks of the wearers, but that they were so few, so ill-supported, and so easily suppressed. The force in the Jullundur Doab was small enough for the work that might be expected of it. At Jullundur itself there were four native and one European regiment, some Irregular horse and a battery of artillery. Besides these, there were small detachments of native troops, which were posted at vari- ous points of vantage, such as Hoshiarpore and Kangra ; and — more important than all for John Lawrence’s purpose, as they were immediately subject to him — there were two local corps of military police, one composed of Sikhs, the other of Hill- Rajpoots. This was the whole of the force available for the protection of the province, and even of this a large portion was to be drawn off in the course of the war for military opera- tions in the Bari Doab. The first symptom of the rising storm showed itself in May — within a week or two, that is, of Agnew’s murder. It came from beyond the frontier. Emissaries from Mooltan traversed the hill districts, calling on the chiefs to rise, and promising them the restoration of all their rights and privileges. At the same time Bhai Maharaja Sing, a Guru who had been outlawed for a plot formed under the very eyes of the Resident at La- hore, using the influence which his sacred character gave him, collected together several hundred followers to the north of the Beas. His object, as his movements showed, was the invasion of the British territory. But the fords of the river were too well watched by its natural guardians. He beat a retreat to- wards the Chenab ; he was there attacked by some Mussul- mans, who had discovered that the British rule was preferable to the Sikh ; was driven into the river, with hundreds of his followers, and was seen, so it was said, to disappear, with his 236 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 famous black mare, beneath its waters. But a Guru was not fated to die like a dog ! He bore a charmed life, and reap- peared now here, now there, till he was ultimately taken, as we shall see hereafter, at Jullundur, by Vansittart. Towards the end of August a second inroad took place. Ram Sing, son of the Vizier of Nurpore, one of the small hill states, put himself at the head of a band of marauders whom he had collected from the Jummoo Hills, crossed the Ravi, seized the fort of Shahpore, proclaimed with tattoo of drums that the Eng- lish rule had ceased, and took up a commanding position at Nurpore. Charles Saunders, Deputy-Commissioner at Hoshiar- pore — ‘a cool judicious officer,’ says John Lawrence, ‘one of 'the best I have got’ — was the first, with Fisher’s Irregular Corps, to arrive at the spot, and he was soon followed by Barnes, Deputy-Commissioner at Kangra, and John T^awrence, the Commissioner, in person. More troops came up, and, a few days later, the position was stormed (Sept. 18, 1848), consider- able booty was taken, and Ranf Sing escaped with difficulty to the Sikh army encamped at Russool. Meanwhile though, as I have shown, the rebellion had been spreading throughout the Punjab, it had been met by no corre- sponding effort on the part of the highest authorities. Novem- ber the 1 st had been fixed six months beforehand as the day on which our campaign was to begin, and the rapid spread of the rebellion was no reason, in the opinion of the Commander-in- Chief, for changing his plan ! The revolt of Shere and Chuttur Sing at opposite ends of the province, the consequent raising of the siege of Mooltan, the unopposed march northward of Shere Sing, and the imminent danger of Lahore, which, had he known its weakness, he might have taken then and there, had produced their natural effect. All the Sirdars but two joined the insurgents, and the whole of the open country was in their hands. A few extracts from a letter of John Lawrence to Brigadier Wheeler at Jullundur, dated September 25, will give some idea of the dangers against which, in view of this general rising, he had to guard, and of the scanty means at his disposal for doing so. I have just received your letter of the 19th. Whatever is finally de- termined on, you may depend on my working with you cordially and willingly, and if I appear to be stepping beyond the immediate bounds of my own line in explaining my views, you must forgive me. Your ob- 1 848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 237 jcctions to my proposition regarding Kangra and Nurpore are founded on the paucity of troops at your disposal. This may be an insurmount- able obstacle to my wishes ; but I will shortly state what arrangements might be made to admit of those I proposed, leaving you to determine what value is to be placed on my opinion. As regards Kangra, if but one wing of a corps can be spared, I would prefer it being placed in that fort, as it would thus give me the whole of the hill corps to knock about in the event of an imeute. The men are better suited to such work, and can be more easily moved than Regulars. As it is now, the utmost force I can detach are two companies — say one hundred and fifty men ; the rest are in forts, the mass being required at Kangra. A small force, moved on the instant, confounds insurgents and disperses them before they can gather strength. If not attacked at once they daily increase in force, both from friends and enemies, for they plunder and destroy villages and force the people to follow them. Such was the case with Ram Sing. He murdered the headman of one village and seized those of others. Two days before we attacked him he was joined by one hundred and fifteen men of these places. I do not distrust the hill corps. I think they will be true to us, though people say otherwise at Lahore. But the fact of that corps being disposable to march on any point with their whole force, and the moral advantages alone of regular troops being at Kangra, may make the difference of a general disturbance in the hills or not. . . These hills are full of disbanded soldiers, not inimical to us, but wanting service and bread ; and more danger is to be apprehended here than in the plains of the Jullundur Doab. . . . In the Jullundur Doab there are few disbanded soldiers, an open champaign country, and no forts. Two infantry corps, or a couple of irregular cavalry corps and a battery, would, I think, render all safe. In the hills we have an area of three thousand square miles, full of soldiery, with but three companies at Nurpore, and the Sikh local corps locked up at Kangra. If it is thought necessary to put a corps in Govindgurh, surely it is incumbent to take care of Kangra ; and this I can’t do if I detach any large body of men from it. Only consider the moral effects of any general disturbance in the hills, the roads rendered unsafe, the towns plundered, and the revenues unpaid ! Whether the request of John Lawrence for reinforcements, thus made, was ultimately successful or not I have failed to discover. But in any case he acted as if it were, for during the next two or three months he was here, there, and everywhere, with his flying hill-corps, putting down insurrection wherever it showed its head, and as soon as it had shown it, and at the expense of very little blood or money. It was also with his full approval and advice that Wheeler, who was reluctant to spare any of his troops from Jullundur for the hill country, crossed with a portion of them out of his own district into LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 238 1848 the Bari Doab, to put down disaffection and seize some forts there. * In November news came that the frontier fort of Pathancote, which was garrisoned by only fifty Sikhs from Kangra and a few police, was being besieged by a thousand insurgents, who had been collected in the Bari Doab and Kashmere. The danger was urgent, for the fort was large and the garrison small. It had ammunition and supplies for five days only, and the garrison, composed as it was of Sikhs, might be disposed to hand over the fort at once to the enemy. By a night march Barnes relieved the garrison and made the besiegers withdraw to Denanuggur, on the Sikh frontier ; and by another night march, John Lawrence, — like Joshua, when summoned by the Gibeonites, under circumstances of similar urgency, — march- ing ‘all night,’ crossed the Beas into the Punjab and attempted to surprise the rebels while they were still asleep. He arrived an hour too late, but followed them up with vigour and dis- persed them. ‘The Sikh troops,’ he says in his report, ‘ though they knew that they were going against Sikhs, evinced the greatest spirit and alacrity.’ It will be remembered that, unlike the inhabitants of the plains, who had not only acquiesced in but welcomed our rule, the hill chiefs were naturally more or less discontented with the loss of their ancient privileges ; and the flame which had been smouldering now burst out simultaneously in different direc- tions. At the other extremity of the hill country, the Kutocli chief raised the standard of revolt, seized his ancestral palace at Teera and some adjoining forts, and fired a royal salute an- nouncing the disappearance of the British Raj. At the same time the Raja of Jeswun, lower down in the hills, and the Raja of Duttarpore, and the Bedi of Oonah, from the plain country, rose up against us. Dividing his force into two parts, Law- rence sent Barnes at the head of one of them against the Kutoch chieftain, while he himself, with five hundred of the Sikh corps and four guns, moved down the Jeswun valley against the other insurgents. The success of both expeditions was complete. Barnes captured his opponent and the forts belonging to him. Lawrence did the same. Subdividing again the small force into two columns, with one of them he captured a hill above Umb, held by the enemy ; with the other he destroyed the fort. Both Rajas fell into his hands. The Bedi of Oonah might have proved a much more trouble- 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 239 some foe. He held large possessions both in the plains and in the hills, and was a man of considerable ambition and arrogance. He was, moreover, as I have shown, the high-priest of the Sikhs, being descended from Nanuk, the great Guru. This position he had won from his brother, whom he had slain in battle. Such a man could not fail to be hostile to us, and his opposition was intensified by the fact that we had set our faces against the prac- tice, so dear to the Bedi, of female infanticide. Many of his people, however, refused to fight for him, and on the advance of John Lawrence with a body of Sikhs who seemed as ready to go against him as against the Rajas of the hills, he abandoned his stronghold and took refuge in the camp of Shere Sing. 1 may add that he shared in the privations and disasters of the subsequent campaign, surrendered to us at its close, and spent the rest of his life as a British pensioner at Umritsur. The retreat of the Bedi into Sikh territory ended John Law- rence’s campaign — a campaign of thirteen days only, but as complete, on a small scale, as any which was ever fought. A bloodless campaign is apt to escape the notice of an historian, for the very reasons which — if prevention is better than cure, and if to save life and money is better than to throw them away — ought to attract particular attention to it. From this time forward not a gun was fired in the Jullundur Doab, not even when the echoes of the disastrous battle of Chillianwallah might well have roused it to one more effort ; and that this was so, was due chiefly to the skill, the energy, the intrepidity, the presence of mind of the Commissioner. With a mere handful of troops at his disposal, upon whose fidelity, till he had tested it in ac- tual warfare, he could not safely count, he had taken measures to quell risings in the most opposite parts of his province, had organised his own commissariat, had kept the military authori- ties up to the mark, had carried on the civil government of the country, had led Sikhs against Sikhs, religious enthusiasts against their own high-priest ! In November of that memora- ble year the scales seemed evenly balanced in the Punjab, or even to incline, as the result of the first three general engage- ments, in favour of the Sikhs. How much more desperate would the struggle have been had the Jullundur Doab burst into a flame and threatened the flank and rear of our hard- pressed army ! Golab Sing, left to himself, and surrounded by the rebels, would assuredly have joined them, and, probably, at least one more Chillianwallah would have preceded Gujerat. 240 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 Such brilliant services could not fail to be noticed by the re- markable and masterful spirit who had succeeded Lord Hard- inge as Governor-General, who was just throwing off the slight symptoms of hesitation which, on first landing, had made him defer to the judgment of others, and who was henceforth bent on showing everybody, perhaps only too bluntly, that he could afford to stand alone. ‘ It was,’ writes Lord Dalhousie to Henry Lawrence from Ferozepore, ‘ in order that no proclamation should be issued without being previously sanctioned by me, and in order to ensure unity of action by the Government and its officers, and to avoid differences of opinion, that I advanced to the verge of the frontier ; and it is for this that I remain here now.’ The bunglings, the delays, and the disasters which had marked the opening of the campaign had not, it will readily v be believed, taken place without causing many high words and much mutual recrimination between the fine old Commander- in-Chief and the young and self-reliant Governor-General. And a few extracts from the confidential letters of Lord Dal- housie to Henry Lawrence, which have been kindly entrusted to me by Henry Lawrence’s surviving son, will help to fill a large gap which I find in Lord Lawrence’s letters from October, 1848, to September, 1849, and will also serve to bring vividly be- fore us one side (and I think the least lovable side) of the man who was henceforward to exercise so powerful an influence over the destinies of the Lawrence brothers. They will help to explain so much that is pleasant and so much that is painful in their subsequent relations to him that I have no scruple in in- serting them here. A special interest, it will be remembered, attaches to the correspondence of Lord Dalhousie, from the fact that the bulk of it — all, that is, over which his executors have an exclusive control --is sealed up for fifty years after his death. Conscious of the integrity of his motives, he has thus appealed from the hasty praise or condemnation of contem- poraries, to the deliberate judgment of posterity ; and any con- clusions, therefore, which we may draw from a portion of his correspondence, even though it be so extensive and so impor- tant a correspondence as that with the brothers Lawrence, must be held with some reserve. Henry Lawrence had gone, as I have related, to England on a year’s leave, which was to be extended, if necessary for his health, to two. But the news of the outbreak at Mooltan de- 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 241 termined him to return as soon as possible to his post. He left England in November, reached Bombay in December, hurried up to Mooltan, took part in the operations of the final siege, left it on January 9, brought the first news of the capture of the town — though not of the fort — to Lord Dalhousic, went on to the camp of the Commander-in-Chief, and was present on the 13th at the disastrous battle of Chillianwallah. His beneficent influence had made itself felt even before he arrived. 1 he Sikhs had not been slow to remark that the outbreak had fol- lowed so soon after his departure, and they hoped that his re- turn might be the signal for a pacification. This general belief in the Ikbal (prestige) of Henry Lawrence was in itself enough to arouse the spirit of Lord Dalhousie, to make him put his foot down, and show his subordinate that, Ikbal or no Ikbal , it was Lord Dalhousie, and not Henry Lawrence, who would have the last word on each question as it came up. Nor can it be said that he was wrong in this. There had been rumours afloat that Moolraj intended to surrender to Sir Henry Lawrence as soon as he arrived, in the hope of getting more favourable terms from him than could be got from any one else. But a letter written on December 12 from Sirhind, by the Governor-General, and intended to meet Sir Henry Lawrence on his arrival, was calculated to remove all misconception on this point. I have to inform you that I will grant no terms whatever to Moolraj, nor listen to any proposal but unconditional surrender. If he is cap- tured he shall have what he does not deserve — a fair trial ; and if on that trial he shall prove the traitor he is, for months in arms against the British Government, or accessory to the murder of British officers, then, as sure as I live, he shall die. But you have one answer alone to give him now — unconditional surrender. I have told you what will follow it. An earlier letter, written on November 13 from Allahabad, before the campaign had well begun, shows that Lord Dal- housie had, even then, made up his mind as to the necessity of annexation ; and there will be few who have followed the his- tory thus far who will not agree with him on this point rather than with Henry Lawrence. Our ulterior policy (he says) need not be promulgated till Mooltan has been taken and the Sikh rising has been met and crushed ; but I con- fess I see no halting-place midway any longer. There was no more sincere friend of Lord Hardinge’s policy, to establish a strong Hindu government between the Sutlej and the Khyber, than I. I have done all Vol. I.— 16 242 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 that man could do to support such a government, and to sustain that policy. I no longer believe it feasible to do so, and I must act accord- ing to the best of my judgment in what is before us. On January 18, five days after Chillianwallah, Henry Law- rence looked in upon his old quarters at Lahore, of which he was again to take charge as Resident on the 1st of the follow- ing month, and there, as the result of the ‘ victory ’ of Chillian- wallah, he found the Brigadier in command talking of building up the gates and breaking down the bridges, to delay the on- ward march of the ‘ conquered ’ Sikhs ! You say you are grieved (says Lord Dalhousie to him) at all you saw and heard at Lahore ; so am I — so I have long been ; but I don’t know whether our griefs are on the same tack. In other letters from Ferozepore he writes : — Never mind what other people say about your having authority over the Sutlej Provinces, or whether they like it or not. I think it expedient you should have it for the public good, and that’s enough for anybody. Rub Colonel ’s nose in the dirt if it’s necessary. General is beyond all human patience and endurance. Pray coax or frighten Briga- dier away. The letter in which Lord Dalhousie, who had so lately ar- rived in India and had never even seen the Punjab, severely re- primanded John Lawrence — not for a proclamation which he had issued on his own authority, but for the draft of one which he, with the full consent of the Governor-General, had pre- pared and then humbly submitted again to him for his approval, simply because he had inserted in it some slight expression of his personal feelings for a brave foe — has already been pub- lished in great part by Herman Merivale in his life of Sir Henry Lawrence.1 It need not, therefore, be quoted again here. The reception of such a letter would have been gall and wormwood to a man of afar less sensitive and generous nature than Henry Lawrence, and it is painful to those who knew what he had done and what he was, to read it even now. Such is the lot, the unenviable, but, perhaps, inevitable, lot of some of the best of our Indian public servants. And it is a drawback to their condition which the changing circumstances of the Government of India, the rapidity of communication bc- 1 Vol. ii. p. 123. 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 243 tween it and England, the increasing connection of European with Indian politics, and the party spirit thus imported into regions which should be looked upon as beyond its reach, seems likely, in the future, to increase rather than to diminish. A new Viceroy, as has very recently been the case, comes out, bent, wisely or unwisely, on reversing the policy of his prede- cessor, or, it may be, of all the wisest of his predecessors. In order to do so, he has to manipulate or get rid of the subordin- ate agents of that policy, and it will depend, to a great extent, upon his tact, his sympathy, and his large-heartedness, whether he eases their fall or intensifies its bitterness. It will some- times happen that the more an agent has been trusted by one Governor-General, the less he will be trusted by his successor ; the more he knows of the merits of a particular question, the less his opinion will be asked upon it. It is, perhaps, only human nature that it should be so. The Athenian rustic was not the only person in the world who would have been glad to banish Aristides, because he was tired of hearing him called the Just. The consideration, therefore, with which an Indian officer is treated by a new Governor-General is, sometimes, likely to be in inverse proportion to his merits. And still more is this the case when the new Viceroy comes out not merely charged to initiate a new policy, but with every step in that policy marked out beforehand. For while he himself — except in those rare cases where he has risen from the ranks of the Civil Service — necessarily knows little of India from personal experience, he is instructed by those at home who, ex hypothesi, know even less. His first step, therefore, is to elbow out of his way, in one method or another, those who know the facts which tell against him, and who have given as many years to the study of the problem which has to be solved as he has hours. ‘ Local experience,’ a recent Viceroy exclaimed, when the results of that experience were brought before him by one who knew the Afghan frontier as he knew his own home — ‘ I’ll have none of it ! ’ and that, too, under circumstances when it was all-important that he should avail himself of it to the very full. He did have none of it, and with consequences which India and England alike will feel, to their cost, for many years to come. Not that Lord Dalhousie is to be coupled for a moment with Lord Lytton, or that Henry Lawrence’s case was, in any de- gree, parallel to that of those lifelong ‘ Wardens of the Marches ’ 244 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 who received lately but ‘ a bow and a good-morning ’ from the Viceroy who ought to have picked their brains and done his best, if he could not follow their advice, at least to assimilate it and to utilise their services. Lord Dalhousie, whatever his faults, had a single eye to the public good, and a determination to learn all that was to be said upon a subject before he made up his mind upon it. He gave his confidence freely to any subordinate whom he recognised as worth it, provided only that that subordinate, after he had delivered his protest, would loyally do his bidding ; and when a man was a good man, Lord Dalhousie’s worst enemies will admit that he never failed to recognise him as such. ‘You give,’ he says to Henry Lawrence on February 13, ‘and will, I hope, continue to give, me your views frankly. If we differ, I shall say so ; but my saying so ’ — and here he undoubtedly hits a blemish in Henry’s mental con- stitution— ‘ ought not to be interpreted to mean want of con- fidence.’ And even earlier, on February 3, ‘ I assured you lately,’ he says, ‘with entire sincerity, that I have full confi- dence in your ability, your vigour, and your experience. My confidence in your possession of these qualities will always en- sure that any view you submit shall receive from me the most respectful and mature consideration.’ With this explanation of wdiat I believe to have been the atti- tude of Lord Dalhousie towTards his subordinates, I may proceed to give a few of the more striking passages from his letters illustrating his force of expression, his self-reliance, his deter- mination to have his own way, and his indignation — possibly, sometimes, the shortsighted indignation of a civilian who could not see all the difficulties which were visible to the military' eye — at the blunders and shortcomings of the military authorities, especially of the brave old Commander-in-Chief. One question which had already called down the Olyunpian thunders on the devoted head of Henry Lawrence was the question which was looming in the distance, of the treatment of the conquered — if, indeed, they ever should be conquered — Sirdars. Henry Lawrence, who knew them and was known by them so well, was, with his usual generosity', in favour of giv- ing them the easiest terms compatible with safety. But Lord Dalhousie would hear of nothing of the kind. ‘Their lives and subsistence’ was all that he would promise to these proud and powerful nobles, even if they submitted at once. And when at last they fell into his hands lie was as good as his word. The 1 84S THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 245 more formidable of their number lie proposed to banish. ‘Chut- tur Sing and Slrere Sing cannot be allowed to live at home and weave treachery at leisure.’ Their chivalrous treatment of the captive George Lawrence and of the English ladies, about whose release Lord Dalhousie, throughout his correspondence, shows the tenderest interest, seemed to him to be no reason at all for dealing chivalrously with them. ‘As for promising easier terms because they have treated the prisoners well, I hold a different view. I hold that Chuttur Sing and his sons, in seizing their best friends and making them prisoners, have shown themselves unmitigated ruffians ; and that they have not ill-treated them into the bargain, rescues them from irrecoverable infamy and nothing more.’ In vain did Henry Lawrence plead day after day with touching earnestness for the less guilty Sirdars. Nothing (replied Lord Dalhousie) is granted to them but maintenance. The amount of that is open to discussion, but their property of every kind will be confiscated to the State. ... In the interim, let them be placed somewhere under surveillance ; but attach their property till their destination is decided. If they run away our contract is void. If they are caught I will imprison them. And if they raise tumult again, I will hang them, as sure as they now live, and I live then. Everything in camp (he says on February 1 1), as far as the Commander- in-Chief is concerned, grows worse and worse. ... I expected no good tidings, and the best news which I now hope for is, that his Excel- lency has not had his ‘ blood put up,’ but has waited the few days which will give him reinforcements, that will enable him to make sure work of the next action. I have written to him to-day on his future proceedings in terms which I am aware will be very distasteful to him, but which it is both necessary that I should employ as a caution to him, and prudent that I should address to him in relief of my own responsibility. On the following day, referring to a request of Henry Law- rence that he might go to the camp and throw his influence into the scale on the side of vigour as well as prudence, he writes thus : — It is already too notorious that neither you nor anybody else can exer- cise any wholesome influence on the mind of the Commander-in-Chief ; if you could have done so the action of Chillianwallah would never have been fought as it was fought. . . . All that we can do will hardly restore the prestige of our power in India, and of our military superior- ity, partly from the evidence of facts, and partly from the unwise and unpatriotic and contemptible croaking in public of the European com- 246 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 munity all over India, high and low. . . . Moreover, I have my orders. I am ordered in the first instance to conquer the country. Please God, I will obey. Lord Gough, it should be remarked here, had been waiting, by Lord Dalhousie’s own directions, for the reinforcements with which General Whish was at that moment hurrying up from Mooltan, before he should risk another battle. And it was during this inaction that news arrived that the enemy, who had so long been encamped opposite us at Russool, had suddenly left their encampment and had gone off, Heaven knew where ; for some of our informants said they were marching eastward for Jhelum, others westward for Gujerat ! Well may you say (writes Lord Dalhousie to Henry Lawrence on Feb- ruary 15) that it is wonderful that the Sikhs are allowed so to play around us. Other and stronger epithets would not be less applicable. I have a letter to-day from the Commander-in-Chief. He is utterly mys- tified. The mystery was soon cleared up, and it was found that Shere Sing had turned Lord Gough’s right, had got into his rear, had established his head-quarters at Gujerat, and had even pushed a portion of his forces across the Chenab, thus threat- ening, or appearing to threaten, an advance on the ill-protected city of Lahore. Lord Gough, meanwhile, who had been com- plaining for a month past of the encumbrance of his heavy baggage, but had declined to move it from his camp, found it impossible to follow up the enemy closely, or even to detach a brigade to guard the crossing of the river. It is sad work (says Lord Dalhousie) to be thus out-generalled day after day. ... I wait, as patiently as I may, the announcement of where the enemy are, or what we are doing. At present I have only the intelligence of the Commandcr-in-Chief, which might be stereotyped, that ‘ the order is countermanded till to-morrow.' A letter written by Lord Dalhousie to Ilcnry Lawrence, on February 20, is so intensely characteristic of the man, shows so vividly his strength of mind, his strength of will, his strength of expression, and at the same time proves so clearly that the submission which he required from his subordinates he equally expected them, in their turn, to require from theirs, that I make no apology for quoting it almost in full. 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 247 The tidings you send, on the whole, are satisfactory, and I pray God we may, for the sake of all, and for the peace of this country, have achieved a ‘ crowning ’ victory before long. I observe what you say re- garding General Campbell (Sir Colin) having told you that there was ‘ no thought of crossing the Jhelum this season.’ Your brother will have ere this reassured you on that point, which he incidentally mentioned to me. What ‘thought’ the camp of the Commander-in-Chief has signi- fies very little. The camp’s business is to find fighting ; I find thought; and such thought as the camp has hitherto found is of such d — d bad quality, that it does not induce me to forego the exercise of my proper func- tions. It is too late to enter to-night into the details of your letter. I will only say now generally, that the camp will cross the Jhelum this season, and, please God, the Indus also ; that the Commander-in-Chief and General Thackwell, or the Departments, will not cross it ; that General Gilbert will command, and I hope the job will be well done. All this I communicated to the Commander-in-Chief some time ago, authorising him, and requiring him, in the event of the opportunity presenting itself, to make the arrangements himself, and expedite matters as much as possible. I am greatly surprised with what you write to me about Major Ed- wardes, or rather, I should say I am greatly vexed, but not surprised at all. [Edwardes, it should be explained here, had disbanded a Pa- than regiment, whose fidelity he had suspected, without any authorisa- tion from Sir Henry Lawrence.] From the tone of your letter I perceive it is not necessary to say that you should pull up Major Edwardes for this at once. But I further wish to repeat what I said before, that there are more than Major Edwardes in the Residency who appear to consider themselves nowadays as Governor-General at least. The sooner you set about disenchanting their minds of this illusion the better for your comfort and their own. I don’t doubt you will find bit and martingale for them speedily. For my part, I will not stand it in quieter times for half-an-hour, and will come down unmistakably upon any one of them who may ‘ try it on,’ from Major Edwardes, C.B., down to the latest enlisted general-ensign-plenipotentiary on the establishment. To- morrow I will write again. Believe me, Yours sincerely, Dalhousie. The admirers of Lord Dalhousie — and it must be admitted that these letters, incisive and racy, and often opportune, as they are, are not calculated to make anyone love him — and the admirers of Lord Gough, who, in spite of his blunders and vacillation, was, in virtue of his gallantry and martial bearing, beloved by his army, will, alike, reflect with pleasure that the Commander- in-Chief, while he was the object of such unsparing sarcasm and 248 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 animadversion, was preparing the way, by a careful exploration of the ground, and by a series of masterly movements, for as crowning a victory as ever smiled upon our arms in India. The battle of Gujerat was fought on February 21. With 20,000 men and a hundred guns, Lord Gough attacked the Sikhs, who were in a position chosen and fortified by themselves and numbered 50,000 men armed with sixty guns. Taught by bitter experience, or influenced, it maybe, by the strong letters of Lord Dalhousie, which I have before me, he changed his tactics and, with the help of the skilled advice of Sir John Cheape of the Engineers and Sir Patrick Grant, his son-in-law, kept himself and his men in check till the artillery, in which our real strength lay, had done its proper work. The Sikhs, even after their guns were silenced, fought like heroes, but they were utterly routed; and Gilbert, ‘the best rider in India,’ in a ride of many days, followed up the wreck of their army till at length it surrendered with its guns, its ammunition, and — more important than all in Lord Dalhousie’s eyes — its English prisoners. Few more striking scenes have ever been witnessed in India than this final submission of the Sikh army, the last remnant of the great Khalsa commonwealth. ‘With noble self-restraint’ — to use the words of Edwin Arnold — ‘ thirty-five chiefs laid down their swords at Gilbert’s feet, while the Sikh soldiers, ad- vancing, one by one, to the file of the English drawn across the road, flung down tulwar, matchlock, and shield upon the grow- ing heap of arms, salaamed to them as to the “ spirit of the steel,” and passed through the open line, no longer soldiers.’ But it must have been a more touching sight still when — as it has been described to me by eye-witnesses — each horseman among them had to part for the last time from the animal which he regarded as part of himself — from the gallant charger which had borne him in safety in many an irresistible charge over many a battle-field. This was too much even for Sikh en- durance. He caressed and patted his faithful companion on every part of his body, and then turned resolutely away. But his resolution failed him. He turned back again and again to give one caress more, and then, as he tore himself away for the very last time, brushed a teardrop from his eye, and exclaimed, in words which give the key to so much of the history of the re- lations of the Sikhs to us, their manly resistance, and their not less manly submission to the inevitable, ‘ Runjeet Sing is dead to-day ! ’ THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 249 1S48 But Gilbert’s task was not yet done. Pursuing his headlong career further still, he drove the Afghan contingent over the In- dus, through Peshawur, and right up to the portals, the happily forbidding portals of the Khyber. The battle of Gujerat thus brought to a close, not the campaign only, but the war. All pre- vious shortcomings were forgotten in the enthusiasm of victory, and the victor of Gujerat was able, with agood grace, to hand over the command to Sir Charles Napier, who had been sent out, in hot haste, to supersede him, and arrived from England early in May. The whole of the Punjab, together with Peshawur and the Trans-Indus provinces, now lay at Lord Dalhousie’s feet, as the prize of victory ; and he was not the man to shrink, either ^n general or special grounds, from appropriating the prize. ‘ I take this opportunity,’ he says in one of his State papers written a year or two later, ‘of recording my strong and deliberate opinion, that in the exercise of a sound and wise policy the British Government is bound not to put aside or neglect such rightful opportunities of acquiring territory or revenue as may from time to time present themselves’ — a sentence of death just or unjust, necessary or unnecessary, expedient or inexpedi- ent, upon how many native states ! But, in the case of the Punjab, there could be no question about the justice, and little about the expediency or necessity, of applying the general rule. Twice the Sikhs had attacked us unprovoked, and, the second time, under circumstances which laid them open to the charge of treachery and ingratitude, as well as deadly hostility. The experiment of sustaining the Khalsa against its own internal weakness had been tried honestly and under the most favourable circumstances by Lord Dalhousie as well as by Lord Hardinge, by John as well as by Henry Lawrence, and it had failed. We had remained in the country, to begin with, against our own wishes, and only at the unanimous and urgent request of the Sirdars ; and no sooner had we acceded to their importunity than they treacherously rose against us in arms, and, once again, by their enthusiasm, their discipline, and their valour, imperil- led the safety of our Indian Empire. Lord Dalhousie had made up his mind at an early point in the struggle as to what must be its ultimate result, and even so chivalrous a supporter of native states and rights as Henry Law- rence had always been, had not done more than meet his views with a half-hearted opposition. If he was disposed to deny the expediency, he was forced to admit the justice of annexation. 250 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1848 John, with clearer views of what the safety of India required, thought it to be expedient as well as just. The two brothers, as I gather from the few papers relating to this time which I have before me, had been living together at Lahore since Janu- ary. And when an interview between the Governor-General and the Resident was deemed necessary to arrange for the im- pending annexation, we can hardly wonder if the Resident, in- stead of going himself, preferred to send his brother John on an errand which must have been so distasteful to him. The mo- mentous interview took place at Ferozepore on March 12, and on the following day, after 4 two long conversations,’ John returned to Lahore, 4 charged to convey to his brother the sub- stance ’ of what they had been discussing, both as to Lord Dal- housie’s intentions and as to the mode of carrying them into execution. It was, I believe, the first time that Lord Dalhousie had set eyes upon the man who was so soon to become the most wfamous of all his lieutenants. But, drawing his conclusions Lcrom the vigour he had shown as Magistrate of Delhi during the irst Sikh war, from the manner in which he had governed the Jullundur Doab in peace and in war, and from his correspond- ence with the Secretary to Government which he had seen and studied, he had already taken the measure of the man, and had begun to rate him at his proper value. 4 What is to be done ? ’ asked Lord Dalhousie, self-reliant and self-sufficing as he was, of the subordinate, whose advice he was hereafter so often to ask, and, even when the answer given did not harmonize with his previous views, he was not seldom to take — 4 what is to be done with the Punjab now?’ and John Lawrence, who knew well that his questioner had made up his mind, at all hazards, ultimately to annex the conquered province, answered with characteristic brevity, 4 Annex it now.’ Difficulty after difficulty was started by the Governor-General, but as Demosthenes, when asked what was the first, the second, and the third requis- ite of an orator, replied in one word, 4 Action ; action ; action,’ so John Lawrence met each difficulty as it was started with what he considered to be the best and the only sufficient method of meeting it, — 4 Annex it now ; annex it now ; annex it now.’ Im- mediate annexation would be easy while the people were still crushed by their defeat ; it would anticipate the difficulties and dangers of the hot weather, which last year had brought into such fatal prominence ; finally, it would at once anticipate and clinch the determination of the Directors at home. 1848 THE SECOND SIKH WAR. 251 On March 29 Lord Dalhousie sent his Secretary, Sir Henry Elliot, to Lahore, charged to declare publicly his determination respecting the Punjab ; and on the following day, in presence of Sir Henry Lawrence, the Resident, and his brother John ; in presence of the faithful remnant of the Sikh Durbar ; in pres- ence also of the young Maharaja, who took his seat, for the last time, on the throne of Runjeet Sing, Elliot read aloud the fate- ful proclamation. The dynasty of Runjeet Sing was to be de- posed ; the young Maharaja was to receive 50,000/. a year and to have the right of residing wherever he liked outside the limits of the Punjab ; and the whole of the territories of the five rivers, together with the Crown property and jewels, above all, the peerless Koh-i-noor, were to belong to the British. The proclamation was received by those present with silence and almost with indifference. It was a step fraught indeed with tre- mendous possibilities for good and evil. It overthrew the fond- est hopes and the most generous aspirations of Henry Lawrence’s life, but it was justified by what had gone before it, and the most resolute opponent of unnecessary annexations will admit that it has been more than justified by its results. CHAPTER XI. THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 1849—1852. The Punjab had been annexed, but how was it to be governed ? It might be placed under a purely military government, like that of Scinde — a system dear to the heart of the conqueror of Scinde, the self-willed and brilliant Sir Charles Napier, who was now on the point of landing in India as Commander-in- Chief, who despised all civilians as such, but reserved a special portion of his hatred as well as scorn, for those ‘ soldier-politi- cals ’ who, by doffing the red coat and donning the black, had shown that they deliberately chose the darkness rather than the light, and yet who — as even he could not deny — had gone far to make India what it was. Or, again, the precedent af- forded by most of our earlier and more settled provinces might be followed ; the Punjab might have a purely civil government, under the control of a trained civilian, whose primary object it would be, not to make it a stepping-stone to further conquests beyond, but to prove to the East India Company that it could be well governed, and yet turn out to be a financial, as well as a military and political acquisition. This was the system which it might have been expected would have been preferred by a Governor-General who had never heard a shot fired till he reached the Sikh frontier, and who, it was then believed, cher- ished almost as great a dislike for military as did Sir Charles Napier for civil rule. Was, then, Sir Charles Napier or Lord Dalhousie to have his way? Neither, and yet both. Both, that is, in part. The scheme on which Lord Dalhousie hit, as the result of his per- sonal knowledge of the men who had the best claim to admin- ister the annexed province, was as novel in the history of our Indian Empire as it was, at first sight, unpromising. The Pun- jab was to be governed, not by any one man, however eminent he might be, either as a soldier, or as a statesman, or as a mix- ture of both, but by a Board, the members of which were to be IS49-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 253 drawn from both branches of the service, and were to work under a system of ‘ divided labour, but of common responsi- bility.’ ‘A Board,’ remarks Sir Charles Napier, when criticising the new arrangement, * rarely has any talent.’ And other and less unfriendly observers, knowing the antagonistic and self-con- tradictory elements which this particular Board contained, remarked that it was self-condemned from its birth ; that it con- tained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. There was truth in these sayings. But it was only a small portion of the truth. A Board is in itself a compromise, and therefore cannot possibly have the unity, the rapidity, the concentration, the in- dividuality, which a single mind — especially if that single mind has within it a spark of the sacred fire of genius — can bring to bear on those whom it governs. Again, it was inevitable that the seething elements implied by the presence of such diverse and yet such masterful spirits as Henry and John Lawrence would one day become explosive. A volcano may be quiescent for many a year, but it is a volcano still. It does not follow, however, because the Board was, at no distant day, doomed to die, that therefore it was stillborn. It did precisely the work which it was expected and meant to do, and which, certainly, no one of its three members would have done so well by himself. In the three years of its existence it accomplished, at whatever cost to the peace of mind of its con- stituent parts, a task, of which no one of them need have been ashamed, even if it had been the result of a lifetime. If the Board succeeded in reducing the most warlike and turbulent people who had ever crossed our path in India to submission, and made them not only submissive but contented ; if it, literally as well as figuratively, beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks ; if, in dealing with the widely different races and classes which the Punjab contained, it abol- ished an old system and introduced a new, with, on the whole, the minimum of inconvenience or injury to the few and the maximum of benefit to the many — and that it did all this, and a good deal more than this, I hope now to show — then it did a noble work ; it was its own best justification, and abund- antly answered alike the expectations of its founder and the highest hopes of the distinguished men of whom it was com- posed. The Board was to consist of three members. At the head of 254 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 it, as of prescriptive right, came the man who had filled the highest post in the country before its annexation, first as Resi- dent, and then, as he might almost be called, Regent — the chiv- alrous and high-spirited, the eager and indefatigable, Henry Lawrence. That he was appointed to the first place in the ad- ministration of the new province is almost as creditable to a man of the autocratic tendencies of Lord Dalhousie as to Henry Lawrence himself. The friend and mentor of Lord Hardinge had already had many a sharp brush with Lord Hardinge’s suc- cessor, and there was an antagonism of nature between the two men which each must have felt that no amount of mutual for- bearance could bridge over. But Lord Dalhousie, as I have shown, was able to respect and to trust those from whom he differed, if he knew that they had the root of the matter in them. And he was certainly not the man to pass over, on the score of mere incompatibility of temperament, the pre-eminent claims which Henry Lawrence’s previous services, his knowl- edge of the Sikhs, and his influence over them gave him. Had Lord Dalhousie been anxious to clear him out of his path and to put somebody else in his place who would be more congenial to himself, who would prove a mere tool in his hands, and would be content to register and carry out his orders, it would have been easy for him to do so without incurring any ob- loquy in the process. For Llenry Lawrence, finding that his scruples against annexation had been finally overruled, volun- tarily placed his resignation in Lord Dalhousie’s hands, and would certainly have carried his purpose out had not Lord Dalhousie urged him to reconsider it, on the unanswerable plea that the objects dearest to his heart could not be thwarted and might be furthered by his remaining at Lahore. The argument was as honourable to Lord Dalhousie, who, knowing the differ- ences between himself and his subordinate, could go out of his way to employ it, as to Henry Lawrence, who, even in the bit- terness of his soul, could recognise its binding force. Next to Henry Lawrence on the Board, in point of influence, if not of seniority, and marked out for it by his family name, and by his services in the Delhi district, in the Jullundur Doab, and at Lahore itself, came Henry Lawrence’s brother John. His knowledge of the Sikh races was only less than that of his brother ; while, in mastery of details, in financial skill, in power of continuous work, and in civil training generally, he was far superior to him. A man who had ruled the Jullundur Doab 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 255 during the last two years in the way in which John Lawrence had ruled it, and with the results which the prolonged and doubtful struggle of the second Sikh war had brought into full relief, was clearly the man to have a potential voice in the rule of the four other Doabs which the fortune of war had now thrown into our hands. But a board must consist of more than two members, and Charles Greville Mansel, the third member invited to serve upon it, was a man of more equable and philosophic temperament than either of the Lawrences. Like John, he was a civilian who had served his apprenticeship in the best school then known in India — that of Mertins Bird and Thomason, in the North-West. He was a man of contemplation rather than of action, and it was perhaps well that he was so ; for the two brothers — with all their high mental gifts — were pre-eminently men of action. Mansel thus served as a foil to them both, in a different sense from that in which they served as a foil to each other. lie was admirably fitted to discover the weak points in any course of action which was proposed, and, with somewhat irritating impartiality, would argue with John in favour of Henry’s views, and with Henry in favour of John’s. He would thus throw the ‘ dry light of the intellect ’ on questions which might otherwise have been seen, owing either to the aristocratic leanings of Henry or the demo- cratic leanings of John, through a too highly coloured medium. If he was not good at carrying out into action any views of his own, it is probable that the views of his colleagues, which they might have been anxious, in the exuberance of their energy, to carry out at once, often passed, owing to his idiosyncrasies, through a sifting process for which they were seldom the worse, and sometimes much the better. The balance between the civil and military elements aimed at by Lord Dalhousie in the construction of the Board itself was scrupulously observed also in the selection of those who were to w'ork under it. Besides George Christian the Secretary', upon whom John Lawrence had long fixed his eye, and Melvill, who was specially appointed by Lord Dalhousie to the post of Assistant-Secretary', there were to be four Commissioners for the four divisions of the new province — Lahore, Jhelum, Mool- tan, and Leia ; while beneath them, again, came some fifty-two Deputy and Assistant-Commissioners who were selected, in as nearly as possible equal numbers, from the civil and military services. ‘You shall have,’ wrote Lord Dalhousie to Henry 256 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 Lawrence, in anticipation of the annexation, on February 26, ‘ the best men in India to help you — your brother John to begin with.’ And he was as good as his word. But, before I go on to describe the work done by the Board in general, and, so far as it is possible to distinguish between man and man, the part in it borne by John Lawrence in particular, it will be well to give some slight notion of the size, the inhabitants, and the leading physical characteristics of the country which tljey were to administer, and which, so long as the world lasts, it may safely be predicted, will be bound up with the name of Lawrence. The five magnificent streams — the Sutlej, the Beas, the Ravi, the Chenab, and the Jhelum — which have given the name of ‘ Punjab ’ to the country which they traverse, all rise amidst the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, all flow in the same general direction, north-east to south-west, and all are ultimately united in the vast bosom of the Indus. Each of the five tracts of country enclosed by these six rivers narrows gradually from north to south, and is known by the name of Doab (the two rivers). TheJullundur Doab, between the Sutlej and the Beas, is the richest and most peaceful of them all. It had been under John Lawrence’s rule for two years past, and its principal fea- tures have been sufficiently described already. The Bari Doab, which comes next, between the Beas and the Ravi, is the most important, and, in its northern part at least, the most populous of the five. It contains the political capital of the whole coun- try, Lahore ; and the commercial and religious capital, Umrit- sur. It is the Manjha, or ‘ middle home ’ of the Sikh nation, which supplied the Sikh religion with its most revered Gurus ; Runjeet’s court with its most powerful Sirdars ; and Run- jeet’s ever-victorious army with its most redoubtable warriors. Next, beyond the Bari Doab, between the Ravi and the Chenab, comes the Rechna Doab ; and beyond it, again, between the Chenab and the Jhelum, the Jetch Doab, containing the most famous battle-fields of the war which was just over, Chillian- wallah and Goojerat. Last comes the Sind Saugar, or ‘ocean of the Indus,’ Doab — so called from the vast tracts of country exposed to the inundation of the river — the largest, the most thinly inhabited, and the most sterile of all. Beyond the Indus, between it and the Suliman range, lies the Peshawur valley and the district of the three Deras, or ‘camp- ing grounds,’ of Afghan chiefs — Dera Ismael, Dera Futteh, and Dera Ghazi Khan, hence called the Derajat. It forms no part 1 849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 257 of the Punjab proper, but on the due arrangements for its de- fence depends, as we shall see hereafter, the security of the province, and so of the whole of our Indian Empire. For the width of a few miles on each side of the six rivers of the Punjab there runs a fertile tract of country, the soil of which is irrigated by their superfluous waters and bears abun- dant crops. But far richer, far more extensive, and far more blest in every way by nature than these narrow strips, is the belt of land which lies beneath the shadow of the Himalayas, and forms the northern portion of the three central Doabs. It has a comparatively temperate climate, a fair rainfall, innumer- able streams and streamlets, the feeders of the great rivers, and it yields, with an outlay of little labour and of less skill, two abundant harvests in the year. If the whole of the Punjab were equal to this, its richest part, it might almost challenge comparison with Bengal. But this is far from being the case. For, between the narrow belts of rich land, which owe their ex- istence to the great rivers, there lie vast arid tracts which are covered, not with the waving crops of corn or cotton, of indigo or tobacco, but with scanty and coarse grass or with jungles of tamarisks and thorns. The soil is often impregnated with soda or salt ; the heat is terrible ; and the jungles are the haunt of wild beasts, or of wilder men, whose livelihood has been gained, from time immemorial, by cattle-lifting frohi the more cultiva- ted districts. The Punjab, therefore, is a country of extremes. One part of it is as populous as Bengal, in another there is hardly a hu- man habitation to be seen ; one part smiles as ‘ the garden of the Lord,’ another is as bare and as barren as the deserts of Scinde or Rajpootana. The hill districts, with their mountain sanataria, from Murree away to Dalhousie, and thence to the Kangra valley, to Dhurmsala, or to Simla, are heavens upon earth, pleasant even in the hot season. The plains, at Lahore, for instance, and at Mooltan, are almost insupportable to Euro- peans from the heat. When the followers of the Arabian pro- phet demurred to fighting beneath the full blaze of an Arabian sun, because it was so hot, the prophet replied that ‘ hell was hotter still,’ and on they went to victory or death. But a Eu- ropean who is unlucky enough to find himself at Mooltan in the hot season, will be disposed rather to agree with the truth expressed in the native proverb: ‘When God had Mooltan ready for His purpose, why did He make hell ? ’ Vol. I.— 17 258 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 The boundaries of the Punjab and of India are clearly marked out by the hand of Nature. On the north, the Himalayas give it an absolute security from Chinese or Tartar, or even Russian scares, while on the west, the range of the Suliman mountains, which runs parallel with the Indus, forms an almost equally impenetrable barrier. It is true, indeed, that the Suliman range is traversed by passes which, under favourable circum- stances, have given an entrance to the invading armies of Alex- ander the Great and Timour the Tartar, of Baber and Nadir Shah. But those conquerors were opposed by no foe worthy of the name. And, happily for us, here, again, range upon range rises behind the main mountain wall, and beyond these, once more, are ‘wilds immeasurably spread,’ which, being inhabited by races as rough, as wild, and as inhospitable as the soil on which they dwell, altogether form an all but impregnable pro- tection to India. No better series of defences, indeed, scientific or natural, could possibly be desired against any foe who comes from beyond Afghanistan ; and no strong foe, it should be re- marked, can ever come from within it. The only range of mountains within the limits of the Punjab is the Salt range, which, crossing the Indus at Kalabagh and stretching westward to Pind Dadun Khan on the Jhelum, di- vides the Sind Saugar Doab into two parts. Commercially it is most important ; for salt is one of the first requisites of life, and the supply it yields is quite unlimited. Salt-springs issue everywhere from its base, and at Kalabagh, in particular, pro- duce a peculiarly picturesque effect, by encrusting with a snowy whiteness the blood-red rocks around. North of the Salt range is the hilly district of Rawul Pindi ; and beyond that, again, the wildly mountainous conntry of Huzara, a country of crags and caves, the abode of mountain robbers who had levied black- mail on the surrounding people from the time of Alexander downwards, and had never yet been conquered by force or fraud, but were to yield now a willing obedience to the father- ly kindness of James Abbott, and his worthy successor, John Becher. The races inhabiting the Punjab are as varied as are its phys- ical features. The Sikhs proper, though they form the flower and the sinew of the population, are, it must always be remem- bered, only a fraction, perhaps a sixth part, of the whole. The aboriginal Goojurs and Gukkurs, together with the Rajpoots and other Hindu races, make up another sixth ; and the re- 259 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. mainder— the inhabitants, that is, of the Sind Saugar Doab, of the district round Mooltan, of Huzara, of Peshawur, and of the Derajat generally — are all, more or less, Mussulman. It must have given no slight satisfaction to the English conquer- ors of the Punjab, to reflect that, if they had swept away the famous empire of the Sikhs they had at least given religious freedom and security from oppression to subject races who were four times as numerous. The Sikhs were the bravest and most chivalrous race in India. They had done their best against us in two great wars, and they now seemed disposed to submit with manly self-restraint to our superior power, if only we used it with equity and toleration. A more serious difficulty was to be found in those wild and warlike tribes which line our whole western frontier, from the north of Huzara right down to Scinde. These tribes had, for ages, carried on an internecine warfare with the more peaceful and settled inhabitants of the plains below, and the heirs to the rich inheritance of Runjeet Sing could hardly complain if they had to take the bad part of the bargain with the good. It needs only a glance at the position of Peshawur — the prize for which Afghan and Sikh have so often contended — with the Khyber frowning in its front, and with mountains enclosing it on three sides, all of them inhabited by tribes who have, from time im- memorial, levied black-mail on all travellers passing through their territory, and have received the presents, the bribes, or the tribute of some of the greatest conquerors the world has seen, while they themselves have seldom paid toll or tax to any one — to see that the rich valley is a veritable apple of discord, for the possession of which those who hold it are likely to have to pay in the shape of large armaments, of chronic anxiety, of occa- sional retributory expeditions, and, once again, unless wisdom holds the helm at Calcutta, of a distant and aggressive war in which victory may be even more disastrous than defeat. And what is true of the Peshawur district is true also, in a less degree, of the whole frontier line beyond the Indus — of the valley of Kohat, for instance, which is only to be approached from Peshawur by two long and dangerous and waterless passes through the Afridi territory ; of the valley of Bunnoo, which is only accessible from Kohat by just such another pair of passes ; and so on along the whole length of the Suliman range, with its robber-haunted defiles, and the champaign of the Derajat lying at its feet as its natural prey. Altogether, it 26o LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 was calculated that these frontier tribes could put into the field against us 100,000 men, all fanatical, all Mohammedans, all well-armed, all excellent marksmen, and all inhabiting a coun- try admirably adapted for their own predatory warfare, but very ill-suited for regular military operations. The arrange- ments for the defence of such a frontier were delicate and diffi- cult enough, but upon their adequacy, as I have said, depended the security of all the rest. Such, then, was the general nature of the country, and such the chief characteristics of the people with whom the newly formed Punjab Board had to deal. It remains to ask how far its task was facilitated or hindered by any existing political or social institutions, in particular by what the masterful govern- ment of Runjeet Sing had done or had left undone. Runjeet was, without doubt, an able and vigourous ruler, but it was vigour and ability as men understand it in the East. A good army and a full exchequer were the two, and the only two, objects of his government. The stalwart frames and the martial and religious enthusiasm of his subjects ensured the one, and the intoxication of victory after victory and of province added to province by the Khalsa commonwealth, made them ready to put up with the abuses which supplied the other. The difficult question as to what articles of consumption are most suitable for taxation and what are not, gave Runjeet Sing no trouble at all, for he laid taxes on all alike. Houses and lands, stored grain and growing crops, exports and imports, manufactures and the natural products of the soil, luxuries and necessities, all contributed their quota to the great cause. Powerful provincial governors like Sawun Mull and the local tax-gatherers, or kar- dars, were left free, provided that they remitted good round sums to Lahore, to squeeze their victims, and to feather their own nests pretty much as they liked. No statements of ac- counts were either expected or received from them by the Cen- tral Government. Runjeet’sown account-book, — the most nat- ural one, perhaps, for a man who could neither read nor write, — was a notched stick. The balance-sheet was the last thing in the world with which the paymaster of the forces would have cared to trouble himself. We found when we annexed the country that no balance-sheet had been presented by him for sixteen years. Punishments were few and simple. Thefts or ordinary murders were atoned for by payment of a fine ; crimes involving gross violence were punished by mutilation — the loss 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 261 of the nose, the ears, or the hand ; while the worst criminals of all were hamstrung. It was reserved for Avitabile, an Italian soldier of fortune, and ruler of the Peshawur district, to set the example of more barbarous punishments still. His rule was one of simple terror. He feared not God neither regarded man. He revelled in extortion and in cruelty of every description. Those who opposed his relentless will he blew away from guns or turned out in the sun to die, naked and smeared with honey ; others he impaled or flayed alive, sometimes, it is said, begin- ning the terrible operation with his own hands ! Of prisons there were few, and those few we found to be al- most untenanted. The chief duty of Runjeet’s police was not to prevent or detect crime, but only to put down disorder and facilitate the movements or the army. Roads, in the proper sense of the word, there were none ; public conveyances and bridges none ; written law or special ministers of justice none ; schools, except of the most elementary kind, none ; hospitals and asylums, of course, none. If, therefore, the Board had very much to do they had little to undo. Henry Lawrence, helped by his Assistants, had already, in his position as Resident, at- tacked the worst abuses, and had done something towards pay- ing off the army, towards reforming the taxes and putting a limit to the extortions of the tax-gatherers! And now, as Pres- ident of the Board, with his brother John as his chief coadjutor, he was not likely to stop before he had finished the work to which he had put his hand, and hijd built up, in an astonish- ingly short space of time, that fair and firm political fabric which was to prove our surest support in the hour of need. The first and one of the most difficult tasks which lay before the Board was the pacification of the country'. The greater portion, indeed, of those gallant foes who had made us trem- ble for our Empire at Ferozeshah and Chillian wallah had frankly recognised that our star was in the ascendant after the battle of Gujerat, and on March 12, as I have already shown, had thrown down their swords in one vast pile, and had each, with one rupee in his pocket, returned to the plough whence he had originally come. It was now the turn of the few who had remained faithful to us during the struggle. Obedient to our summons they mustered, together with the armed retinues of the old Sikh nobility, at Lahore. The old and invalided among them were pensioned off. The remainder obtained their long arrears of pay, and permission was given them, of which they 262 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 were eventually to avail themselves largely, to re-enter our ser- vice. We had thus disbanded the Sikh army. It remained to dis- arm the population and so to deprive them of the temptation to violent crime and disorder which the possession of arms always gives. The wearing of arms, as the history of Eastern Europe still shows, is a privilege as dearly prized by a semi- civilised as by a barbarous people, and is often necessary for the safety of the wearer. But peace, profound peace, was henceforward, as we hoped, to reign in the Punjab. Accord- ingly, about six weeks after annexation, a proclamation order- ing a general disarmament was everywhere placarded, and, strange to say, was everywhere obeyed. One hundred and twenty thousand weapons of every size and every species, some of them much more dangerous to the wearer than to his foe, and ranging from the cannon or the rifle of the nineteenth cen- tury, a.d., down to the quoit or the bows and arrows of the time of Porus and Alexander in the third century, b.c., were voluntarily surrendered. The mountaineers of Huzara and of the Trans-Indus frontier were the only exceptions to the rule. They were allowed, and were not only allowed but enjoined, to retain their arms.; for to have disarmed them at this early period would have been to lay them a defenceless prey at the feet of their neighbours across the border. The duty of protecting the country which had been thus de- prived of the natural guardians — or disturbers — of its peace fell, as a matter of course, on the conquerors. To guard the dan- gerous frontier line it was arranged that ten regiments — five of cavalry and five of infantry — should be raised from the country itself ; and people of various races — Hindustanis, Punjabis, and Mussulmans — responded cheerfully to the call. The Sikhs, it had been feared, might flock in dangerously large numbers to our standards. But it was they alone who hung back ; and for the moment it seemed as though, contrary to all our principles, we should be obliged to hold the Punjab in check by a force from which the bravest of its inhabitants were excluded. This danger soon passed by. The Sikhs threw off their scruples, and since then they have rendered us valiant service whenever and wherever they have been called upon to do so. They have fought for us, with equal readiness, upon their own frontier and in other parts of India, on the Irrawaddy, and on the Yang- tse-Kiang ; they have borne their part in the victorious march 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 263 on Magdala ; they have dropped down like an apparition on the newly annexed island of Cyprus ; and, more recently still, they have stood side by side with us before the ramparts of Tel- el-Kebir, and have joined us in the beneficent race for Cairo. Within a year of their being raised several of the Punjab ir- regular regiments shed their blood in our service, and hence- forward they were seldom to shed it in any other cause. The Afridis, the Swattis, and other turbulent tribes beyond the fron- tier, learned that their more peaceable neighbours within it had a formidable power behind them which could not be provoked with impunity, and began to put some check on their predatory propensities. Three horse field-batteries, a camel corps sta- tioned at Dera Ismael Khan, and the famous ‘ Guide Corps,’ completed the movable defences of the frontier. But the * Guide Corps ’ was so remarkable a body of men, and they will have to be so often mentioned hereafter, that it will be well to give at once some notion of their leading charac- teristics. The corps owed its origin to a suggestion thrown out by the fertile brain of Henry Lawrence at the close of the first Sikh war. It originally consisted of only two hundred and eighty men, horse and foot. But, in view of the increased duties which were now to be thrown upon it, its numbers were to be trebled. No more uncanny, and yet no more invaluable, body of men was ever got together. Like the Carthaginian army of old, which contained samples of every nation that the ubiquitous fleets of the great republic could reach, the Guide Corps contained, on a small scale, representatives of almost every race and every place, ever)' language and every religion, which was to be found in the North and North-West of India. It contained men of every shade of moral character, and men of no character at all. The most cunning trackers, the most no- torious cattle-lifters, the most daring freebooters, were enrolled in it, were subjected to a wholesome but not an overstrict dis- cipline, were clothed in a brown uniform, so as to be indistin- guishable at a little distance from the ground on which they moved, were privileged to receive a high rate of pay, and within a very short space of time were found to be ready ‘ to go any- where or do anything.’ * Ready, aye ready ! ’ might well have been their motto. Endurance, courage, sagacity, local knowl- edge, presence of mind — these were the qualities which marked a man out for the Guide Corps. On whatever point of the five hundred miles of our western frontier, with its score or 264 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 more of savage tribes, operations had to be carried on, there were always to be found amongst the Guides men who could speak the language of the district in question, men who had threaded before, and therefore could now thread again, its most dangerous defiles, and could tell where the hostile encampment or the robber-haunted cavern lay. Thus the Guides, in a new but not an untrue sense of the word, formed the ‘ Intelligence Department ’ of the Punjab. These were the men for a daring reconnaissance, for a forced march, for a forlorn hope. Raised first by Lieutenant Harry Lumsden, they had already done good service in border fighting and in the second Sikh war. They were soon to serve under Sir Colin Campbell against the Moh- munds, and their like, with unvarying success. Finally, they were to be the first of that splendid succession of reinforce- ments of which the Punjab was to denude itself in the day of peril and send with a God-speed down to Delhi. * I am mak- ing,’ said Henry Daly, their commander, as he started with alacrity on his honourable mission, ‘ and I intend to make, the best march that has been heard of in India.’ And he was as good as his word. In twenty- two days, at the very hottest season of the year, he made a forced march of five hundred and eighty miles from Peshawur to Delhi ; and his men came into camp, as they were described by an eyewitness, ‘ as firm and light of step as if they had marched only a mile.’ What wonder that they were received with ringing cheers by the small besieg- ing force, and were welcomed, not merely for what they were in themselves — a body which represented the loyalty and the energy of nearly every tribe of Upper India — but as an earnest of the reinforcements which the Punjab, wfith John Lawrence at the helm, and with such supporters as Montgomery, Nichol- son, Edwardes, Chamberlain, and a dozen other such at his side, was to pour forth, in quick succession, on the same hazard- ous errand ? The whole frontier force which I have described, was, after long discussion, made directly subject to the Board, and was placed under the command of Brigadier-General Hodgson. One portion, and only one, of the frontier line was deemed by Lord Dalhousie to be of such paramount importance for the protection of the Empire that it was reserved for the regular troops. This was the Peshawur Valley, which, — with the Khy- ber, the direct passage to Afghanistan, and thence into Central Asia, in its front, and with the fords of the Indus, the best pas- 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 2C5 sage to India, directly in its rear, — was to be guarded by a force of about 10,000 men, nearly 3,000 of them Europeans. The Board had already shown by its measures that it was alive to the truth of the Greek saying that ‘ men, and not walls, make a city ; ’ but the number of men at their disposal was too small, the hostile mountains were too near, sometimes not a couple of miles from our boundary, to allow of such a merely Spartan rampart as was possible in other parts of our Indian frontier. Accordingly, they arranged that the most dangerous portion, from Huzara to Dera Ismael Khan, should be defended by forts of considerable size, which were to be rendered capable of standing a siege ; that below these, again, from the Tonk Val- ley down to Scinde, there should be a chain of smaller fortified posts at intervals of twelve miles apart ; and that the whole should be connected together by a good military road, with branches leading, on one side, towards the hostile mountains, and, on the other, towards the friendly river. So skilful and so complete were these defensive arrange- ments, and so admirable was the forbearance and the knowl- edge of the native character ; the resolution, the promptitude, and the dash of the officers who were chosen to carry them out, that, from that time forward, the peace of the Punjab was never seriously threatened from without. The warlike preparations of the Board were thus all made, not with a view to war, but, as all warlike preparations ought to be made, with a view to peace ; not for aggression, but for defence ; not with a view to a ‘ forward ’ or a ‘ backward ’ policy, but with a determination to stand firmly placed where they were against all comers. And I have purposely described these frontier arrangements first, not because they are the most prominent feature of the Pun- jab administration, but because, owing to their complete suc- cess, they are the least so. They were the essential conditions of all the rest, and the less we hear of them after they had once been set going, the more sure we may feel that their object was attained. The ‘Wardens of the Marches,’ chosen by the Lawrences for these posts of danger and difficulty, George Lawrence and Reynell Taylor, Nicholson and Edwardes, Abbott and Becher, Keyes and Pollock, the Lumsdens and the Cham- berlains were all of them picked men and pre-eminently fitted for their work, a work as modest as it was heroic. They only want their historian. Yet these were the men whom, together with others who have faithfully followed in their footsteps, a 266 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 recent Viceroy, bent on initiating an aggressive line of frontier policy, went out of his way in one of his State-papers deliber- ately to insult. No more cruel or more unjustifiable attack has ever been made on several successive generations of able, en- ergetic, and single-minded public servants. But their reputa- tion had survived the attack, and the wisdom of their policy has been triumphantly justified by the melancholy results of the one wilful lapse from it. In any case, so well was their work done — the work of defence not defiance, of civilisation not conquest — during the period most identified with the name and fame of John Lawrence, that his biographer, forgetting the triumphs of war in the more grateful and enduring triumphs of peace, can afford, after he has indicated the general charac- ter of the frontier they had to guard and the general principles on which they did so, to let them almost pass out of sight, re- curring to them only at those rare intervals when exceptional dangers brought them into exceptional prominence, and showed that they were able to cope with the need. The country having been disarmed, and the frontier rendered secure, the next object of the Board was to provide for the de- tection and prevention of crime. To meet these ends, they raised two large bodies of police, the one preventive, with a military organisation, the other detective. The preventive police were 8,000 in nurtiber, horse and foot, many among whom had done good service to the late Durbar, and had remained faith- ful to us in the Sikh war. Their duty was to furnish guards for treasuries, jails, and outposts, to patrol the roads — as soon as there should be any roads to patrol — and to follow up gangs of marauders, should any such appear or reappear in the nearly pacified province. The other body, numbering 7,000 men, and divided amongst some 230 police districts (thannahs), was to be employed in the detection of crime, in the guarding of ferries, and in the collecting of supplies for troops or of boats for the passage of the rivers. With a wise trustfulness in its instruments, the Board left to the native revenue collectors, called tahsildars , large powers in the way of organising and controlling these police, thus utilising the local knowledge which they and they alone possessed. The native village watchmen, who formed an integral part of the old village system and were paid by the villagers themselves, were also carefully maintained by officers who had learned the priceless value of the village communities in the North-West. 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 267 Special precautions were required in those districts which were most infested by criminals. The Peshawur valley, for instance, was a nest of assassins, in which crimes of violence had always been the order of the day. Any hollow of the ground, any gully, above all any tomb of a Mussulman saint, might, not im- probably, harbour some desperate cutthroat. The centres of the Doabs, again, which were covered with jungle, or brush- wood, or tracts of long grass, had been, as I have already men- tioned, from time immemorial a very sanctuary of cattle-lifters and their spoil. In these natural fastnesses whole herds of oxen which had been driven off from the richer lands near the river might graze and wander at pleasure, and yet lie impenetrably concealed from their former owners. Foolish, indeed, would any villager be who dared to penetrate such a Cyclops’ den in order to recover what its wild inhabitants deemed to be theirs by a right at least as sacred as his ! The chance of finding his cattle would be small, and his chance of escaping with them or with his life would be smaller still. It was not the nature of the Punjabi to throw away good money after bad, and so the great central Doabs were pebpled, like the Aventine of old, by hun- dreds of Cacuses who had never, till the time of the British oc- cupation, found any reason to fear a Hercules. How did the Board deal with these districts ? Round the city of Peshawur they drew cordon upon cordon of police posts. They filled in the ravines and hollows and spread a network of roads over the adjoining district. In the Doabs, which had never yet been crossed by anything but a camel track, roads were cut in various directions, mounted patrols of police sent along them, and, more important than all, professional trackers were introduced — men of whose amazing skill John Lawrence had again and again availed himself in the pursuit of criminals at Delhi, at Paniput, and at Gorgaon ; men whose senses had been sharpened by natural or artificial selection to a preter- natural degree of acuteness ; who could discern a footprint, in- visible to the ordinary eye, in the hardest clay ; who could follow a track of harried cattle through the wildest jungle and the roughest grass for, perhaps, some fifty miles, naming before- hand the number of the men and of the animals in the party, till at last they carried the trail triumphantly to some remote encampment, where their uncanny skill was proved to ocular demonstration. But cattle-stealing was by no means the worst crime with 268 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 which the Board had to deal. Dacoity, or robbery in gangs, had been bound up with the whole course of Punjab history. The Sikhs had been cradled in it ; it had grown with their growth ; and, as in many analogous periods of European history, it was the most successful gang robber who, after winning by his trusty sword large quantities of money or of cattle, usually ended by carving out for himself, in much the same manner, broad estates or powerful principalities. The leader of a band of free lances had thus little reason to be ashamed of his occupa- tion. The bluest blood to be found in the Punjab often flowed ^in his veins, and his profession did as much honour to him as he to his profession. Kept within bounds by the strong hands of Runjeet Sing, or rather given ample occupation by his foreign conquests, Dacoity had taken a new lease of life in the anarchy which followed his death ; and when his army was final- ly broken up by us, it was only natural that the bolder spirits who could not, or would not, enter our service should betake themselves to so time-honoured a practice. The districts of Lahore and Umritsur began to swarm with them. But strong precautions and wholesome severity soon checked the evil. Dur- ing the first year thirty-seven Dacoits were condemned to death in Umritsur alone ; in the second year the number fell to seven ; and in a few years more the crime ceased to exist throughout the Punjab. But there was a more insidious crime, the existence of which seems at first to have been quite unsuspected in the Punjab. The prevalence of Thuggee in other parts of India had only been discovered a few years previously. But the weird practices connected with it, the religious initiation, the patient plotting, the cool cruelty, the consummate skill, and the professional en- thusiasm of the actors, had already given to it a world-wide cel- ebrity. Colonel Sleeman had tracked its mysteries through all their windings, and Colonel Meadows Taylor has, since then, laid them bare to the world in a well-known story, which does not overstate the facts of the case.- The discovery of corpses by the side of wells or in the jungles after the Dacoits had pretty well been exterminated, first aroused a suspicion that other confraternities of death might be found within our limits. Dead men tell no tales, and the Thugs of Hindustan had been much too skilful ever to leave their work half done. No half-throttled traveller had ever escaped from their hands to tell the tale of the fellow-travellers who had joined 849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 2C9 him on his road, had wormed themselves into his confidence, had questioned him of his welfare, and then, as he sat at food with them by the wayside, had, with one twist of the fatal handker- chief, given, or rather all but given, him a short shrift. But the Punjab Thug was a mere bungler in his business. The fine art had only recently been imported into his country from Hin- dustan, and its first professor had been discovered and straight- way hung up by Runjeet Sing. 1 1 is successors often made up for their want of skill in the use of the handkerchief by hacking their victim to pieces with their swords, and then, instead of pitch- ing his body, still warm, into the grave which they had opened while he was talking to them, they often carelessly left it to rot by the wayside. At last a Brahmin, who had been two-thirds strangled and left for dead, recovered and told his tale. The clue was followed up. Rewards were offered for the detection of Thugs, a free pardon was promised to those who might turn Queen’s evidence, and a special officer was appointed for the in- vestigation. A list of recent victims, two hundred and sixty-four in number, was soon given in by approvers. A second list of professional Thugs, given in by the same authorities, was pub- lished and posted everywhere. Many of these were apprehended, and their confessions taken. Others disappeared altogether. The approver would often conduct the British officer for miles through the jungle without any apparent clue which could guide him in his search or refresh his memory. ‘ Dig here,’ ‘ Dig there,’ he would say, as he came to a sudden stop in his tortuous course ; and the turning up of a few spadesful of soil revealed the corpse or the skeleton of one of his victims. Along one bit of by-path fifty-three graves were thus opened and were all found to be tenanted. One Thug was questioned as to the number of his victims. His professional pride was touched, and with true enthusiasm he replied, ‘ How can I tell ? Do you remember, Sahib, every animal you have killed in the chase ? Thuggee is our sport, our shikar ! ’ 1 The Thugs of the Punjab were found to belong chiefly to the Muzbi or sweeper caste. They were as superstitious as they were bungling and cruel. A cry of a bird or beast of ill-omen could turn from its purpose a heart which no pang of pity or of remorse could ever reach. A thousand of these Muzbis paid within a few years the penalty of their misdeeds. They had 1 Arnold's Dalhousie, vol. i. p. 259. 270 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 been treated by the Sikhs as outcasts, and it is little wonder if they soon became so. It was the noble object of the Punjab Board, if they could not overcome the sentiment which lay at the bottom of the caste feeling, at least to make the existence of those miserable creatures more tolerable, and by a strict sys- tem of supervision and of employment to turn them into decent members of society. They were employed for several years to come on those two great material triumphs of the Punjab Ad- ministration, to be described hereafter — the Bari Doab Canal and the Grand Trunk Road. And in the Mutiny, when a cry was raised at Delhi for sappers and miners, it was these self- same outcasts who were selected by John Lawrence for the purpose, and who did admirable service to our cause both at Delhi and at Lucknow. To have reclaimed these men, and to have put down for ever, in a marvellously short space of time, two such evils as Dacoity and Thuggee, is no slight credit to the Punjab Board, and no slight gain to the cause of humanity. A cognate subject, and one which would naturally come next to the suppression of Dacoity and Thuggee, is that of female infanticide. But of this I have already said something, and its suppression in the four Doabs belongs rather to the Chief-Com- missionership of John Lawrence, who had been the first to strike a blow at it in the Jullundur Doab, than to the period of the Board. In dealing with the subject of crime, the Lawrence brothers did not lose sight of the secondary object of punishment — the reformation of the criminal. • Runjeet’s simple alternative of fine or mutilation had certainly never been open to the charge of overstocking his prisons. His system had placed not more than two hundred criminals in durance. Ours was to place ten thousand. But these, instead of being mutilated, or chained to a post in the streets, or placed at the bottom of a dry well, were subjected to a system of strict discipline indeed, and hard work, but were decently clothed, fed, and housed, and were taught the rudiments of education, and of a trade. New jails, twenty- five in number, of different sizes and models, were erected in the different districts of the Punjab Board. The great central jail at Lahore was built on the newest model with a view to economy and health, as well as the supervision, the classifica- tion, and the moral improvement of the prisoners. Thus John Lawrence was able, with the energetic help of Dr. Charles Hathaway, who was now appointed Inspector of Prisons, to I 849-S 2 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 271 carry out the improvements in the system which he had long since indicated as desirable. As regards legislation, the customs of the natives were, as far as possible, taken as the basis of the law. The Board knew well, as one of the sages of antiquity has remarked, that ‘good customs are of even greater importance than good laws,’ in fact, that the one are only efficacious in so far as they are the outcome and the representative of the other. Accordingly, a code of native customs was drawn up. Those which were ab- solutely bad and seemed to be incapable of improvement were forbidden. Those which related to marriage and divorce, and tended, as they do in most Eastern countries, to the degrada- tion of the female sex, were first modified and then accepted. Those which related to such subjects as inheritance and adop- tion were incorporated at once. The tahsildars, whose local knowledge marked them out as the best judges of local matters of small importance, were confirmed in their judicial as they had already been in their police authority. Each village, or group of adjoining villages, thus retained a court of its own, sanctioned by immemorial custom, and though the right of ap- peal to the Deputy-Commissioner was reserved, yet a large portion of all matters in dispute could always be settled within its precincts. It should be added, that the English officers of all grades were bound by the spirit rather than by the letter of the regulations, and all acted on the principle so dearly cher- ished in the East, that, if it is not possible to eliminate all mis- takes in the administration of justice, it is at least possible to avoid undue delays. But none of these reforms could be accomplished without a proper settlement of the revenue, and in particular of that item on which it mainly depends — the land-tax. The land-tax is that varying share of the produce of the soil which is claimed by Government as its own. Under native governments it is generally paid in kind, and is levied, harvest by harvest, by ill- paid officials, who are apt to take too little from the cultivator if he bribes them sufficiently, too much if he does not. And in either case a large part of the amount, instead of finding its way into the coffers of the State, stops short in the pocket of the tax-gatherers. Under the system introduced by the Eng- lish, a low average of the produce of a district was taken on the returns of several years together, and then the money value of the Government share was taken at another low average of 2J2 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 current prices. All parties gained by this arrangement, but most of all the cultivator himself. The saving was great in every way ; for the estimate was taken once in ten, twenty, or thirty jears, instead of twice or three times in one year, while extortion and other abuses were rendered almost impossible. If the English Government had conferred no other benefit on India than this, it would have done much to justify its exist- ence. Now what was the financial condition of the Punjab when it passed from Runjeet’s representative to the Board ? So great an advance had already been made by the Lawrences in the time of the Residency from the rough-and-ready methods of Runjeet Sing, that the Board had rather to develop what had been begun than to start afresh. In the Trans-Sutlej division — not to speak again of the summary settlement so well carried out there by John Lawrence — a careful survey of the land and a settlement of its revenue for thirty years had been set on foot and was already far advanced towards completion. In large portions of the Punjab proper summary settlements had also been made, and all that was required was that these should be modified where mistakes had been discovered, and that the re- maining portions should be dealt with in like manner. These settlements, dealing as they did with a country which was as yet so imperfectly known, were to last for periods of not less than three, or of more than ten, years. The varieties of land tenure were numerous and complicated, but they were time-honoured ; and it was the honourable mis- sion of the Board in no case to destroy, but only to revivify and to preserve. The land-tax had in Runjeet’s time amounted to half the gross produce, and had, generally, been paid in kind. This payment in kind — not without strong protests on the part of the tax-payers — was abolished by us, and its amount reduced to a half or to a quarter of what it had been before. Nor did the State suffer much by the remission, for the reve- nues of Mooltan, which had become an integral part of the Pun- jab, and of other outlying parts, were flowing freely into our Treasury, and our receipts were further swollen by the aboli- tion of the illicit profits of the tax-collectors, and by the confis- cation of the property of rebellious jagheerdars. I have already alluded in my account of the Jullundur Doab to this difficult question of the treatment of jagheers and of other alienations of the State revenues. It was the question on 1 849—52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 273 which the Lawrence brothers differed most, and, as it was to have an important bearing on the future of each, I reserve its further consideration for the next chapter, which, from the na- ture of the case, will be as distinctly biographical as this is, in the main, historical. The financial policy of the Board was liberal throughout. The forty-seven articles taxed by the lynx-eyed Runjeet had already been cut down to twenty by Henry Lawrence ; but to secure the Dayment even of this diminished number of duties, it had been found necessary to retain Runjeet’s cordon of pre- ventive lines all round the frontier. Transit duties and tolls had been levied by Runjeet at every possible point within the Punjab. A piece of merchandise crossing the country had to pay duty some twelve times over! On January x, 1850 — only ten months, that is, after annexation — all town and transit dues, all export and import duties, were swept away. The preven- tive frontier line was abolished and trade was left free to flow in its natural channels. To balance these reductions, an ex- cise, desirable in every point of view, was levied on spirits ; stamp duties were introduced ; toll at the chief ferries over the large rivers were authorised ; and a tax — necessary un- der the circumstances, but not theoretically free from objec- tion, since it was laid on a necessity of life — was imposed on salt. The vast stores of this mineral to be found in the Salt range were henceforward to be managed by Government itself; and to render the revenue accruing from it secure, the impor- tation of salt from all neighbouring districts was prohibited. It was the one blot on an otherwise excellent fiscal system. But the natives did not object to it, and found it no burden. If the prosperity of the country did not seem to increase with a bound as the result of all these arrangements, it was not the fault of the Government but of circumstances which were beyond its control. There were three rich harvests after annex- ation. The soldiers of the Khalsa betook themselves to the plough or to the spade ; and agriculture, encouraged by the lowered land-tax, and by the peace and security of the country, spread over tracts which had never before been broken up. There was thus a glut of agricultural produce in the markets, while there was as yet no ready means of disposing of it. The cultivators found difficulty in paying even the reduced land- tax. A cry arose for further remissions, and under a Govern- ment which was generous, but not lavish, it was a cry that was Vol. I. — 18 274 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 not raised in vain. Thus, the discontent which was the acci dental result of the improved condition of the country tended to make the inhabitants more prosperous still. Happy the country and happy the people that were in such a case ! I have spoken of the jails erected by the Board throughout the Punjab, and of the line of forts along its western frontier ; but there were other public buildings and other public works, which, if they were less urgently required at the outset of our rule, were not less essential for its permanence and its success. What we vaguely call 1 the development of the resources of the country ’ — a country in some parts so blessed by nature and so neglected by man — required a department, or at least a ruling spirit, to itself ; and Lord Dalhousie, who had promised Henry Lawrence to give him ‘ the best men in the country,’ was true to his word in this as in other particulars. For he gave him as ‘ Civil Engineer ’ the best man who could have been found at that time, perhaps the best who could be found at any time, in India, for the purpose. Colonel Robert Napier had acted as Consulting Engineer to Henry Lawrence during the Residency, he had traversed the country for himself from end to end, and was well acquainted with its capabilities and its wants. More than this, he was a man of vast ideas. He had something in him of the ‘ great-souled ’ man of Aristotle — the beau ideal , as the whole of his subsequent career has proved him to be, of chivalry and generosity. If a thing was to be done well, and without a too close calculation of the cost, Napier was the man to do it. His ideas found expression in those splendid public works which are the pride of the Punjab, and are still a model for the rest of India. An efficient staff was placed at Napier’s disposal ; first and foremost Lieutenant Alexander Taylor, whose name will come before us in more than one striking scene hereafter, and who was able to secure the warm affection of men so widely differ- ent from each other as Napier and Nicholson, as Henry and John Lawrence. Funds fairly adequate to the occasion were placed at the Chief Engineer’s disposal, and special grants were to be made for works of imperial magnitude, such as the Grand Trunk Road and the great canals. But roads and canals are not made in a day, and, in such matters, the work of the Board was, necessarily, one of preparation rather than of completion, of struggles under difficulties rather than of victory over them. Yet, even in this early period, roads were not only projected 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 275 and surveyed, but were actually constructed. In the map pre- pared in Napier’s office and appended to the first Punjab re- port, a perfect network of roads — military roads, roads for ex- ternal and internal commerce, cross and branch roads in every direction — some of them merely proposed or surveyed, others traced or completed, may be seen spreading over the country, like the veins and arteries over the human body. A single sentence of this same Punjab report, a document to which my brief sketch of the Punjab administration owes much, thus sums up what had been done in the way of road-making, during the first three years of our possession : ‘ 1,349 miles of road,’ it says, ‘have been cleared and constructed; 853 miles are under construction, 2,487 miles have been traced, and 5,272 miles surveyed, all exclusive of minor oross and branch roads.' The Romans were the great road-makers of antiquity, and it is one of their crowning glories that they were so. But the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawur may, in the difficulties which it overcame, in the way it overcame them, and in the benefits it has conferred, challenge comparison with the great- est triumphs of Roman engineering skill, with the Appian Way, which united Rome with Brundusium, and the Flaminian, which united it with Ariminum. Nor need the character and career of Robert Napier shrink from comparison with all that is best either in that of the great censor Appius, or of the Con- sul Flaminius, the generous foe of aristocratic privilege and chicanery, and the constructor of the splendid Circus and the Road which immortalise his name. More had been done by previous governments for the devel- opment of the Punjab in the way of canals than in that of roads. The Moguls, who Avere magnificent in all they undertook, had especially distinguished themselves in this particular. The Mooltan district had been intersected with canals, and the na- tive system, which compelled each village to pay its share of labour, or of money, towards keeping them in repair was found by Napier to be so fair and efficacious that he was content to ‘leave well alone.’ In the north of the Bari Doab, again, a canal known as the Husli or Shah-i-nahr, ‘ the royal canal,’ had been carried from the point where the Ravi leaves the moun- tains— a distance of no miles — -to Lahore. It was a grand work. But it fertilised no wastes and called into existence no villages. It simply supplied the royal waterworks, conserva- tories, and fountains at the palace of Lahore. Accordingly, 2 y6 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 another great work was proposed by the Board, which is as characteristic of the aims of the English Government in India as the Husli Canal had been of the Native. Starting from pre- cisely the same point in the Ravi — as though to emphasise the contrast — a canal was projected, which, passing near the cities of Denanuggur, Puttiala, and Umritsur, should traverse the whole length of the Bari Doab, should send forth from the upper part of its course, into districts which specially needed it, three branches, each of them from sixty to eighty miles long ; should refill the empty reservoirs and the disused water- courses of the great southern waste, calling into existence every- where new villages, and resuscitating those which had fallen into decay, till, after a course of 247 miles, it rejoined the Ravi above Mooltan. The new canal would necessarily be the work of many years, but it was begun in faith, and was all but ac- complished in the Chief Commissionership of John Lawrence. The ‘father of history,’ in his ever fresh and vivid account of Egypt, struck by the wonder-working power of its life-giving river, invests it with personality throughout. The whole land of Egypt is, he says, ‘the gift of the river’ ; the river is ‘indus- trious,’ ‘benevolent,’ ‘takes this or that into its head,’ ‘wills this or does not will ’ that. But the terms in which Herodotus speaks of the river Nile and of the indwelling river-god he might have applied now, with a hardly greater infusion of met- aphor, to the rivers of the Punjab and to the philanthropic statesmen who, by means of scores of canals and hundreds of watercuts and watercourses, have so twisted and turned them as to revivify deserts and to scatter plenty over a comparatively smiling land. I have now glanced at the most important subjects which called for the immediate attention of the Board. But there were others of which less energetic rulers would have postponed all consideration till the pressure upon them was less intense. The diversity of the coinages of the country was one difficulty which presented itself ; the diversity of languages a second ; the diversity of weights and measures a third. The want of a system of education and of a system of agriculture ; the want of forest trees, of sanitary measures, and of sanataria, — all these subjects demanded and received their due share of attention. A few lines on each of them must suffice, in order to complete the outline of the Lawrence brothers’ administration. In the strange intermixture of coinages and languages to be 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 277 found in the Punjab, it would be possible to trace the successive waves of foreign conquest and the internal convulsions which have passed over the country. To coin money is the attribute of kingly power everywhere, but nowhere so exclusively as in the East. Accordingly, the first thing which any conqueror or upstart provisional governor does, is to strike off a coinage of his own. Thus it came about that in the Leia Division alohe twenty-eight different coins were found to be in circulation, and that the rupee of Kashmere was worth barely two-thirds of that of the Company, while this last, again, was inferior in purity and value to the old Nanuk Shahi rupee, the symbol of the Sikh religion and power, which was coined at Umritsur and La- hore. Nor was this the worst ; for of the Nanuk Shahi rupee itself there were not less than thirty varieties in circulation ! The commercial confusion, the illicit gains, the losses on ex- change resulting from such a state of things can be imagined. All the illiterate classes must have suffered, and only the coiners, the money-changers, and, possibly, the Sirdars, have thriven. Here was a case for prompt interference on our part. The dead coinages were called in. They were sent to Bombay and Calcutta to be melted down, and their equivalent was remitted to the Punjab, stamped with the mark, not of the Great Guru, or the Great Mogul, but of the English Queen. The coinage of the country was thus made to harmonise with accomplished facts, and, within three years, three-fourths of the whole revenue paid into the British treasury was found to be in British coin. The languages of the Punjab were equally confusing. The Gourmooki, or sacred language of the Grunth, or Sikh scrip- tures, was, like Sanskrit, written rather than spoken. But there was a sufficient variety of spoken languages. In the two west- ernmost Doabs, Persian, or dialects derived from it, were cur- rent ; in the easternmost, Punjabi, a corrupt form of Urdu. In one of the Indus districts, Pushtu was spoken ; in another Bel- uchi. The difficulty of establishing a settled government and administering justice amidst this Babel of languages was great. But it would hardly have been lessened by any arbitrary attempt — letting alone the question of its justice — to force, as the Rus- sians have done in Poland, any one official language upon the whole. An arrangement was ultimately come to that Urda should be the official language of the eastern and Persian of the western half of the Punjab, and this compromise has been found to work well. 278 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 As regards education, the work of the first three years was chiefly preparatory. The first thing to be done was to ascertain what steps had been taken by natives in that direction ; and Robert Montgomery — a name mentioned here for the first time in connection with the Punjab, but, henceforward, almost as closely bound up with it as that of the Lawrences themselves — threw himself into the work with alacrity. To his surprise and pleasure, it was discovered that throughout the Punjab there were elementary schools for all classes, Sikh, Mussulman, and Hindu ; that the agricultural classes, unlike those of other parts of India, resorted to them in at least as large numbers as the higher castes, Rajpoots, Brahmins, or Khuttries ; and, more re- markable still, that even female education, which is quite un- known in other parts of the peninsula, was not altogether neg- lected. In Lahore, for instance, there were sixteen schools for girls, with an average of six scholars in each, and, what is still more noteworthy, all of them were Muslims. In fact, there was a general desire for education. The standard aimed at in these native schools was, of course, not high. The staple of the education was the reading and recitation of the sacred volume accepted by each creed, supplemented by a little writing and arithmetic— enough, at all events, to enable the Sikh to calculate his compound interest with accuracy, and to make him a good village accountant. The buildings were of the most primitive kind. A temporary shed or tent, or the enclosure of some mosque or temple, sufficed for the purpose. Sometimes there was nothing but the shade of a spreading tree. The stipend of the teacher was precarious enough, and was eked out by pres- ents of grain or sweetmeats from the pupils or their parents. The members of the Board were unable at this early date to elaborate any extensive educational schemes, but they scrupu- lously respected all existing educational endowments, and they proposed to found a central school in each city of the Pun- jab. That at Umritsur was of a more ambitious character. It was to be divided into as many departments as there were relig- ions or languages in the country. By the end of the second year after annexation it contained 153, and at the end of the fourth year 308, scholars. A race of young Punjabis, it was hoped, were thus being trained up who might be trusted with the more or less important posts under Government which were then in the hands of Hindustanis. The want of forest trees was met, so far as it could be so, by 849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 279 orders that all existing forests should be carefully preserved, that groves should be planted round public buildings, at inter- vals along the main lines of road, and in continuous lines throughout the course of the great canals. Thus some shade and timber were secured for coming generations, while, with a view to firewood, which is all-important in a country destitute of coal, the vast jungles, whence the woodcutters used, with reckless improvidence, to tear up whole bushes, were to be re- planted and carefully tended. The famous grass preserves, the best of whose produce had been appropriated by the very Sirdars who were paid to look after them, while Runjeet’s cavalry, for which they were intended, got only the refuse, were committed to the care of a special English officer, Edward Prinsep, who took measures that the State should, henceforward, get its own. The proper rotation of crops was a subject little understood, and less practised, by a people who, careless of the future, are content if they can live from hand to mouth, and, when they can no longer do that, are only too content to die. It was ob- served that one of the first results of the remission of taxation was that cereals were planted everywhere by the short sighted cultivators of the ground. There was, consequently, a glut in the market of this kind of produce, while the land itself suffered proportionately. To meet this evil, cotton, tobacco, flax, sugar- cane and root crops were introduced on an extensive scale into the Punjab, by the direct intervention of the Board, and with great success. The country was already well stocked with mul- berry-trees, and the cultivation of the silkworm, which was en- couraged by the Board, soon gave it a silk trade of its own. Fifty new species of forest trees were planted in the tracts set apart for woodlands, and the tea-plant, which had been intro- duced by Thomason and his assistants into the North-Western Provinces, was now introduced into the Murri hills and the slopes of the far-famed Kangra valley. A new region was thus thrown open to a new commerce, and to a commerce which, unlike that of opium, is of a wholly unobjectionable kind. In the unadulterated East, sanitary precautions are entirely neglected. The streets of even splendid cities are unpaved, undrained, and uncleansed. The carcasses of animals are left to rot where they die, and the suburbs are worse even than the cities. They are veritable Gehennas, the ‘heaps’ or ‘mounds’ of the Bible, and form the invariable surroundings of an Eastern 28o LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 town. Hence the foul air, the polluted water, the frequent pestilences, and, when once the European has introduced the appalling idea of statistics to the Eastern mind, what are at length discovered to be still more appalling death-rates of East- ern cities. Lahore, which was deemed worthy by Milton of a place in the world-wide panorama displayed to our great parent by the angel, enjoyed a bad pre-eminence in these respects. The English troops, encamped in one of its suburbs, amidst the dilapidated houses and the pestilential deposits of successive generations, were the first to feel the Nemesis of offended nature. And the first steps towards sanitary improvement only made the evil worse. Science can hardly get rid of the germs of disease from such a hotbed without first stirring them into unwonted activity. But the exertions of a few years procured a clean bill of health even in so fever-haunted a region. Lahore was meta- morphosed, in a sanitary point of view, by the exertions of George Macgregor, and Umritsur by those of C. B. Saunders, its magistrate. And if, as was inevitable, they both lost in the process something of the charm and picturesqueness of an Eastern city, the health and happiness and well-being of their in- habitants were vastly increased. Nor was the Board content to be, in these matters, simply a paternal government. It has often been said that the best pos- sible government for Orientals is a benevolent despotism — a government, that is, in which everything is done for the people, and nothing by them. But such was not the ideal set before themselves by the Lawrences. The English magistrate was naturally the moving spirit in each city, but associated with him there was to be a Town Council elected by the natives from their own body, and when once the first impulse had been given they worked with a will in the right direction. The first germs of municipal government were thus planted in a not altogether uncongenial soil. The establishment of sanataria in the hills proceeded pari passu with the sanitary measures taken in the plains. A sana- tarium for the troops quartered at the great stations of Pesha- wur, Rawul Pindi, and Jhelum was established in 1851 on the beautiful hills of Murri. It is a place which will often be men- tioned in this biography, for it was amidst its cool breezes, dur- ing the next eight years, that over-burdened Punjab officials snatched the hard-earned period of comparative repose which might fit them for still harder work to come. A second sanata- 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 281 rium, intended for the Punjab Irregular force, was built on the Budawodeen Mount across the Indus ; and a third, intended for the cantonments of Lahore and Sealkote, was sought and found amidst the Chumba hills. .This last, on the proposal of the Lawrences, took, as it well might, the name of the Governor- General under whose master-spirit they were content to think and work. At the same time, dispensaries were established at all the leading stations in the country. The superintendence of these institutions was to be confided to natives who had re- ceived a European education. Eastern patients generally have more belief in amulets and incantations than in drugs and pre- scriptions, and when we remember the absolute ignorance of Eastern practitioners, we may well think it fortunate that it is so. But the Punjabi was willing to take from a native doctor drugs which he would have refused at the hand of a European ; and it was hoped that, when he had once convinced himself of the good to be got from European medicines, it would not be long before he was able to.trust the Europeans also who pre- pared them. Of the smaller benefits conferred on the Punjab, such as a postal system, the protection given to natives against unfair impressment of their draught cattle or their carts, the improved working of the salt mines, the care taken to keep in repair the historical monuments of the country, it is unnecessary here to speak. Enough has been said to show that the Lawrences thought nothing to be above, nothing beneath, their notice ; that their object was to find out everything which could be done, never to find excuses for leaving anything undone. And if any of the details to which I have referred in this general sketch of the Punjab administration seem to any one to be of small importance, I answer that it has been well said that per- fection is made up of trifles, but that perfection itself is no trifle. It only remains to be added that the Punjab ‘paid’: an all- important consideration this, when we bear in mind the poverty of the inhabitants of India. It is, of course, true that the bal- ance-sheet of a great empire is not always to be scrutinised as though it were the balance-sheet of a commercial firm, and that a heroic disregard of finance may, occasionally, prove in the end to be not only the truest wisdom but the best economy. But, owing to the exertions of the Board, and in an especial degree, it must be added, to the financial genius of John Lawrence, the 282 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 administration of the Punjab — even when the task before it was nothing less than the reconstruction of the whole country, and when that reconstruction was proceeding at a railroad pace — could stand the strictest of commercial tests. Not to speak of the balance-sheets of the first three years, which showed a sur- plus of fifty-two, sixty-four, and seventy lacs of rupees respec- tively— for this surplus was in part the result of the confiscation of jagheers, and of the sale of State property — in the fourth year, when these exceptional receipts had almost disappeared and the colossal expense of the Grand Trunk Road and the Great Canal had begun to make itself felt, there was still a surplus of fifty-three lacs. The Board did not disguise from themselves or from their superiors that, in the spirit of a munificent and far-seeing landlord, they contemplated an ever-increasing ex- penditure during the next ten years on these public works. But, with just confidence, they held that such an expenditure would be reproductive, and that even during the ten years of leanness which must precede many decades of plenty, there would still be a surplus of twelve lacs per annum. These anti- cipations, however sanguine they might seem, were justified by the result. Constant reductions were made in the land settle- ment and yet the revenue went on increasing. The 134 lacs of revenue of the year of annexation (1849) had risen by the year of the Mutiny (1857) to 205 lacs. In that year of agony the Chief Commissioner not only raised this large sum, by methods which are usually practicable only in the time of peace, but was actually able from the surplus to send off twenty lacs in hard cash to Delhi ! It was to little purpose that the critics of the Punjab admin- istration pointed to the large army of 50,000 men stationed within the limits of the province, and insisted that the whole expense attending it should be charged to the Punjab account ; for Lord Dalhousie triumphantly retorted that the military force which would have been required if our frontier had still been the Sutlej, would not have been appreciably less than that which was required to defend the line of the Suliman moun- tains. It was only the excess — an excess consisting, as he pointed out, of not more than two European regiments — which could fairly be charged to the Punjab accounts. But even if the Punjab had not ‘paid,’ it would still, looking at the results achieved, have been an extraordinary success. In this very imperfect world it is not always, nor indeed often, that 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 283 the cost of a war is proportioned to its justice or injustice. But it is not unsatisfactory to observe that the two Sikh wars which were forced upon us, and were essentially defensive, over and above the enormous moral benefits which they have conferred upon the conquered people, have proved financially also a suc- cess ; while the two Afghan wars, which were essentially ag- gressive, and which history has already branded with the stamp of egregious folly as well as of injustice, have proved as disas- trous financially as they deserved to be. The finances of India, as a whole, have hardly yet recovered from the blunders and the crimes of the first Afghan war. When will they recover from the second ? I can hardly conclude this account of the administration of the Punjab Board better than by making three quotations — one from the last paragraph of the first Punjab report, to which it owes so much ; the second from Lord Dalhousie’s comments upon it ; and the third from the reply of the Directors at home. In a spirit of just self-appreciation, equally removed front false modesty and from pride, the Board thus sum up their la- bours for the past and their hopes for the future : — The Board have endeavoured to set forth the administration of the Punjab since annexation, in all its branches, with as much succinctness as might be compatible with precision and perspicuity. It has been ex- plained how internal peace has been preserved, and the frontier guarded ; how the various establishments of the State have been organised ; how violent crime has been repressed, the penal law executed, and prison discipline enforced ; how civil justice has been administered ; how the taxation has been fixed, and the revenue collected ; how commerce has been set free, agriculture fostered, and the national resources developed ; how plans for future improvement have been projected ; and, lastly, how the finances have been managed. The Most Noble the Governor-Gen- eral, who has seen the country and personally inspected the executive system, will judge whether this administration has fulfilled the wishes of the Government ; whether the country is richer ; whether the people are happier and better. A great revolution cannot happen without injuring some classes. When a State falls, its nobility and its supporters must, to some extent, suffer with it ; a dominant sect and party, ever moved by political ambition and religious enthusiasm, cannot return to the or- dinary level of society and the common occupations of life, without feel- ing some discontent and some enmity against their powerful but humane conquerors. But it is probable that the mass of the people will advance in material prosperity and moral elevation under the influence of British rule. The Board are not unmindful that in conducting the administra- 284 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 tion they have had before them the Indian experience of many succes- sive Governments, and especially the excellent example displayed in the North-Western Provinces. They are not insensible of shortcomings, but they will yet venture to say that this retrospect of the past does in- spire them with a hope for the future. (Signed) Henry M. Lawrence, President. John Lawrence, Senior Member. Robert Montgomery, Junior Member. Lahore : August 19, 1852. Lord Dalhousie, after a lengthened comment on the report, writes as follows, and there will be few who will not endorse this deliberate judgment : — For this prosperous and happy result, the Honourable Company is mainly indebted to the members of the Board of Administration — Sir Henry Lawrence, Mr. John Lawrence, Mr. Mansel, and his successor, Mr. Montgomery. ‘ I desire on my own part to record, in the most em- phatic manner, an acknowledgment of the obligations of the Government of India to those distinguished officers, and its admiration of the ability, the energy, the judgment, and indefatigable devotion with which they have discharged the onerous and responsible duties entrusted to them, and of which I have been for several years a close and grateful observer. 1 request them to receive the most marked assurances of the cordial ap- probation and thanks of the Governor- General in Council ; and at the same time I beg leave to commend them to the favour and consideration of the Honourable Court. (Signed) Dalhousie. May 9, 1853. Finally, the Directors of the East India Company, whom Sir John Kaye, their chartered and chivalrous advocate, has not unjustly characterised as ‘good masters but very chary of gracious words,’ proved, on the receipt of the Punjab report and of Lord Dalhousie’s comments thereon, that they could, on occasion, not only not be chary of gracious words, but could be aroused into a genuine enthusiasm. We will not delay (they say) to express to you the high satisfaction with which we have read this record of a wise and eminently successful administration. In the short period which has elapsed since the Punjab became a part of the British dominions, results have been achieved such as could scarcely have been hoped for as the reward of many years of well-directed exertions. The formidable army, which it had required so many battles to subdue, has been quietly disbanded, and the turbulent soldiery have settled to industrious pursuits. Peace and security reign 1849-52 THE WORK OF THE PUNJAB BOARD. 285 throughout the country, and the amount of crime is as small as in our best administere(d territories. Justice has been made accessible, with- out costly formalities, to the whole population. Industry and commerce have been set free. A great mass of oppressive and burdensome taxa- tion has been abolished. Money rents have been substituted for pay- ment in kind, and a settlement of the land revenue has been completed in nearly the whole country, at a considerable reduction on the former amount. In the settlement, the best lights of recent experience have been turned to the utmost account, and the various errors, committed in a more imperfect state of our knowledge of India, have been carefully avoided. Cultivation has been largely increased. Notwithstanding the great sacrifices of revenue, there was a surplus, after defraying the civil and military expenses, of fifty-two lacs on the first, and sixty-four and a-half lacs on the second year after annexation. . . . Results like these reflect the greatest honour on the administration of your Lordship in Council, and on the system of Indian government generally. It is a source of just pride to us that our services, civil and military, should have afforded men capable, in so short a time, of carrying into full effect such a series of enlightened and beneficent measures. The executive functionaries in the subordinate ranks have proved themselves worthy ot the honourable career which awaits them. The members of the Board of Administration — Sir Henry Lawrence, Mr. John Lawrence, Mr. Man- sel, and Mr. Montgomery — have entitled themselves to be placed in the foremost rank of Indian administrators. We are, your affectionate friends, (Signed) R. Ellice. J. Olliphant, &c., &c. London, October 26, 1853. If any critic is disposed, malevolently or otherwise, to remark here that the eulogies of Lord Dalhousie were passed on what was, in part at least, his own handiwork, and so reflected credit on himself, and that the Directors based their judgment on the report drawn up by the actors themselves rather than on an im- mediate knowledge of the facts of the case, it is perhaps enough to point to the Mutiny, and to ask whether its experiences do not more than justify all that has been said in praise of the Punjab administration. Had there been any weak point in the system that fiery trial must have discovered and probed it to the utmost. No such weak point was found. But it is not without special interest, to me at least, to add that, after a conversation of many hours with the man who, perhaps of all others now living, is most familiar with the facts of the case, and was throughout the best years of his life most intimate with John Lawrence, I asked him point blank 286 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 whether, looking back at this distance of time, he thought that any part of the ‘ Punjab Reports ’ was too highly coloured, and whether, if they had now to be rewritten, he would wish to modify anything therein. Sir Richard Temple, as the next chapter will show, though he was not Secretary to the Board, had done an important bit of the Secretary’s work, some time before its final dissolution. It was his pen which helped largely to put the thoughts of the Lawrences into words and to record their achievements, and it is hardly necessary to add that since that time there is scarcely a corner of India which he has not visited or which has not been under his personal rule. Like the much-travelled Ulysses of old, he has seen the cities of many men and has learned their thoughts. He has out-lived most of the Lawrence generation, and has ruled or served another which knows all too little of them and theirs. But his answer to my question was unhesitating and emphatic. ‘ There is not a word,’ he said, ‘in the Punjab Reports which I would wish unwritten. On the contrary, I should feel justified in speak- ing now even more strongly of the achievements of the Board than I did then. I have borne since that time a part in the gov- ernment of nearly every province in India, and now, looking back upon them all, I declare to you that I have seen no government to be compared with that of the Lawrences in the Punjab.’ CHAPTER XII. HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 1849—1852. In the last chapter I have given as clear and succinct a view as I could of the government of the Punjab by the Board of Administration, of what they aimed at, and of what they ac- complished. Biographical the chapter is not, in the strict sense of the word, for I have been able to throw into it little that is distinctive of John Lawrence apart from his colleagues. The joint responsibility of the three members of the Board, the sys- tem by which all important measures were brought before them collectively, and the way in which, theoretically at all events, they worked together for a common end, would have made it difficult to do so. Biographical, therefore, I repeat, the chap- ter is not. But none the less is it essential to this biography ; for, in the absence of private letters, we are compelled to judge of John Lawrence in great measure by what he did ; and it is on what he did in the Punjab during these, as well as in subse- quent years when he stood alone in responsibility and power, that, in my judgment, his chief title to fame rests. It was this which enabled him to ride and to allay the storm when it burst forth. Not even his iron grasp could have held the Punjab during the crisis, had not that grasp been riveted before by something which was not of iron. The glory of suppressing the Mutiny is great, but the glory of having made that sup- pression possible beforehand is greater still. In the present chapter I purpose, so far as it is possible to do so, to bring out what is more personal and domestic in the life of John Lawrence during the same period of the Board (from March, 1849, to January, 1853), to lay stress on his individual work, and, in so doing, to quote freely from his demi-official letters, when they are of permanent interest. It is, in one respect, the most painful period of his life, for it deals with the severance — the inevitable and irrevocable severance — of two 288 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 brothers, who were as able, as high-minded, as devoted to duty and to each other, as, perhaps, any two brothers ever were. But it is a subject which I am not at liberty to shirk. Herman Merivale has treated it with ability and judgment from his standpoint as biographer of Sir Henry Lawrence. It remains for me to treat of it, as best I can, from my standpoint as the bio- grapher of John Lawrence. Happily there is no temptation to suppress aught that is necessary to the understanding of either of the two brothers. The characters of each will be brought out into strong relief. Neither of them will be found to be free from faults ; and what I imagine those faults to have been I shall endeavour to indicate, as both brothers would have wished their biographers to do, without fear and without favour. But there is nothing which need shrink from the light of day, or which, however painful, is discreditable to either. The great light which is said to beat upon a throne and blacken every blot, will find nothing to blacken here. The last glimpse we obtained of John Lawrence in the quiet of his own family, if such a word as quiet can ever be used of his toilsome life, was in March, 1848, when, having rid himself at last of his troublesome ‘acting ’’post at Lahore, he returned with his wife and children to his own Commissionership of Jul- lundur, hoping, in the cool hill-station of Dhurmsala, to enjoy a brief period of comparative rest and domestic life. There was excellent shooting to be had in the neighbourhood, and I am fortunately able to relate, nearly in his own words, one striking incident of the chase. It was in the year 1848 that my brother Richard, my wife and chil- dren, and myself, went up into the hills, to a place called Dhurmsala, near Kangra. There was first-rate bear-shooting to be had in the coun- try round ; so Richard, George Christian, and I myself, went off one day, accompanied by a suitable number of attendants who were to beat the bushes and rout out the animals. It was not long before we dis- covered an enormous bear concealed in a cavern. Many were our ef- forts to dislodge him, but all in vain, until one of the natives managed, by some means, to thrust a spear into him from behind. At first this seemed hardly to disturb him, but as the man grew more persistent in his endeavours, Bruin, goaded into fury, rushed out to attack his ene- mies. I fired the moment I got sight of him, but only succeeded in wounding him. This made him more desperate. He rushed at me, and as I leaped back, my foot caught, and I rolled down the steep side of the hill amongst the thorns. In a moment he was upon me, 1 felt his hot breath upon my face, and thought it was all up with me. But my 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 289 companions rushed to the rescue, and Bruin turned round, uncertain whom to attack. But before Richard could fire, he had singled out a tall handsome Sepoy, had sprung upon him, and had torn his nose clean off his face. At this moment my brother fired, and again the bear was only wounded. Fortunately I had reloaded, and soon put an end to his existence by lodging a ball in his brain. I at once sent off a messenger to our house, carefully instructing him to tell my wife to prepare ban- dages and everything necessary, but to be sure to say that it was not I who was hurt. The moment he was off, I had the poor fellow put on a stretcher, and we all started for home. The unfortunate man was in dreadful pain, and his face was terribly lacerated; but the only thing that seemed to affect him was the fact that he was to have been married very shortly, and he was now afraid that his young woman would not have him without a nose to his face. I tried to console him, but it was of no avail. Meanwhile, the messenger had reached my house and, after giving my wife the message, had told her that I was hurt. What the rascal meant I do not know, but he succeeded in thoroughly alarming her, and she instantly came out to meet the cavalcade, bringing out two little daughters, Kate and Emmie, with her. When she first saw the men carrying the stretcher in the distance, she thought I must be dead. But she was soon able to recognise me among the bearers, and could hardly believe her ears when I told her that I was safe and sound. We had the Sepoy carried into his tent, and our own doctor at once looked to his hurts, but gave it as his opinion that he was disfigured for life. Now it occurred to me that I had heard of a native doctor who was celebrated in those parts for being able to make noses. I had never paid much at- tention to this report before, but I now thought that the least I could do was to summon the nose-maker, and let him try his skill on the Sepoy who had lost his nose in my service. So I sent for the man, and took him in to see the invalid. He declared he would make him a new nose which would be as good as the one he had lost. I bid him set to work, and he at once proceeded to cut a triangular piece of skin out of the Sepoy’s forehead ; he put this over the place where the nose ought to be, and then pulled his face this way and that until at last he had quite a little lump resembling a nose on the man’s face. He repeated the pulling process every day for a week, and finally produced a nose which, if not quite as good as the former one, was fairly presentable. The Se- poy’s delight knew no bounds, especially as his young woman liked the new nose quite as much as the old one ; indeed, I believe she looked on him as quite a hero. John Lawrence’s own escape had been a sufficiently narrow one. ‘ When I saw the bear and you rolling over one another,’ said George Christian, who had been one of the party, ‘I felt that my promotion was trembling in the balance.’ ‘ You little Vol. I. — 19 290 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 villain ! ’ exclaimed his chief ; and when telling his story be used to say that when he picked himself up from his roll amidst the thorns, he was like a porcupine or a pincushion, ‘stuck ’ all over with them. ‘ It took my wife,’ he said, ‘a week or more to pull them out of my head.’ The news of the murder of Agnew and Anderson at Mooltan, and the dull rumbling of the impending storm in the Punjab, soon called John Lawrence away from the pleasures of bear- hunting to even more stirring scenes. He left his wife and family behind him, warning them to be ready, on the receipt of a message from him, to come down with all speed to a place of safety in the plains. It was a pleasant spot, this Dhurmsala ; and the hill people around it, the Gudis, were simple and lov- able, as a trilling but touching incident of one of the earlier visits of the Lawrences to the place will show. John Lawrence had been called off to Lahore, to help his brother, and as his wife was the only European left in the small hill-station, he had spoken before his departure to the headman of a neighbouring village, begging him to look after her, and see that the family had no difficulty in getting what they required. The old man came very often to see her, dressed in the peculiar costume of the hill people, a large loose coat fastened by a belt round the waist, and out of the capacious hollow of this coat he used to produce various offerings in the shape of cucumbers or Indian corn, and, now and then, a live fowl or lamb. He took great interest in her welfare and was always most kind and courteous. Thinking that she was unhappy in her quiet life, he wrote pri- vately to her husband at Lahore to say that she looked so mel- ancholy, always walking about with her head down, that he ad- vised him to return to her as soon as possible. Otherwise she might be turned into a pheasant and be seen no more ! Such was the odd superstition of this simple and kindly people. But even the attentions of the trusty Gudi could hardly have made Dhurmsala a safe place of residence for Mrs. John Law- rence during the summer of 1848. For many of the hill chief- tains around were preparing to rise, and a hasty message from her husband warned her to make the best of her way to the hill fort of Kangra, where his brother Richard would help her. With her four young children and her English maid she left the little village. Kangra was only twelve miles distant, but the journey was not an easy one and took many a long hour to ac- complish. They were obliged to travel in what are now well 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 291 known as jampans, a sort of a chair carried by bearers. There were several heavily swollen streams to be crossed, and here the jampans were carried on the heads of the bearers instead of on their shoulders, while a second set of men walked alongside, helping them to hold their loads aloft. Before evening the travellers arrived safely within the walls of the Kangra fort, and were soon afterwards summoned by other messages from John Lawrence to Hoshiarpore and Jullundur. Here he had taken a house for her, and here she passed the winter in the company of her sister in-law, Mrs. Barton, whose husband was with his regi- ment throughout the Chillianwallah campaign. During the winter John Lawrence, who was also with the troops in the numerous small expeditions which I have described, managed occasionally to visit her. But early in the spring he was sum- moned to Lahore to meet his brother Henry, who had just ar- rived from England. At the end of March the formal annexation of the Punjab took place, and John found himself, not altogether to his satis- faction, as his letters show, installed a member of the new gov- erning Board. The hot weather was rapidly coming on and the Residency, as it has been described to me by those who have a good right to speak, was the busiest of all busy scenes. Some fifty officers and their families, arriving from various parts of India, and despatched with all haste through the roadless and still disturbed country to their various destinations ; the Law- rences and their secretaries working, as we may well believe, full sixty minutes to every hour ; every room and every bed in the Residency and the adjoining houses filled or over-filled, and crowds everywhere ! But (says Lady Lawrence), in spite of the overwhelming heat and tur- moil, we were all too busy, I believe, to be ill. A wonderful work was accomplished during those days, and happy memories, indeed, have I of them. How I prized my evening drive with my husband ; and how vigourous and strong he was ! He was never too busy to attend to my wants, and help me in any troublesome matter ; and, in addition to his own hard work, he always made time to look after his brother’s private affairs. Indeed, as that brother remarked, he would have saved little for his children but for John’s wonderful aid. Always liberal with his private funds, and ready to help others, my husband spent as little as possible on himself, and was ever sparing of the public money, anxiously impressing on everyone the necessity of strict economy in the manage- ment of the new province. But this is so well known that it needs no 292 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 words of mine ; only I like to show that, while he was careful for others, he never spared his own purse, or time, or trouble, when he could be helpful. The Board met, and infinite were the number and variety of the subjects calling for immediate attention. On Sir Henry Lawrence, as the President, naturally devolved what is called in India the political, as distinguished from the civil, work of the annexed province. He was the recognised medium of communication with the Supreme Government, and the racy and incisive letters of Lord Dalhousie, now before me, written to him day by day, and sometimes two or three on the same day, during the months which preceded and followed the an- nexation, give a pretty clear idea, in the absence of other documents, of the multifarious duties which fell, in the first instance, on him as President, and afterwards on the other members of the Board. The disbanding and then the partial re-enrolment of the Sikh army ; the disarmament of the people; the treatment of the fallen Sirdars ; the raising of Irregulars ; the selection of military stations with gardens for the troops ; the arrangements for the Guides and Engineers ; the dismissal of Captain Cunningham by the Directors for the publication of his able and honest — too honest — history of the Sikhs ; the trial of Moolraj ; the care of the young Maharaja ; the escape of the Maharani ; the safe custody of the crown jewels (of which more anon) ; the Afridi troubles, ‘ a plaguy set,’ as Lord Dal- housie calls them ; the preparation to receive the onslaught of Sir Charles Napier on the whole system of the administration of the Punjab, — these are but a fraction of the subjects with which Lord Dalhousie’s letters deal, and which would come be- fore John Lawrence as a member of the Board, though the in- itiative would not rest with him, but with his brother. John Lawrence’s own immediate duties were connected with the civil administration, and especially with the settlement of the land revenue. This was the work for which his admirable civil training had especially fitted him. He was now to reap the appropriate reward — a reward not of repose, but of re- doubled work and responsibility — for those long years which he had spent almost alone among the dusky myriads of Pani- put and Gorgaon, Etawa and Delhi. It was now that his knowledge of all classes of the natives, acquired, as it only could be acquired, by the closest intimacy with them, stored 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 293 up in the most retentive of memories, and never allowed to rust for want of use — was to be called into abundant requisi- tion. The ‘ mysteries ’ of the revenue survey and of the revi- sion of the settlement were no mysteries to him, for he had long since been brought face to face with all the difficulties which they suggested, and had been able to overcome them. He k*iew (says Sir John Kaye, the friend of both brothers alike) how the boundaries of estates were determined, how their productiveness was to be increased, how revenue was to be raised in a manner most advantageous to the State and least injurious to the people. And with all this extensive knowledge were united energy and activity of the high- est order. He had the enthusiasm of youth with the experience of age, and envy and detraction could say nothing worse of him than that he was the brother of Sir Henry Lawrence. And indeed there was enough to be done in the Punjab to tax all this experience, all this energy, and all this enthusiasm to the utmost. Differences of opinion between the brothers on matters of policy soon began to reveal themselves, or rather were brought into greater prominence by the fact that they were now for the first time sitting on equal terms at the same table. These differences had never been disguised. On the contrary, they had been fully recognised by each, as the letters of John Lawrence to his brother, which I have already quoted, show. But while John had been merely 4 acting ’ for JJenry at Lahore, he had, of course, set himself loyally to carry out his views, especially where they most differed from his own. More- over, the questions between them respecting jagheers, the priv- ileges and position of the native aristocracy, and the like, had been theoretical rather than practical, so long as the annexation of the Punjab was only looming in the distance and had not become a thing of the past. But now the decree had gone forth ; the question referred to had come within the range of practical politics ; and the differences began to be more vital. Each brother had a quick temper, though Henry’s was the least under control of the two ; each had a clear head and a firm will ; each had an equal voice at the Board ; and each was fully convinced of the expediency and justice of the view which he himself held. But these were only the first mutterings of an explosion which might be postponed for many a month or year — possibly might never break forth at all — and some of the earlier meetings of the volcanic Board seem to have been amusing enough. 294 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 Here is a sample. Shortly before the decree of annexation went forth, Lord Dalhousie had written to Henry Lawrence to make every disposition for the safe custody of the State jewels which were about to fall into the lap of the English. And writing to him again on April 27, on the subject of the Maha- rani, who had just escaped from our hands, he remarks : * This incident, three months ago, would have been inconve- nient. Now, it does not so much signify. At the same time it is discreditable, and I have been annoyed by the occurrence. As guardians seem so little to be trusted, I hope you have taken proper precautions in providing full security for the jewels and Crown property at Lahore, whose removal would be a more serious affair than that of the Maharani.’ It had, in fact, been found more than once, on the enrolment of some new province in our Empire, which, whether by cession, by lapse or by forcible annexation, was growing, or about to grow, so rapidly, that the State jewels or money had had a knack of disappearing. It is amusing, in the correspondence before me, to read the expressions of virtuous indignation which bubble over from our officers at the extravagance, or rapacity, or care- lessness of the former owners, when on entering a palace, which they deemed would be stocked with jewels ready for English use, they found that the treasury was empty and the jewels were gone. Great care was, therefore, needful, es- pecially as among the Punjab jewels was the matchless Koh-i- noor, the ‘ mountain of light,’ which it was intended should be expressly surrendered by the young Maharaja to the English Queen. The origin of this peerless jewel is lost in the mists of le- gendary antiquity. It had fallen into the hands of the early Turkish invaders of India, and from them it had passed to the Moguls. ‘My son Humayoun,’ says the illustrious Baber, one of the most lovable of all Eastern Monarchs, ‘ has won a jewel from the Raja which is valued at half the daily expenses of the whole world ! ’ 1 A century or two later the Persian conqueror, Nadir Shah, seeing it glitter in the turban of Baber’s conquered descendant, exclaimed with rough and somewhat costly humour, ‘ We will be friends ; let 11s change our turbans in pledge of friendship.’ And the exchange of course took place. Xpvcr (a x«(\k€ iW, €Karo/j./3oi ivveafioitov. 1 Quoted by Edwin Arnold, Dalhousie s Administration , vol. i. , p. 191. 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 295 The Afghan conqueror, Ahmed Shah, wrested it, in his turn, from the feeble hand of Nadir Shah’s successors, and so it came into the possession of Shah Sooja, who was, by turns, the pen- sioner and the puppet of the English, and the miserable pretext of the first disastrous Afghan war. Half-prisoner and half-guest of Runjeet Sing, he had, of course, been relieved by the one- eyed, money-loving Sikh of the responsibility of keeping so valuable a treasure. Runjeet, listening, on his death-bed, to the suggestions of a wily Brahmin, had been half-disposed, like other death-bed penitents, to make his peace with the other world by sending the beautiful jewel to adorn the idol of Jug- gernaut. But fate reserved it for the custody of the Punjab Board, and for the ultimate possession of the English Crown. One incident of its transfer not generally known, I am able to relate on the best authority. At one of the early meetings of the Board the jewel was formally made over to the Punjab Government, and by it com- mitted to the care of John Lawrence. Perhaps the other mem- bers of the Board thought him the most practical and busi- ness-like— as no doubt in most matters he was — of the three ; or they deemed that his splendid physique , and the gnarled and knotted stick which, fit emblem of himself, he always carried with him — and which the Sikhs, thinking it to be a kind of divining-rod or familiar spirit, christened by its own- er’s name, ‘Jans Larens ’ — would be the best practical security for its safe keeping. But in this instance they misjudged their man. How could a man so careless of the conventionalities of life, a man who never wore a jewel on his person, till the orders and clasps which he won compelled him to do so, and even then used to put them so remorselessly in the wrong place that the court costumier exclaimed in despair, that he would lose reputa- tion by him in spite of all his pains, — how, I ask, was it likely that such a man would realise the inestimable value of the jewel entrusted to him ? And, again, what was the custody of a court jewel compared with that of the happiness of the millions for which he was also responsible ? Anyhow, half-unconsciously he thrust it, wrapped up in numerous folds of cloth, into his waistcoat pocket, the whole being contained in an insignificant little box, which could be thus easily put away. He went on working as hard as usual, and thought no more of his precious treasure. He changed his clothes for dinner, and threw his waistcoat aside, still forgetting all about the box contained in it ! 296 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 About six weeks afterwards a message came from Lord Dal- housie, saying that the Queen had ordered the jewel to be at once transmitted to her. The subject was mentioned by Sir Henry at the Board, when John said quietly, ‘ Send for it at once.’ ‘ Why, you've got it ! ’ said Sir Henry. In a moment the fact of his carelessness flashed across him. He was horror- stricken, and, as he used to describe his feelings afterwards, when telling the story, he said to himself, ‘ Well, this is the worst trouble I have ever yet got into ! ’ But such was his com- mand over his countenance that he gave no external sign of trepidation : ‘ Oh, yes, of course ; I forgot about it,’ he said, and went on with the business of the meeting as if nothing had happened. He soon, however, found an opportunity of slipping away to his private room, and, with his heart in his mouth, sent for his old bearer and said to him, ‘ Have you got a small box which was in my waistcoat pocket some time ago?’ ‘Yes, Sahib,’ the man replied, ‘ Dibbia (the native word for it), I found it and put it in one of your boxes.’ ‘Bring it here,’ said the Sahib. Upon this the old native went to a broken-down tin box, and produced the little one from it. ‘ Open it,’ said John Lawrence, ‘ and see what is inside.’ He watched the man anx- iously enough as fold after fold of the small rags was taken off, and great was his relief when the precious gem appeared. The bearer seemed perfectly unconscious of the treasure which he had had in his keeping. ‘ There is nothing here, Sahib,’ he said, ‘but a bit of glass ! ’ The Koh-i-noor was then quickly presented to the Board that it might be forwarded to the Queen ; and when John Lawrence told them his story, great was the amusement it caused. The jewel passed, I am told on good authority, through one or two other striking vicissitudes before it was safely lodged in the English crown. But never, I feel sure, whether flashing in the diadem of Turk or Mogul, or in the uplifted sword of Persian, or Afghan, or Sikh conqueror, did it pass through so strange a crisis, or run a greater risk of being lost for ever, than when it lay forgotten in the waistcoat pocket of John Lawrence, or in the broken-down tin box of his aged bearer. I have spoken of the number and perplexity of the subjects which came before the Board for consideration in its early days. Henry Lawrence was not well at the time of annexation. He had returned hastily from England without taking the rest which had been prescribed as essential for him, and in sore dis- 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 297 tress of mind at the mismanagement which, as he conceived, had led to the second Sikh war. The annexation of the Pun- jab overthrew the dream of a lifetime — the establishment of a strong, friendly, independent native power between ourselves and the wild Afghan tribes. He had struggled against the idea of annexation while it was yet in the future with all the chiv- alry and generosity of his nature ; and now that it was an ac- complished fact, he accepted it as such, set himself to make the best of it, and struggled, with the same chivalry and generosity, to ease the fall of the privileged classes. lie contested every inch of ground with Lord Dalhousie and with his brother John, who saw, more clearly than he did, how impossible it was, in view of the poverty of the masses, for the two systems of gov- ernment— the native feudal system, based on huge grants of land, on immunities from taxation, and on military service ; and our own, based on equality before the law, on equal and light assessments, and on reforms and improvements of every kind — to exist side by side. The more that could be left to the Sirdars of their dignity, their power, their property, their im- munities, the better, in Henry Lawrence’s judgment ; the worse in John’s and in Lord Dalhousie’s. In the one case the few would gain, in the other the many. It was one of those ques- tions on which honest and honourable and far-seeing men might well differ. It may, perhaps, be said that it is as difficult not to feel with Henry Lawrence as not to think with John. In the one brother the emotional part of our nature tended to predominate, in the other the intellectual and the practical. Each had a warm heart and a clear head, and each, beyond question, had a conscience whose dictates were law. But the strong sympathies of Henry tended, at times, to overbalance his judgment ; and the clear- ness of John’s judgment tended to repress, or at least to keep under a too stern control, the feelings of his heart. The parti- sans of the one brother might be excused if they call the other flighty and unpractical ; the partisans of that other if they deemed the first rigorous and hard. But it would have been as impossible for the partisans of John not to love Henry, as for the partisans of Henry not to trust John. Each brother, fully conscious that the other would, as far as possible, oppose and thwart his views on this and cognate ques- tions, pressed them, probably, to a greater extent than he would otherwise have done. It was human nature that it should be 298 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 so. The friction, the tension, the heartburning, were intense, for this question of the treatment of the Sirdars underlay and tended to colour and to become intermixed with all the others. But the result, as I have already said, was, beyond doubt, ad- vantageous to the State. The privileged classes fell, as they needs must ; but it was, to a certain extent, by a gradual and mitigated fall, thanks chiefly to the uphill battle fought by Henry Lawrence. The masses received an equivalent for the loss of their national life in the freedom from oppression, in the security of life and property, in costly improvements and yet in lightened assessments, thanks chiefly to the statesmanlike views and the untiring assiduity of John Lawrence. Certainly it would have fared ill with the great Sirdars who had favoured the rebellion had they been left to the tender mercies of Lord Dalhousie. That they had anything left to them beyond ‘ their Lives and the barest maintenance ’ was due to Henry Lawrence’s earnest and importunate entreaties. ‘ Stripped of all rank, deprived of all property, reduced, each of them, to a monthly pittance of two hundred rupees, con- fined within very narrow limits, and then watched, well know- ing that an attempt at flight would be made at the risk of their lives ; ’ — such is the description of the Sirdars given on August 25, not by the highly coloured imagination of Henry Lawrence, but by Lord Dalhousie himself, in view of the misgiving of the Directors at home, who feared that they might still be the cause of another Punjab war. The work and the worry entailed by the annexation had al- ready begun to tell on Henry Lawrence’s enfeebled health. The heat of the season was more than usually intense. It was, as Lord Dalhousie called it, ‘a killing summer’ for those who had to work through it. Everybody at Lahore suffered, Henry Lawrence most of all ; and he was driven, much against his will, to apply for a month’s leave of absence at Kussowlie. John Lawrence thus found himself for the first time, on May 21, in the doubly delicate and difficult position which it was to be his to fill so often during his brother’s Presidency of the Board. Left at Lahore, with one colleague only, who, with all his unquestioned ability, was disposed rather to criticise than to originate, to point out difficulties rather than to drive through them, he found that nearly the whole weight of the current business of the country was put upon his shoulders. Henry Lawrence was, by nature, locomotive. Office work 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 299 was distasteful to him. He had not passed through the long years of civil training which would have fitted him for it ; and his natural disposition, his enfeebled health, the friction at the Board, already painfully felt, and the craving for that kind of life and work in which he was conscious that he could do most good, all combined to make it likely that, when it could legiti- mately be so, he would be found working elsewhere than at Lahore. A young civilian who had done good work in the Jullundur district, and who had a turn for epigram, remarked, during a visit to Lahore, with as much, perhaps, of truth and cleverness as an epigram usually contains, that the Punjab was governed by a firm of three partners, who might be character- ised as the ‘ travelling,’ the ‘working,’ and ,the ‘sleeping’ part- ner respectively. To spend four or five months in each year under canvas, riding some thirty or forty miles a day ; to in- spect a salt-mine, a fort, a gaol, an asylum, or a bazaar ; to dash off a review article in rough outline, leaving his ever-ready wife to fill up the hiatuses of grammar or of sense ; to see with his own eyes every portion of his province, and to visit and converse freely with every class among his subjects, and with each and all of his subordinates, as far as possible, in their own homes, breath- ing into them all something of his own noble spirit, — this was exactly the life, with its variety, its freshness, its intensity, its hu- man interest, which suited Henry Lawrence, and brought out the power in which, by all accounts, he seems to have been unique among his contemporaries, that of influencing men through their affections and their hearts. He was a man for whom, as I have been told repeatedly by those who had the best oppor- tunity of knowing, and who are not given to exaggerate, per- adventure, not one only, but a dozen, men in the Punjab would have even been prepared to die. But though the peregrinations of Henry Lawrence were often necessary, and were always productive of benefit to that portion of his province which he visited, there were drawbacks attend- ing them which could not but be felt, immediately by his col- leagues and ultimately, also, by himself. It was not merely that the amount of work which was thrown upon those who were left behind was greater, but that there was an element of uncer- tainty in all that they did. Even if they knew their own minds fully they could not be sure that they knew that of the Presi- dent. Henry Lawrence often did not know his own mind. He was touchy and fitful : a disturbing element, therefore, on whose 300 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 erratic movements it was impossible to count beforehand, and whose reappearance at a critical moment might, like that of Mr. Gladstone in his place in Parliament during his tempor- ary retirement from public life, undo a great deal that had been done, or half-done, without him. Achilles absent was Achilles still. His frequent absences from Lahore tended, moreover, to bring his brother John into a prominence which he would never have sought for himself, and which, as far as possible, he shunned. It forced him to be, in many important matters, the medium of communication between the Board and Lord Dalhou- sie, and gave that clear-sighted Governor-General opportunities, which he might not otherwise have had, of comparing the apti- tudes and capabilities of the two brothers, and of making up his mind, if circumstances should ever compel him to choose between them, as to the one on whom his choice should fall. In September Henry Lawrence set out on a prolonged tour through Huzara and Kashmere. Lord Dalhousie had not been unwilling that the President of the Board should see with his own eyes what was going on in Huzara, the domain of James Abbott, whose fatherly rule there — the rule, as he somewhat bitterly calls it, ‘of prophet, priest, and king’ — he seems to have regarded with suspicion and mislike. But he had ex- pressed a doubt whether the remaining members would be able to carry on the work without him. The ‘ killing summer ’ had pretty well done its work. Ten men of the young Punjab establishment were already hors de combat. Mansel, the third member of the Board, and Christian, its Secretary, were ill, whilst Edwardes and Nicholson, who were each in themselves a tower of strength, were shortly going home on leave. But John Lawrence stepped into the gap and filled it as few others could have done, and from this time forward I find that he is in regular communication with Lord Dalhousie, giving his views freely on each question as it came up, but taking especial care to lay stress on his brother’s views where they differed from his own. His heavy office work was perhaps relieved, rather than increased, by news which seemed to promise something of an adventure, and so to recall the long bygone days of Pani- put. Chuttur and Shere Sing had been allowed, as the upshot of the long controversy between Henry Lawrence and Lord Dal- housie, to reside in their own homes at Attari, but they were already, so it was believed by some of the authorities at Lahore, 849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 301 feeling their way towards another rising. They were feeding day by day a lot of Brahmins and Khuttris ; messengers, it was reported, were passing to and fro between Attari, Sealkote, and Umritsur, where others of the fallen Sirdars were living ; and it was even whispered that treasonable communications had come from Golab Sing in Kashmere, and from Dost Mohammed at Cabul. ‘ Brahmins and barbers,’ says John Lawrence to Lord Dalhousie, ‘ the two classes of people who are usually engaged in all kinds of intrigues, have been repeatedly seen at Attari.’ Here was a piece of work which might have been safely left to the local officers, but the spirit of the man who had tracked out the murderer of William Fraser was awakened, and he de- termined to take a chief part in it himself. At one O’clock a.m. on the morning of October the 1st he started on the enter- prise, accompanied by Montgomery, Commissioner of Lahore, by Edwardes, by Hodgson, and a small force. It was a clear moonlight night, and a rapid ride brought them by dawn of day to the spot. They quietly surrounded the village, arrested Chuttur Sing in his own house ; followed up and arrested his sons, who had just gone out to ride ; and brought the whole party back in triumph to Lahore, before anyone in the city had guessed that such an expedition was even meditated. The other Sirdars at Umritsur and Sealkote were arrested almost simul- taneously. Arms were discovered buried in various places, a suspicious correspondence with Dost Mohammed and with Golab Sing, ‘ a hart of many tynes,’ as Lord Dalhousie calls kim, was seized, and the unfortunate Sirdars were not long afterwards removed to a place of greater safety in Hindustan. Bhai Maharaja Sing, the Guru who had headed the outbreak in the Jullundur Doab in the preceding year, and who, after being drowned, as it was reported, in the Chenab, had lately come to life and light again at Denanuggur, was finally dis- posed of about the same time. Like Aristomenes among the Messenians of old, after one of his miraculous escapes, or like Schamyl, under similar circumstances among the Circassians, he had been received with double reverence by his followers on his return from the dead. His followers carefully concealed his whereabouts, and, before an expedition could be concerted against him, he crossed back into Jullundur, where he was ap- prehended by Vansittart. And, with his disappearance from the scene, there passed away the last danger of any rising in the Punjab. 302 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 Another subject which occupied very much of John Law- rence’s time during the first autumn of the existence of the Board was the preparation of an elaborate report, in which he took the bold step of advising the total abolition of all customs and transit duties in the Punjab. ‘ Our true policy,’ he writes to Lord Dalhousie, ‘ is to give up every restriction that we can possibly do without, and retain the land-tax. By this means we conciliate the masses, and especially the industrial classes. Customs levies are harassing in all countries ; in this country they are intolerable.’ After a long correspondence, the wished- for reform was introduced, and trade in the Punjab was hence- forth allowed to run in its natural channels, freed from all arti- ficial obstructions. But that which gave the overburdened Punjab administration more trouble and occupied more of its time than any other sub- ject during this first year of its existence, was the attitude taken up towards it by the impracticable genius whom the outburst of popular indignation after the battle of Chillianwallah had summoned from England to the command of the Indian army. ‘ If you don’t go, I must,’ the Duke of Wellington is reported to have said to Sir Charles Napier, when he hesitated to accept the post which was offered to him. His scruples were soon overcome ; his ambition was fired ; and he went out revolving magnificent schemes of conquest and reform, which were not bounded even by the horizon of Irfdia. He landed in Calcutta on May 6, 1849, and set off with all speed for Simla. But he was already a disappointed man. He had expected to find war, and he found peace. Our half-victorious enemies at Chillian- wallah had become our peaceful and half-contented subjects ; and to make the disappointment more complete, the conquered country had passed under the control of those ‘politicals’ upon whose assumed incapacity, alike in peace and in war, the con- queror and pacificator of Scinde had never ceased to pour out the vials of his contempt and hatred. * I would rather,’ he wrote to his brother on June 22, ‘be Governor of the Punjab than Commander-in-Chief.’ Fortunately, or unfortunately, he could not now be Governor of the Punjab ; and in his vexation he used the opportunities which his post as Com- mander-in-Chicf gave him, with the result, if not with the in- tention, of making it doubly difficult for anyone else to be so either. His biography, written by his admiring brother William, and, 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 303 still mgre, his own posthumous work on ‘ Indian Misgovern- ment,’ contain a strange medley of petulances, egotisms, and vagaries, which overlie and overshadow the flashes of insight, and even of genius imbedded within them. These two works, together with the voluminous memoranda and counter-memo- randa of Sir Charles Napier himself, of Lord Dalhousie, and of the Punjab Board, together also with the letters in my posses- sion which passed between the Lawrence brothers and the Gov- ernor-General, afford an embarrassing wealth of materials for this portion of my subject. There is little of permanent in- terest in the details of the controversy. But its echoes may, per- haps, still be heard in the differences which separate the Scinde school from that of the Punjab — the supporters, that is, of a military as opposed to a civil administration, and which in later times, assuming another and a more serious shape, have di- vided Indian statesmen into two groups — those who, in view of the advance of Russia towards our Indian frontier, Avould push on to meet her, annexing or absorbing Afghanistan and the adjacent regions in the process, and those who, clinging with redoubled firmness to the natural frontier marked out by the Indus and the Suliman Avail, Avould only advance into the savage country AArhich lies beyond, as the allies of the inhabi- tants against a threatened inA'asion. The most brilliant repre- sentath-e of the one school is, perhaps, Sir Bartle Frere; the most illustrious representative of the other is, beyond all ques- tion, Lord LaAvrence. The contro\Tersy, therefore, has a bear- ing on the AAhole course of this biography. That a struggle for supremacy Avould take place betAveen tAvo spirits so masterful and so autocratic as those of the Governor- General and the Commander-in Chief might ha\re been foreseen from the beginning. But it AA7as equally clear that the man Avho Avas armed Avith incontestably superior authority, and Avas capable of stern self-control, Avould beat out of the field the brilliant and unmanageable old soldier, Avho had ‘ the faculty of believing Avithout a reason and of hating Avithout a provocation and Avas disposed to think nothing right unless he or his had the doing of it. Sir Charles Napier A\*as noAV sixty-eight years of age — nearly double, that is, the age of his antagonist — but the feeling that he AAras in command of an army of 300,000 men made him, for the time, feel young again ; and, in spite of a disease which Avas ultimately to pro\re fatal, he buckled doAvn to his A\Tork at Simla, sitting at his desk, as he tells us 304 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 himself, for some fifteen hours a day. At his very first inter- view with the Governor-General, if we can possibly believe the account given by Sir Charles in his posthumous work, the spirit of antagonism flashed forth between them. ‘ I have been warned,’ said Lord Dalhousie, ‘not to allow you to en- croach on my authority, and I will take good care you do not.’ But a few quotations taken almost at random from Sir Charles’s own letters and diaries, written at the time, will give a better idea than any lengthened description of the man with whom the Punjab Board — which was still in the throes of its birth, and which might have expected gentler treatment from its natural guardians — had now to deal. Governing the Punjab (he says, writing from Calcutta shortly after his arrival on May 22) by a court of ‘ politicals ’ is curious, and it is scarcely to be believed that Dalhousie means this. . . . Instead of tying up the faggot of sticks the political system seems to untie the bun- dle. The situation of the troops alarms me, they are everywhere defi- cient in cover and, of course, crowded. . . . We have 54,000 men in the Punjab. This is not necessary ; with good government, 20,000 would suffice, but not with a ‘ Board of Administration ’ as it is called ! This Board has not yet got a police ; and it has 18,000 men as guards, of whom neither the Commander-in-Chief nor the Adjutant-General know a word, and they are from sixteen to one hundred miles distant from any military station. Again : — Strange as it seems, I have no patronage. Lord Hardinge raised eighteen new regiments, and did not give Lord Gough the disposal of a single commission. Lord Dalhousie has raised ten, and not a commis- sion at my disposal ! Indeed, they were all given away before I came. The Governors-General keep these things for themselves. On August 2 he writes in his journal : — Begun a letter to Lord Dalhousie, telling him that if the army is not relieved from the pressure of the civil power India is not safe. The habit is that all civil servants have guards of honour, and treasury guards, and God knows what, till, when added to the military guards and duties, the soldiers are completely knocked up. This shall not go on if I can stop it, and Lord Dalhousie is well disposed to help me. He seems a good fellow and sharp, but I doubt his abilities being equal to the ruling of this vast empire. 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 305 Such was Sir Charles Napier’s opinion of Lord Dalhousie. Here is his opinion of the Lawrences, and of their relation to the Governor-General : — The Lawrences have been forced upon Lord Dalhousie ; the Punjab system is not his — at least he tells me so. . . Henry Lawrence is a good fellow, but I doubt his capacity. His brother John is said to be a clever man, and I am inclined to think he is; but a man may have good sense and not be fit to rule a large country. Here is his description of his own position, as it appeared to himself : — I am Commander-in-Chief of the Indian army, but I cannot order a man to move. I must write a letter to one secretary, who writes to another, who addresses a third, who asks the Governor-General’s leave to move the company back from Batalu. The house that Jack built is a joke to it. The commander of 300,000 men can’t move three companies out of danger without leave from the civil power ! I will not stay in India. And here, once more, is his description of himself as he ought to be — if ever, that is, his ideal commonwealth, the counterpart of the philosopher-kings, or king-philosophers, of Plato could be realised, when a Sir Charles Napier should be king of England, or the king of England should be a Sir Charles Napier. It is a curious mixture of the grand and the grotesque, the sublime and the pathetic. Would that I were king of India ! I would make Muscowa and Pekin shake. . . . The five rivers and the Punjab, the Indus and Scinde, the Red Sea and Malta ! what a chain of lands and waters to attach England to India ! Were I king of England I would, from the palace of Delhi, thrust forth a clenched fist in the teeth of Russia and France. England’s fleet should be all in all in the West, and the Indian army all in all in the East. India should not belong another day to the ‘ igno- minious tyrants,’ nor should it depend upon opium sales, but on an im- mense population well employed in peaceful pursuits. She should suck English manufactures up her great rivers, and pour down those rivers her own varied products. Kurrachi, you will yet be the glory of the East ! Would that I could come alive again to see you, Kurrachi, in your grandeur ! As for the high Indian authorities who were opposed, or — what was the same thing — whom he assumed would be opposed, to him, his views of them are equally explicit. Vol. I. — 20 3° 6 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 By an old Indian I mean a man full of curry and of bad Hindustani, with a fat liver and no brains, but with a self-sufficient idea that no one can know India except through long experience of brandy, champagne, gram-fed mutton, cheroots, and hookahs.1 It was with such feelings towards those who were above, and below, and around him, that the doughty old Commander-in- Chief addressed himself to the military tour of inspection on which he started from Simla on October 13. It was a tour in- tended to result in great reforms, and was full of growls and grievances of every description. His keen eye of course de- tected many real blots in the military system. But the indis- criminate censure he poured on all existing arrangements minimised the effect of his criticisms where they were really deserved. The barracks no doubt needed much improvement everywhere. But his remarks on ‘that infernal military Board,’ and his comparison of their barracks to the ‘ Black Hole of Calcutta ’ and to ‘ slaughter-houses,’ were certain only to Youse the ire of the authorities, and to cause their barracks to remain something like Black Holes and slaughter-houses still. Anyhow, in his criticism of the army arrangements, he was speaking of that which lay within his province, and with which he might be supposed to be acquainted. But in his attack on the whole of the Punjab administration, which he bound up with it, he was speaking of that of which he knew, and was de- termined to know, nothing at all. It should be remembered that, when he began to write his attack, he had paid only a flying visit of two days to the Punjab ; had given Henry Law- rence only one private interview ; had grudged him even that ; and had treated the information he had given him with undis- guised contempt. Sincerely believing that he himself was the one able and honest man in India, and that every civil adminis- trator, with the exception of Thomason and W. Edwards, who somehow seem to have got on his soft side, was either a fool or a knave, and probably both, it was not likely that he would spare the ‘ ignorant civilians and brainless politicals,’ ‘ the gentlemen who wore red coats but who were not soldiers,’ who had de- prived him of the chance of governing the Punjab, as he had governed Scincle, and whose handiwork he now had it in his power to appraise. And so, drawing on his prejudices for his facts, and on his wishes for his prophecies of the future, he had 1 See Life of Sir Charles Napier , vol. iv. pp. 166, 170, 173, 181, 183, 208, &c. 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 307 no difficulty in setting before Lord Dalhousie a sufficiently gloomy picture of the Punjab as it was, and as it was destined to be. He arrived at Lahore on November 30. 1 1 is Report was not then finished, so that he had a chance of getting information on the spot from those who were most competent and anxious to give it. But he avoided the society of the Lawrences, de- clined to discuss any public matters with them, and returned no answer to their pressing inquiries as to that on which so many of their own measures, in particular the line taken by the Grand Trunk Road, must depend— his military arrangements for the province. They could not find out from him where a single cantonment was to be, nor even whether they were or were not to be responsible for the defence of the frontier and the organisation of its defenders. He would allow the site of no cantonment to be fixed till he had seen it with his own eyes ; and this, though he had had at his disposal for months past the eyes and the experience of soldiers like Sir Walter Gilbert and Sir Colin Campbell, both of whom held high commands at the time in the Punjab. Such being the circumstances under which his Report was prepared and completed, we are not surprised to find that its assertions are always exaggerated and are often reckless and untrue. The Sikhs — a fact unknown to the Punjab Govern- ment and to everybody else, but somehow revealed to Sir Charles Napier for the purposes of his Report — were, he said, daily casting guns in holes in the jungles and meditating revolt ! Golab Sing’s power was enormous — though Henry Lawrence had written to him from Kashmere giving the details gathered on the spot, demonstrating the exact reverse — and he too was preparing for war ! The inhabitants of the alpine district to the north of the Jullundur Doab were, as he described them, dissatisfied Sikh soldiers, not, as they really were, submissive and contented Rajpoots ! The discontent shown by a few regi- ments, first at Rawul Pindi and afterwards at Wuzeerabad, in connection with the lowering of their pay, was a perfectly nat- ural incident of such a change. But it was magnified by Sir Charles, as he looked back upon it in after years, into a por- tentous and premeditated mutiny of some thirty battalions which, had he not been there to deal with it, might have threat- ened our power in India ; and this, though Lord Dalhousie, who was responsible for the maintenance of that power, Sir Walter 3°3 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 Gilbert, who was in high command in the Punjab, Henry and John Lawrence, who were going in and out amongst the troops, and the Duke of Wellington, to whom the evidence of the ‘ mutiny ' was afterwards submitted by Sir Charles himself — all judged it to be the creature of his own imagination. The force of 54,000 men which garrisoned the conquered province, and which, if he were Governor, might, he said, be cut down at once to 20,000, and soon to something much less, it was necessary to maintain only because the Punjab Government was bad. and because another insurrection was impending ! The irregular troops, police, &c., who were independent of him, and who did the main part of the active work of the country, were nothing but ‘ paid idlers,’ who gave no protection at all to the civil ser- vants of the Crown ! ‘ In military matters,’ so he sums up his opinion, ‘the Punjab Administration is only worthy of censure, and its system appears to me clearly tending to produce early dislike to our rule and possible insurrection. . . . The gov- ernment is feeble and expensive, when it ought to be strong and economical.’ ‘ A large revenue and a quiet people,’ he adds, with an honesty which was habitual, and with a modesty which was rare in him, ‘ will make me out a false prophet.’ But mean- while the upshot of the whole Report was that the Scinde mil- itary system ought to be the model for the Punjab and for the rest of India. All civil government was self-condemned.1 A document of this character could not. fail to arouse the susceptibilities of Lord Dalhousie. It touched him in his tenderest point ; for the Punjab Government was his own cre- ation. But the annoyance it occasioned was not unmixed with pleasure, for it gave to him, as well as to the members of the Board who were more directly attacked, an opportunity, which they were not likely to neglect, of making a crushing rejoinder. The Minute of the Governor-General has been published by Sir Charles Napier himself, but I am not aware that the reply of the Board has ever received equal publicity. It has been preserved among Lord Lawrence’s private papers, and I gather, from internal evidence as well as from hints dropped here and there in his letters, that it is his own handiwork throughout. It is a masterly State document, studiously moderate in tone, as indeed the consciousness of a vast reserve of strength in its 1 See Indian Mis^overnmcnt, by Sir Charles Napier, passim; and compare Sir Henry Lawrence's answer to it in the Calcutta Review, vol. xxii. 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 309 writer well enabled it to be, and full of interest. Want of space alone prevents my reproducing it in full. To quote the whole of its seventy-six paragraphs would extend this biography be- yond reasonable limits, and the other alternative of quoting only the more salient passages of a paper, each paragraph of which depends for its strength on its close connection with what has gone before and with what follows, seems to me to be doubly objectionable. Such a document, if it is to be judged at all, must be judged as a whole ; and it may perhaps be hoped that this and other of Lord Lawrence’s weightier State papers, whose length precludes them from more than a passing notice in this biography, may some day see the light in a separate volume. Events move quickly even in the East, and change of circum- stances may already have caused many of Lord Lawrence’s views to seem out of date, but the essential principles underly- ing all that he wrote and thought and did will be as true a hun- dred years hence as they are to-day ; and from these principles, as from a mine of wealth, many generations of Indian statesmen may gather treasures new and old, learning alike what is the practical ideal at which Indian rulers ought to aim, and what are the dangers which it most behoves them to avoid. Instead, therefore, of quoting here any disjointed passages of John Law- rence’s reply to Sir Charles Napier’s attack, I propose only to quote a short statement which seems to have been the first step towards its composition, and which sums up in accurate but modest language what the Board had accomplished and what it had set in train during the first year of its existence. It seems to have been omitted from the answer in its final shape, chiefly because the Board preferred to leave the accusation that its ‘administration was weak and ineffectual’ to the ‘judgment of the Governor-General, before whom a weekly epitome of its acts had always passed in review.’ It is a valuable and authentic record of work done, and the preceding chapter will have shown fully how the promise and the performances of this first year were carried out and more than justified by the performances of the second and third. During the year (says John Lawrence) the amount of work disposed of has been enormous. The whole of the old establishments have been mustered, having been paid their arrears extending over many months, and the greater portion discharged. Many of their number have re- ceived gratuities, and not a few pensions. The revenue and police establishments have been organised, and rules 3io LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 simple and distinct laid down for their guidance. The great mass of the jagheer tenures have been examined, reported on, and disposed of. Rules for the investigation and disposal of all disputes which may arise between the jagheerdar and the occupant of the land have been laid down. The military contingents have been mustered and disbanded, the elite being re-enlisted as police-horse, paid by Government. The lands assigned for their support have been recovered to the State. Officers have been appointed to fix and mark off the village boundaries preparatory to a survey in the ensuing cold weather, and rules for the in- vestigation of the rent-free tenures of the country have been drawn up and circulated. All customs dues on imports and exports have been abol- ished, and, with the single exception of an excise on salt of two rupees per maund (eighty pounds) — which includes the price of excavation and carriage to the depot — the whole trade of the Punjab has been made free. The customs alone yielded six lacs of rupees ; and, perhaps, double that sum would barely represent the relief that the abolition has afforded to the people. Measures have also been proposed for the withdrawal of the old cur- rencies, and the substitution of the Company’s rupee. The value of this measure to all classes, and especially to the agricultural community, who often sold their produce in one coin and paid their revenue in another, may be imagined, when it is recorded that of the Nanuk Shahi rupee alone there are sixty different coinages in circulation, and of other cur- rencies full fifty more. Arrangements have also been made for the gradual and easy introduc- tion of one system of weights, in supersession of the existing systems, which vary in every town and every village. Government have laid aside five lacs of rupees for improvements. II it expends annually five times that sum in opening roads and excavating canals for the next ten years, the revenue will probably be double at the end of that period ; and such an expenditure will do more for the peace and security of the country than if 20,000 men were added to the army. Already the engineer staff is organized, and parties are out surveying in the Bari Doab. The existing revenue assessment, as made by our officers in 1847, has been maintained, and where it did not extend, as in Mooltan and the other districts formerly under Moolraj, it will be completed by the end of the year. Such a measure must be hailed with the utmost satisfaction by the agriculturists, who would otherwise have been preyed on by a host of harpies, collecting the Government tax in kind. All these great measures must have an immediate tendency to in- crease the material comforts of the mass of the people, and to reconcile them to our rule. As conquerors, it cannot be possible that those whose power wc have subverted can, in the present generation, be reconciled to us. There are large bodies of soldiers and officials whom the change of rule has deprived of service. It is only by opening out new means of subsistence that wc can hone that such classes will cease from attempt- iS49-S2 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 31 1 ing to effect a revolution by force and intrigue. These great changes have been made without any noise or commotion of any kind ; they are hardly known to the majority of our own countrymen ; they possess not the glitter of military conquest, but they are nevertheless felt and appre- ciated by those whom they are intended so greatly to benefit. It has been asserted that the Punjab is not in a condition for civil gov- ernment— that it should be ruled by military law, and its inhabitants subjected to the blessings of court-martials. We hope that those who have these opinions will not endeavour to bring about the fulfilment of their own prophecies ; we had almost written, their own wishes. Let the Administration but receive the aid and support which its acts de- serve and which its measures justify, and we will fearlessly predict that the country will gradually settle down with peace and security, and re- cover that wealth, and happiness, of which, as the high road of invasion from Central Asia, and as the battlefield of Hindu and Mohammedan, it has so long been deprived. It was well for the peace of the official world in India that neither of the documents of which I have been speaking saw the light till after December, 1849 ; tor in that month the august antagonists were all thrown together at Lahore. It was one of the earliest visits which the Governor-General had paid to the capital of the province he had annexed. Henry Lawrence hur- ried back from Kashmere to be in time to receive him there, and Sir Charles Napier arrived, as I have already stated, in the course of his military tour of inspection. The presence of a common foe drew Lord Dalhousie and Henry Lawrence more closely together than might otherwise have been the case, and Sir Charles Napier appears to have occupied most of his time in ridiculing the fortifications of Lahore proposed by the Board, and in proposing counter-fortifications of his own. It was an amusement which Henry Lawrence afterwards retorted on him, and as it seems, with reason on his side, in the pages of the ‘ Cal- cutta Review’ (January, 1854). The pressing questions of the frontier force and of the cantonments, even those of the capital itself, still remained unsettled. The oracle was dumb, and, till it could be induced to speak, all other arrangements were neces- sarily suspended. How the matter ended I am able to relate on the authority of an eye-witness and a principal actor in it. The story has never, I believe, been told till now, and it is highly characteris- tic of Sir Charles Napier. One day, towards the end of his stay in Lahore, the three members of the Board and Montgomery, who was then Com- 312 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 missioner of the Lahore division, happened to be taking their early morning ride together, when in the distance they saw the Commander-in-Chief and his Staff similarly employed. ‘ Let us go straight up to him,’ said Henry to John Lawrence, ‘and see if we cannot manage to get an answer out of him at last about the cantonments for Lahore.’ They did so. ‘ You want to know where the cantonments are to be, do you ? ’ said Sir Charles ; ‘ follow me then ; ’ and, as he spoke, he dug his spurs into his horse and rode off as hard as he could go, neck or noth- ing, across country some three or four miles. His Staff fol- lowed him as best they could, and Henry Lawrence, John Law- rence, Mansel, and Montgomery, who were probably not so well mounted, followed as they too best could, behind. It was a regular John Gilpin ride, composed not of post-boys, and of ‘ six gentlemen upon the road,’ crying ‘ Stop thief ! ’ but of the most august personages, civil and military, in the Punjab. At last the old General reined in his horse in the middle of the plain, to all appearance at simple haphazard, and when the last of the long pursuit came up, he cried out from the midst of smok- ing steeds and breathless riders, ‘You asked me where the can- tonments are to be ; they are to be here.’ As ill luck would have it, he had pitched on a bit of ground which was particu- larly marshy and pestilential. But the word was spoken, and it was only by a stretch of authority that the Engineers em- ployed to construct the cantonments managed to draw them back a little from a rather more to a rather less unhealthy spot. Such was the origin of the famous cantonments of Mean Meer ! This matter settled, Sir Charles was able to pursue his mili- tary tour. Accompanied by John Lawrence, he paid a visit to Jummoo and had an interview with Golab Sing. ‘The Com- mander-in-Chief was kind and courteous,’ says his companion, while the redoubtable Maharaja was, ‘if possible, more civil and amiable than ever.’ Sir Charles moved onwards, as he delight- ed to reflect, over the ground which had been traversed by Alexander the Great, to Wuzeerabad, Jhelum, Rawul Pindi, and Peshawur. At Wuzeerabad he obtained fresh evidence, as he thought, of the mutinous disposition of the Sepoys, and at Peshawur he struck up a considerable friendship with George J.awrence, the officer, in charge. ‘A right good fellow,’ Sir Charles calls him, Lawrence though he was, and guilty though he had also been of the unpardonable offence of ‘trying the ad- vising scheme’ with him. Some small military operations were 1 849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 313 just then in progress against the Afridis of the famous Kohat pass. These wild mountaineers had ceded to us the right of making a road through their country on payment of a stipu- lated sum ; they had taken the money, and then, after their fashion, had fallen by night on the detachment of sappers and miners who were employed in the work, had cut the ropes of the tent in which the wearied men lay sleeping, and, before they could disengage themselves, had stabbed them all to death. Sir Charles joined in the operations, which, inconsider- able enough in themselves, are only memorable for the war of words which sprung up respecting them as soon as the sword was sheathed •, the Commander-in Chief asserting that, but for him, the two regiments employed would have been annihilated by the^folly of the Board, and the Board retorting that there had been no serious fighting at all, and that Sir Charles had been escorted back in safety to Peshawur by Coke and Pollock, rather than they by Sir Charles. In any case, it was the last time that the grand old soldier was under fire, and during his military tour, tempestuous as it was, he managed to confer at least two benefits on the country. He cut down, for the time, the extravagant retinue which had usually accompanied the Commander-in-Chief when he was on the march, and which had often preyed, like a swarm of locusts, on the districts through which it had advanced. And, secondly, he had suc- ceeded in inducing Lord Dalhousie to lessen the danger of combination among the Sepoys, by enlisting some Ghoorkas along with them. ‘ Like Brennus,’ as he said himself, he threw ‘ the sword of these redoubtable little warriors into the scale and the experiment, in spite of the misgivings of Lord Dal- housie and Henry Lawrence, has been abundantly justified by its success. In whatever part of our Empire the Ghoorkas have been called upon to draw the sword in our defence they have done us excellent sendee. During the absence of Lord Dalhousie at sea, Sir Charles Napier, acting as if he were Governor-General, took upon him- self to suspend a Government order relating to the pay of the troops. It was an outrageous usurpation of authority, which was followed by a severe rebuke from the Governor-General on his return, by the immediate resignation of Sir Charles, and by the acceptance of that resignation by the Duke of Wellington, who had urged him to go out to India, but who now, without any hesitation, pronounced him to be in the wrong. So passed 3 [4 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 from India the grand old veteran. His sun set, as indeed it had shone for many a long day, in the midst of a stormy sea, and the final outpouring of his wrath in his posthumous publi- cation, kept up the after-swell for years after his turbulent spirit had been laid to rest in the grave. A few extracts from John Lawrence’s letters written during this period will throw light on his personal relations to the two chief antagonists, on the views he took of the most pressing questions of the day, on his relations to his subordinates, and on the multifarious duties which fell, in sickness and in health alike, on his own willing shoulders. Here is his view of the frontier-force question, a view different from that of his brother and from that which ultimately prevailed. To Lord Dalhousie. , * December 18, 1849. The Commander-in-Chief is still here, and no one knows when he will start. He has not answered my brother’s note about the frontier, and the Irregulars. I have thought a good deal about the matter since I saw your Lordship, and I confess that on the whole I would prefer that the Commander-in-Chief kept the frontier himself. I think my brother’s arrangement a good one, and perfectly feasible, if carried out as a whole ; but I fear that if we had to do the work we shall have but a por- tion of what he asks for. I do not covet military honour ; indeed, I rather shrink from it. Every civil and political officer who has to meddle in such matters does it with a rope round his neck. The honour and profit belong to the military ; the disgrace and damage to the political. Irreg- ulars are, I believe, better adapted for all partisan warfare than Regu- lars ; but I believe in my heart that if the Irregulars kept the border under us, we should not be backed up by many officers with the Regu- lars as we ought to be, and as will be essentially necessary. I should like to see the military do their work, and the civil officers theirs. The frontier is the post of danger, and therefore the post of honour, and it seems to be an anomaly giving it to us. We have now 54,000 Regular and Irregular troops in the Punjab, and shall have little short of 20,000 of the new levies. This seems to me an excessive number for such a country. Three days later he writes in much the same strain : — The Commander-in-Chief starts to-morrow ; he seems, as far as I can judge, to be no nearer to a decision regarding the distribution of troops and the new cantonments than before. It seems to me quite clear that little or nothing can be done this year unless it is done at once. . . . If he requires all the troops he has in the Punjab because it has a civil government, with what consistency does lie mass them all along i349-S2 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 315 the Peshawur road, leaving four-fifths of the country without troops ? I suspect he is beginning to see that Golab is not so formidable or so bent on war as he supposed. 1 shall leave Lahore for Sealkote to-mor- row and pay the Maharaja a visit, and then return here. I expect to be absent about ten days. There is a report here that the 32nd Native In- fantry have mutinied at Wuzeerabad, but 1 trust that the report is exag- gerated. I think my brother judges rightly when he says we should not collect our native troops in great masses. Brigades seem all very well ; eight or ten corps together are not safe, especially when they have noth- ing to do. And again, January 3, 1850 : — The way the Commander-in-Chief is distributing the troops, or rather leaving them, seems as if he would wish to have a row, that he might step in and have the glory of quelling it. He says the civil government necessitates the presence of so many troops, and yet he masses them with reference to the Afghans and Golab Sing! Your Lordship is astounded at our request for more civil corps. With a different distri- bution of the regular army such would not be required, and that, too, without employing them on civil duty. Six thousand infantry and 2,500 cavalry would then be abundance, I should say. Your Lordship is aware of my views as regards the protection of the frontier. One of the great objections to the civil officers guarding it, seems to me to arise from the circumstance that it takes them too much from their legitimate duties. They have not time to be both soldiers and civilians, even if they had the genius and the knowledge, and the consequence will be that the latter duties will be neglected. The following passage is interesting chiefly as showing that the jagheerdars of the Punjab did not get quite such hard meas- ure from Lord Dalhousie as is usually supposed. The arrangements regarding jagheers, as lately received from your Lordship, have given much satisfaction, and have exceeded all expecta- tion. A Sikh Sirdar remarked to me that they had got more than Run- jeet Sing ever would have given them, and that too free of all service. He remarked that when Hurri Sing, the bravest Sikh Sirdar, was killed fighting against the Afghans, Runjeet Sing actually confined his wives till they gave up his wealth ! The customs abolition will also, I am sat- isfied, be hailed with great satisfaction, especially by the mass of the people, whose material interests will be immediately improved by the change. We now only want our canals to change the face of the coun- try. If your Lordship had a doubt on the point, your trip to Mooltan will, I think, have removed it. Robert Napier is here at work. Poor fellow ! he has just lost his wife. 3i 6 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 To Lieutenant James, who had served four years in Scinde, the greater part of them in civil employ, and was hereafter to be one of John Lawrence’s ablest subordinates in the Punjab, he writes two long letters asking for full particulars of the Scinde administration. For he thought it advisable, while defending himself from the attacks of Sir Charles Napier, to carry the war into the enemy’s country. I quote some extracts, partly as showing his insatiable appetite for minute detail and the care he took to find out what a man was worth before he invited him into the Punjab ; partly as indicating the spirit in which he ap- proached the Scinde question, anxious to give full credit to what was good and to make allowance for what was bad in his opponent’s rule. I want you to let me know what kind of officer Captain Fleming, in Scinde, is ? Is he an able civil officer ? Does he understand revenue matters properly? Is he a man for Batai, and farms or assessments with the village community ? Kindly answer these queries, and also say if he is strong in mind and body — that is, can he, and will he, work hard ? I wish you would give some idea of the Scinde system past and pres- ent— that is, under Sir Charles Napier and under Pringle ; particularly under the former. He is a first-rate soldier and a man of great capacity generally. But I cannot understand how he could have managed the civil details. He knew nothing of the language, the customs, or the habits of the people ; of revenue customs or police arrangements, though the latter depends more on good sense. Brown, his secretary, I knew well ; he was a fine fellow, but was certainly not cut out for a secretary. Then his district officers must, in the first instance, have had no civil training. I confess, when I think of all this I feel surprised, not at the alleged defects in the system, but that anything worthy of being called a system was carried out. I think I have heard that all the land-tax was collected in grain, not at a fixed quota for each village, but by Batai (division of the crop) ; but that lately they have begun to introduce a three years’ settlement. Is this the case? If so, up to what year did the grain system continue? what did you do with it all ? Did it not work ill ? Were not Government and the people both plundered, particularly the former ? Customs — what customs did you collect? Import or export only, or transit also? Had you any town duties ? Police system — briefly describe it. Judicial — you had assistant dis- trict officers ; and the Governor — who was the executive, the district of- ficer or the assistant ? — that is, did the latter carry out all details and the district officer act as a kind of judge, and hear appeals ? as is the case in Madras, I believe ; or was it like our Bengal system, the district officer being the responsible executive, while the assistants were his aids ? In S49-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 317 this case, who heard appeals ? If the Governor did, he must have had an English translation of every one sent up. How could you afford time for this ? Did the Governor ever hold courts himself ? If so, what trials did he hear ? Cases that go to our commissioners, how disposed of ? Finance — what do you consider was the bona-fide revenue of Scinde ? What its civil expenses, including police corps ? I do not expect exact amounts ; an approximation will suffice. If the revenue was forty lacs, for instance, was the civil expenditure one-half, a third, or a quarter ? Kindly give me a reply to this letter the first leisure half hour. A very long ‘half-hour’s work ’ was thus cut out for James, but his answer came within ten days — that is, pretty nearly by return of post, and called forth another torrent of queries and suggestions from John Lawrence. I extract from them the fol- lowing only : — I have heard something of the three collectors and their discussions. What a system for such a man as Sir Charles to advocate! Judicial — you flogged and fined up to 500 rupees without record or power of ap- peal. I fear some of your men must have done much harm. There was a Mr. under me in the Jullundur who had been in Scinde, and I saw some terrible cases of oppression by him in this way, to which I speedily put a stop. ... I think a good article on Scinde, written in a fair and liberal spirit, entering into details fully, pointing out its merits and demerits truthfully, would be read with great interest and be very ac- ceptable, particularly just now. John Lawrence’s formal answer to Sir Charles Napier’s at- tack appears to have been finished towards the end of March, and, tvriting to Lord Dalhousie on the 31st, he speaks thus of it : — I hope your Lordship will approve of our answer to Sir Charles Na- pier’s paper. We might have said a great deal more, but were anxious to be as amiable as possible. A defensive fight is usually a losing one, in politics as in war ; the assailant has many advantages. He has the immense one of a great name. I believe he did in Scinde wonderfully well ; perhaps as well, if not better, than anyone under similar difficul- ties could have done. But to suppose that a man ignorant of the man- ners, customs, habits, and language of a people, with untrained men under him, could really have governed a country as he thinks he did Scinde, seems to me an impossibility. He has always had one great ad- vantage, namely, that he tells his own story. A man may make a good many mistakes, and still be a better ruler than an Ameer of Scinde. His remarks upon the Afridi troubles bring forcibly before us some of the difficulties in dealing with such barbarous tribes 318 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 — difficulties which his own wise administration and that of his successors have progressively tended to diminish, though they cannot be said to be finally settled even now. They show also that he was not backward to advocate offensive measures against the border tribes where they were necessary. The present state of Kohat is far from satisfactory. I much fear that nothing we can do will bring the Afridis to their senses ; but another expedition may do so if made with deliberation and with a suffi- cient force. The Commander-in-Chief, who declared on his first ar- rival at Peshawur that, were he not tied hand and foot, he would, within a week, be on his way to Kabul, is now for peace, for treaties and pay- ments. If peace and security were even probably to be obtained in this way, it would be well worth the trial. But your Lordship may depend on it that neither Scindis nor Afghans are thus to be managed. You must thrash them soundly, first, before they will respect you. A little money judiciously expended among the heads of the clans would then prove useful. But there are many drawbacks to the paying system. The very fact that an influential man receives our pay tends to lessen his in- fluence. It is very difficult to know whom to pay, for power and influence are continually changing hands. The more we expend the more we are expected to give. Lord Auckland spent lacs of rupees in this way at Herat, Kabul, and in the Khvber, and all to little or no purpose. It is certainly a difficult thing for a ‘political’ to advocate offensive measures when the Commander-in-Chief is for peace ; but I much fear that they are necessary. We cannot exasperate the Afridis more than we have done, whereas, by punishing them well, we may make them fear us, which now they do not do. I take the liberty of enclosing a letter I re- ceived from Sir Colin Campbell. It gives his views of the Afridis, and the comparative value of the new irregular corps and our own native in- fantry. I am myself quite satisfied of the superiority of the former, es- pecially for all hill work. Our Oudh men are not equal, man to man, to the people of this country, and both parties know it. The Commander-in-Chief having, for a brief interval, ceased from troubling, John Lawrence found time, on April 26, to write to Thomason, the distinguished Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, on what was more particularly his own subject, the manner in which the revenue survey and set- tlement of the whole of the Punjab, which was then in contem- plation, could best be set on foot. The subject is one of great interest and importance ; for the settlement is the foundation of everything else in a newly annexed country. But it is not easy to make it intelligible to the general reader. I therefore only quote the concluding passage of his letter. The request 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 319 made in it, as we shall see hereafter, had no slight influence on the futures of the men concerned. Kindly let me know what your views are on these subjects. I have stated mine fully, though I know that my experience on such matters is slight as compared with your own ; but it will do no harm your knowing them. Further, I want to know if you will object to give us Temple for a settlement officer for the Jetch Doab under Edward Thornton. 1 know that you prize Temple. It will be a greater act of generosity letting us have him. We are greatly in want of good men ; the whole success of our administration hinges upon getting them. About this time John Lawrence was summoned by Lord Dal- housie to Simla, and his reply, May 1, 1850, shows something of the difficulty with which he was, even then, struggling at Lahore. I shall be very happy to come up to Simla and wait on your Lordship, and I am quite sure that if I could stay there for a little time it would do me good. But the work here is so heavy, and I have so little hope of its being carried out according to my own views, that I think it will be my duty to stay as short a time as possible. Since the division of labour we have all, I think, worked more satisfactorily ; but there are many ques- tions on which each man wishes to carry out his own views, and in such cases, mine, in my absence, would necessarily not be thought of. I shall arrange to work my own department while away, and where this is not to be done leave returns against the time when I come back. I propose leaving this on Wednesday morning, and I hope to get up to Simla by Saturday. I trust that this delay will not be objected to by your Lord- ship. ... 1 was glad to see in the ‘ Overland ’ yesterday that Sir Robert Peel had spoken so handsomely of the Civil Service at the great dinner to Lord Gough. It is a satisfaction to see that in England some merit may be attached to anything besides a red coat. The visit to Simla was paid. It only lasted a fortnight, and a great amount of work was done during it. But the change did John Lawrence good, and helped him through a long and trying summer. Speaking of an officer who was anxious to get a political charge on the frontier, and also to be made a magis- trate, as he had been in Scinde, he says to Lord Dalhousie on July 3 : — He is a fine soldier, but not at all cut out, I should say, for civil work, nor would such a place as he wishes ever answer. No man can serve two masters. Moreover, in such arrangements there is this inherent evil, that it gives a soldier great facilities for getting up a disturbance, if 320 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 so inclined. Anything like an impcriiim in imperio is also bad, and sure to bring on a collision between the district officer and such roving magis- trates. Our officers, when they have nothing else to say against a civil officer, are sometimes inclined to sneer at his youth. Youth in itself is no fault in an executive officer. If a man knows his work, and has been properly trained, it is an advantage in a country like India, where indol- ence and apathy are the prevailing defects. We daily see instances where age and experience do not go together. When both are inex- perienced I would infinitely prefer a young to an old man ; for the former is more apt to learn, while the latter is wedded to preconceived notions. A passage in a letter of July 22 gives some slight idea of the inordinate pressure under which every officer, high and low, in the Punjab, was expected, during these eventful years to work and live. The Lawrences had gone as boys to a school at which there were no holidays, and the Punjab officers were, it seems, so far as their masters could prevent it, to have none either ; at least, not till they were fairly abreast of their work, a consummation which, however devoutly to be wished, seemed each month to become more and more remote, as new fields of enterprise opened out before them. It was expedient that a few white men should suffer, and, if need be, die for the dusky millions of the Punjab. On this principle John Lawrence acted himself, and on this he expected everyone else who came within his sphere, if he would keep well with him, to act also. Lord Dalhousie, without making any definite request on the subject, had mentioned to John Lawrence the wish of Lord W. Hay, a near relative of llis and an officer employed under the Board, to get some leave. If Lord W. Hay (replied John Lawrence) is left to our mercies, we must, in duty bound, refuse him leave. We have agreed not to recom- mend any leave unless when men are sick. There is still much to do, and will be so for the next two years. Every day is of value, and the best officer cannot work too hard or too long for the public interest. We have a number of men away on sick certificate, and almost every week brings in similar applications, and will, I fear, continue to do so until October. If the rains prove a failure, which I much fear they will, our hands will be full to overflowing. It will take all the metal of our Punjab executive to keep the work down. What wonder that, under such circumstances, the Punjab head came to be a proverbial expression for the break-down which came from over-work, and which sent so many of the Punjab IS49-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 321 officers, sorely against the will of their chiefs, to recruit ex- hausted nature for a month or two in the delicious sanataria of Murri or Chumba or Simla ? The very slight changes of air or scene which John Lawrence allowed himself to take were only justified to his mind by the amount of work which he managed to combine with them, and he was always ready to stay at his desk if he thought his brother could go instead and do the locomotive work, which suited him better. For example, it had been long since arranged that John Lawrence should accompany Lord Dalhousie in a tour in the north-west of the Punjab. He looked forward to the treat with real pleasure. But a passage in a letter of September 15 shows how far he was from wishing in any way to oust or take pre- cedence of his brother. Nothing I should like better than to run along the frontier ; but my brother wishes to go there also, particularly if we act against the Afridis; and as his services will be in every way more useful and carry more weight than mine in public opinion, I will willingly withdraw my request to accompany your Lordship to the frontier. I am very sorry to say that more of our officers are getting ill. Major Lake and Hercules Scott are both ailing, and may both have to go home. In them, George Campbell, and Cust, we lose some of our best civil officers, with none to replace them of equal merit. I feel sometimes quite desperate when looking forward. On the much-disputed question of the frontier force, which was, at length, nearing its solution, and not in the way in which John Lawrence then advocated, I am induced to quote one other letter, because, though it travels over some old ground, it con- tains remarks on the public opinion of India, which are as true now as on the day on which they were written, and because of the vivid portraiture it gives, in very few words, of himself and his colleagues on the Board. The main question is as to the ten Punjab corps being made over to the Commander-in-Chief, or left with the Board for the defence of the country on the right bank of the Indus, south of Peshawur. While ad- mitting to the full the advantages which are to be derived from the con- trol of the Punjab corps, and the defence of this frontier being vested in us, I have always shrunk from advocating the measure from the difficul- ties I felt we should have to encounter. No doubt with a good Brigadier, one in whom we had confidence, and who would be prepared to carry out our views, these difficulties would be lessened. Still they seem to me to be considerable. Some of them are those which I have personally experienced, and which no one who has lived and mixed with military Vol. I. — 21 322 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 men can fail to admit. Public opinion is essentially military in India. Military views, feelings, and interests are therefore paramount. If mat- ters go well, the credit will rest with the military ; if they go wrong, the blame is thrown on the civil power. The views of the Commander-in- Chief are essentially those of his cloth, perhaps a good deal exaggerated, but still their views. There is no security that the officer commanding in the field at any crisis may not be utterly incapable ; there is every possibility that at times he will be so, but the effects of his incapacity will be laid at the door of the civil administration. This is in the nature of things. Probably, if a soldier, I myself should join in the outcry- India has produced few abler or better men than Sir William Macnagh- ten. Had his advice been followed, the Kabul insurrection would have ended very differently. Yet to this day, his memory is maligned, and he is considered the cause of all the misfortunes which occurred. There are a thousand ways in which the military can thwart the civil officers, which it would be difficult to remedy and unwise to complain of. I say this in no bitterness, for on the whole I have been kindly dealt with ; but I have often felt that my honour and reputation were in the hands of a querulous old man. The frontier is a post of danger ; it is therefore one of honour, and the military as a body will be ready to resent its being entrusted to us. They may acquiesce so long as all is quiet, but if anything goes wrong, the feeling will be shown. Independently of these facts, the constitution of the Board is unfavourable to such a change. We are told that in the multitude of counsellors there is safety ; but assuredly there is not much energy. Each man may take a different view of the question, and be- tween conflicting opinions the time for action passes by. Promptitude and vigour, the very soul of military arrangements, will, I fear, be often wanting. If, therefore, your Lordship shall think fit to confide the de- fence of the frontier to the Board, I pray that one only of the members be invested with the duty. There is hardly a single subject on which the members thoroughly con- cur. If they agree in theory, they differ in the mode of execution. My brother’s temperament is very similar to my own, but we have been bred in two different schools. With a keener and higher order of intellect than mine, he is from habit and ill health unequal to systematic exer- tion. Mansel is contemplative and philosophic, but shrinks from action. I am restless and impatient, thinking nothing done if aught is left un- done, and chafe at delay. Such being the elements which compose our Board, I feel averse to our having charge of the frontier, which will re- quire much order and system, joined to vigour and promptitude of action. I beg that your Lordship will not attribute my remarks to want of zeal. I cannot serve the State nor your Lordship more truly than by frankly stating my views. If we are to have the frontier, I suggest it be en- trusted to my brother. I believe he would like the charge, and, judging of him by myself, I should say he would prefer the whole responsibility to sharing it with his colleagues. 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 323 In the spring of this year (1850) Henry Lawrence had set out on a prolonged visit to Kashmere. He was accompanied dur- ing a part of it bv his wife and his daughter Honoria (now Mrs. Henry Hart), then an infant only six weeks old. Dr. Hatha- way, who had been his Private Secretary, and was now surgeon to the civil station at Lahore, and Hodson, afterwards of Hod- son’s horse, were also members of the party. There were elements of romantic interest about the journey which exactly suited Henry Lawrence. The surpassing beauty of the scenery of Kashmere is now well known. But at that time hardly any Europeans had set foot in the country. It was a native state which had been saved from annexation, in part at least, by Henry Lawrence’s own chivalrous exertions, and upon its throne sat the astute Golab Sing, whose misdeeds Henry Lawrence, as his patron, had been driven by a somewhat cruel destiny, and with a strange conflict of feelings, now to condemn and now again to extenuate and defend. The tour was pro- longed farther northward still to Iskardo and Ladak, and the elements of romance seemed to multiply as the travellers advanced farther and farther into the region of the unknown. ‘ Five times over,’ as Henry Lawrence writes exultingly to his brother George, he had been ‘above 14,000 feet high ;’ he had given a dinner to some three hundred natives of those remote latitudes who traded with Yarkand — probably the most original and picturesque as well as the most costly and most difficult en- tertainment which even he, in his boundless hospitality, had ever given — and he was looking forward to one on a still larger scale, which he was about to give to a mixed party of merchants and soldiers at Iskardo. The adventurous and daring as well as the unscrupulous character of Hodson came out at every step of the journey. On one occasion he climbed, at the imminent peril of his life, a snowy peak resembling that of the Matterhorn, on which, as Henry Lawrence afterwards remarked, ‘ none but a Hodson or an eagle would have thought of setting foot.’ • His fate reserved him for many a deed of higher daring still, but for a less happy end. Another unpleasant element in the expedition was the cor- respondence with Lord Dalhousie which had preceded it. Henry had applied for leave of absence during the rainy season, in the hope that he might get the better of his attacks of fever, which latterly had been more than usually severe ; 324 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 and Lord DalhOusie had demurred to the proposal on the ground that his habitual absence from Lahore for nearly half the year was incompatible with his office and unfair to his col- leagues, who would not be able to stir from the capital till he returned. ‘ Of Mr. Mansel’s habits I know nothing, but it is impossible that, after the active movements of your brother’s life for so many years, imprisonment in one place can be other- wise than bad for him. Previous to your departure, therefore, before the rains, I would request that he would come up to Simla and meet me there.’ Lord Dalhousie's consent was given grudgingly, and its tone may well have been resented by a man who was so unsparing of himself as Henry Lawrence. But his forebodings as to the danger to John Lawrence’s health proved too true. The strain of unintermittent work for nearly ten years had begun to tell even on John Lawrence’s iron constitu- tion. The rains, which Henry had wished to avoid, ceased early, and then a terribly unhealthy season set in. The old cantonments at Anarkulli were devastated by disease, and Sir Charles Napier’s new ones at Mean Meer fared even worse. At Wuzeerabad, Inglis declared that ‘ his whole office was pros- trate,’ and the natives throughout the Punjab suffered more even than the Europeans. John Lawrence wras one of the last to succumb. He had worked hard the whole summer through, and now, early in October, his turn came. It was a sharp attack of remittent fever. The symptoms rapidly developed ; intense pain in the head and very high fever, followed by sickness and delirium. Those about him began to fear the worst, but a cold douche extemporised by Dr. Hathaway had a magical effect. The fever and delirium disappeared almost instantaneously. He dropped off into a quiet sleep, and woke up out of danger. As is often the case with very strong men when attacked by illness, his strength had gone all at once, and it now returned almost as rapidly ; and by the 16th of the month, the day originally fixed, he was able to start for his long-projected tour with the Governor-General. Lord Dalhousie had peremptorily overruled his generous wish that his brother should go in his stead. ‘ I shall be delighted,’ he wrote on September 16, ‘to see you at Roopore, but I want also to have you with me in the latter part of the march. If your brother returns in October, he can accompany me to meet Golab at Wuzeerabad. After that he must take his turn at Lahore. I wish for your presence with 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 325 me.’ Lord Dalhousie's wish was equivalent to a command, and for the next six months, except during short intervals, when he ran down to Lahore, John Lawrence was to be found in the lo- comotive camp of the Governor-General, who had come with the intention of seeing as much of the north and north-west of the Punjab as he possibly could. What Lord Dalhousie thought of John Lawrence's services to the State, and what he felt towards him personally, is clear from the following letter, written on October 21 — soon, that is, after he heard of his sudden and dangerous illness : — I have not plagued you with any letter since I heard of your illness. I need not say how deeply and truly I grieved to learn the severe attack you have suffered, and how anxious I shall be to learn again that you are improving during your march, and that you are not foolishly imped- ing your recovery by again returning to work. 1 am terrified at the thought of your being compelled to give up work and go home for a time, and I plead with you to spare yourself for a time as earnestly as I would plead to save my own right hand. Two of you have been working hard enough, Heaven knows, for the third ; let the other two now take their turn of working for you. Keep enough work in your hands to employ you, but don’t take so much as to burden you. It is little to be wondered at that the Governor-General, when he realised the full danger to which his lieutenant had been exposed, insisted that he should spend the next hot sea- son, not in the fever-stricken furnace of Lahore, but amidst the cool breezes of Simla. And it may also be added, by way of anticipation, that it was the readiness of resource shown by Dr. Hathaway at the critical moment, as well as his aptitude for work, tested during a long and intimate acquaintance with him in India, which, fourteen years later, served to recommend him for the post of Private Secretary to the man who had then just been called, by universal acclamation, to the highest post in the Indian Empire, that of Viceroy and Governor-General. John Lawrence left Lahore with his wife, as I have men- tioned, on October 16, just after his brother’s return. Taking Umritsur and Jullundur on his way, and managing to do an infinity of work at each place, he joined the Governor-General, about the beginning of November, at Roopore, a small place on the Sutlej. The Governor-General’s camp was a very large one. Besides his own retinue, it was attended by the principal officers of the district in which from time to time it happened 326 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 to be, and John Lawrence thus found ample opportunities for consultation, alike with his chief and with his subordinates, on the pressing questions of the hour, as well as on the future prospects of the country. I am unable to find in the papers entrusted to me any details of the places visited or of the work done during the next six months. There is a total absence of letters from October, 1850, to November, 1851 ; and it is natural that it should be so. Being so much with the Governor-Gener- al John Lawrence had no need to write to Lord Dalhousie, or Lord Dalhousie to him. Henry Lawrence was at Lahore, and on him, therefore, naturally devolved the laborious correspond- ence— which till now had fallen chiefly on his brother — with the Commissioners, Deputy-Commissioners, and Assistant- Commissioners, who were coming and going hither and thither to their various stations, like the figures in a transformation scene, or the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. And once more, it should be remarked that John Lawrence had no private secretary, and that the copying of the letters to which this bio- graphy will, for some years to come, owe so much, was chiefly the work of his wife, who was only with him at intervals dur- ing this particular tour. The arrangements for the Governor-General’s march had formed the subject of frequent communication between John Lawrence and Lord Dalhousie for months past ; and from their letters I gather that the programme consisted of a leisurely progress through the northern districts of the Punjab ; of a prolonged stay at Lahore, ‘ with more opportunities,’ remarks Lord Dalhousie, evidently much to his satisfaction, ‘for busi- ness and less occasion for ceremonies than in the preceding year of visits to Wuzeerabad and Rawul Pindi ; of a march thence by a newly constructed and difficult road to Kalabagh on the other side of the Indus, where the Governor-General in- tended, if possible, to alter forthe better the arrangements made by the Board for the salt-duties, ‘ the one slip,’ according to him, ‘which they had made at all ;’ finally, of a trip down the Indus in a steamboat to Dera Ismael Khan, where he wished to hold a Durbar of the hill chiefs of the Derajat. His plan was to return thence, if the disposition of the hill tribes allowed it, through the Derajat to Kohat and Peshawur ; thence to travel over the line marked out for the Grand Trunk Road, between it and Attock ; and, last of all, to reach Simla by a circuitous route through Iluzara and Kashmere. This was an extensive 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 327 programme, and the less ambitious parts of it appear to have been carried out. But the delicate and difficult passage through Kashmere was given up, owing to the opposition offered to it by the prudence of the Lawrence brothers. John Lawrence returned to Lahore for Christmas, while the Governor-General remained to finish his tour beyond the Indus. The only interruption to the routine work of the following spring (1851) to which reference need be made here, was the visit of John Lawrence to Peshawur, where he spent a busy fortnight in examining the official records and criminal returns ; in inspecting the fort, the jail, the cantonments, and the city ; in making excursions with the Governor-General to Barra and Jumrood ; and in conversing freely, as his manner was, with people of every grade and of all kinds of views. He found that that important position was not then — probably it is not even now — in an altogether satisfactory condition. The valley was held by a garrison of 10,000 Regulars ; a force which it has never yet, I believe, been found practicable seriously to reduce. The physical characteristics of the country, intersected as it is by two large rivers and numerous hill-torrents, by deep ravines and rugged ridges, and surrounded on every side by mountains which afford a ready refuge to miscreants of all descriptions, marked it out as a den of murderers and marauders, which it wras almost equally difficult for us to hold or to abandon. The Sikhs, who had preceded us in the occupation of the place and had called themselves, for a brief period, its masters, had never held a yard of country beyond the range of their military posts, and had never raised a rupee from either the highlanders or the lowlanders of the surrounding districts, except at the point of the sword. It was hardly to be wondered at, therefore, if, in spite of the moderation and justice of our rule, in spite of duties swept away, and lightened land-tax, in spite of the careful maintenance, in this part of our dominions at least, of the jag- heers of the village or district chiefs, so poor, so predatory, and so warlike a people had not been weaned from their immemorial habits. There were still the eternal mountains, which formed an all but impenetrable fastness whence the inhabitants could sallv forth on the less warlike people of the plains, and which offered, in their turn, an equally safe retreat to any lowlander who, laden with the plunder, or red-handed with the blood, of the hated Feringhis, might wish to claim amongst them the sacred right of asylum. Accustomed as the natives were to redress 328 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 their own wrongs, and utterly regardless of human life, we had found it impossible to disarm any portion of them. And thus the reign of violence, if it was ever to give way at all to the reign of law, could be expected to do so only by very slow de- grees. Fifty-one cases of murder or dangerous wounding had taken place, as John Lawrence found, in the two months and a-half which preceded his arrival, and it was under such cir- cumstances that he drew up two elaborate documents on the de- fence and organisation of the Peshawur district, the suggestions of which have been acted upon ever since, and have gradually succeeded in weaning — as far as in a generation or two they could be expected to do so — the wild marauders of the neigh- bourhood towards a more peaceful life. The levelling of the broken ground around the cantonments, so as to sweep away the lurking-place of the robber or the assassin ; a vigorous sys- tem of police patrols both by night and day ; a chain of forti- fied posts in the interior as well as along the frontier of the country ; the strict limitations imposed on the wandering pro- pensities of our officers and soldiers ; the taking away of their arms from merchants from the hills when they reached our frontier stations, of course to be given back to them on their return ; the strict responsibility of heads of villages for crimes committed within them ; the occupation of Jumrood by Irregu- lars as the advanced picquet of the Peshawur force ; — these were some of the precautions first suggested by John Lawrence, and which have ever since been more or less rigorously observed. In April, John Lawrence followed his wife and family to Simla, and here he and they had the ineffable happiness — hardly, I suppose, to be understood by anyone who has not experienced it himself, or who has not suffered from the Indian sun as John Lawrence had always done — of spending the first of some twenty summers which had passed since he came to India in the hills. The long walk, the pleasant society, the lovely climate of that earthly paradise, the kindness of Lord and Lady Dalhousie, the hard work done under conditions which seemed to make it no work at all, altogether went to form an oasis in his Indian life, on which she who enjoyed and shared it with him can still, after thirty years have come and gone, look back with melancholy delight. But even here he was not to escape altogether from the effects of the deadly cli- mate of Lahore. In September he again broke down with a renewed attack of the fever of the preceding year, and the four IS49-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 329 doctors who attended him— Lord Dalhousie’s physician among them — agreed that nothing but a return to England would re- store him to health. ‘ If I cannot go to India and live there, I will go and die there,’ he had said ten years before, but as a newly married man with no definite employment in view, when the doctors warned him not again to attempt the Indian climate. And it was not likely now, when the interests of a vast province in so large a measure depended on him, that he would think differently. Nothing should induce him, he said, to go home till he had done the work which he had then in hand ; and, when once the fever had abated, he rallied so quickly that all thought of his return was given up by his doctors and his wife. Lord Dalhousie, however, was not so easily satisfied, and, in his anxiety to spare one whose services he valued ‘ as he did his own right hand,’ he wrote to the Directors of the East India Company, asking them to allow John Lawrence to go home on exceptionally favourable terms. The request was refused on public grounds, but the refusal was accompanied by expressions which showed a high appreciation of John Lawrence’s services. I insert here a few lines from one of his letters on the subject to Lord Dalhousie, chiefly because of the light it throws on what were then his plans for the future. I have made up my mind not to go home. It would, I think, be sui- cidal in me, at my age and with the claims which my children have on me, to do so. My health is very uncertain. I do not think that I have more than three or four years of good honest work left in me. In May, 1855, I shall have served my time, and be entitled to my annuity, and by that time I shall have saved a sufficiency for my own moderate wants and to bring up my children. Without making up my mind absolutely to retire at that period, I wish to be in a position to be able to do so. If I go home now without pay, I shall come back to this country without the slightest chance of being able to retire as I propose, for I shall have to spend in my trip the best part of my savings. I am infinitely obliged for the kindness and consideration which led your Lordship to recom- mend the indulgence, and am gratified with the flattering manner in which it has been negatived. It is difficult, now that the writer’s long and deedful life is over, to read without something akin to emotion the simple wishes and the humble prognostications of this letter ; and it is more difficult still, even at the risk of anticipating what might, perhaps, come more fitly at the close of this biography, 330 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 not to take a rapid glance forward at the amount of work which was really in store for him at the time when he wrote. The man who thought he had 1 not more than three or four years of good honest work left in him,’ and could not go to Eng- land to recruit his health without spending the best part of his savings in the process, was to work on in the Punjab with in- creased responsibility and power, not merely for three or four, but for seven years, doing each day as much as most men do in a dozen days, and, during the last two years, facing an amount of anxiety, of difficulty, and of danger which, by itself, would have been enough to make or mar any lesser man. When he returned home after the Mutiny, broken down in health, he was to recruit himself, not by rest, but by serving for four years in the Indian Council, bringing his vast experience and his sound judgment to bear on the difficult questions which had been raised by the transference of India from the Company to the Crown. At the end of that period of comparative repose, he was to return to India as Viceroy and Governor-General, and, for the full period of five years, was to work as hard and suc- cessfully as any Governor-General has ever worked. When he returned to England again, it was to descend at once from the most magnificent of Viceroyalties to the dull and thank- less drudgery of the London School Board ; and that, not be- cause he had any special knowledge or natural bent for the subject of popular education, but because he felt there was good work and hard work to be done upon it. And then, once more, when his health had finally broken down, when his sight was nearly gone, and when he seemed to have set his face towards the grave, he was to rouse himself again at the trumpet-call of duty, and, regardless of obloquy and of miscon- ception of every kind, was to work hard to the very end against a policy which he thought to be unjust, and to be fraught with danger and disaster to the best interests of England and of India. If any life was ever dignified from first to last with that kind of dignity which nothing but labour — honest, unsparing, unselfish labour — can give, that life was John Lawrence’s. By November Lawrence returned to Lahore, visiting all the civil stations on the way, and bringing with him an infant son — Edward Hayes — who had been born in June at Simla. It was a lovely child, which had seemed from its very birth to call forth from beneath the rugged exterior of his father that vein of tenderness which those who knew him well knew was always i S49-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 331 there. A child, particularly a young one, seemed often able — as a notable incident which I shall relate at a subsequent period of his life will show — to calm John Lawrence when he was most ruffled, and to cheer him when he was most wearied with the anxieties and the vexations of his daily work. This babe had been delicate from its birth — so delicate, that its mother feared now to expose it to the rough camp life which formed a princi- pal part of the winter’s work in the Punjab. Accordingly, while the father was roaming about his province in tents, the mother stayed at home to tend it. But, howsoe’er it was, After a lingering, ere she was aware, Like a caged bird escaping suddenly, The little innocent soul flitted away. It was a crushing sorrow, and not to the mother alone. It was the first time that death had come into the Lawrence fam- ily. The strong man was broken down ; and to the astonish- ment of those that did not know him well — but only to those — he was seen weeping like a child, as he followed the body to the grave. It was not often that John Lawrence was seen to shed tears ; and I have thought it worth while in the course of this biography to specify the two or three occasions when he is known to have done so. But his tears were only the outward and intermittent signs of the perennial spring of tenderness which lay below ; of a tenderness which was, perhaps, more real because it made so little show, and certainly gave more encouragement and more support to those on whom it was habitually lavished, because it was felt to be the tenderness, not of a weakling, but of a strong, rough-hewn man. It was the first death. But it was not the first break in the family. For in the autumn of the year of annexation (1849), the inevitable severance, bitter almost as death, to which all Indian families must look forward, and that, too, at the time of life when the child most needs the parent, and the parent most misses the child, had taken place. The two eldest daughters had been sent off to England, under somewhat exceptional cir- cumstances. It happened that Herbert Edwardes and John Nicholson were about to leave on furlough, and they volun- teered to undertake a task, which not even such friends as the Lawrences would have ever thought of proposing to them — the trouble and responsibility of conveying the little girls to Eng- 332 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 land. ‘It was considered,’ says Lady Lawrence, ‘somewhat strange to send two little girls away with only two young men as their escort, but they were dear and trusted friends ; and right nobly they fulfilled their trust, not minding the trouble and anxiety of little children, but tenderly caring for them all the way.’ John Lawrence conveyed them to Ferozepore, and there handed them over, with their ayah, to their kind escort, who conveyed them down the Indus to Bombay, and thence safely to England. And, assuredly, when we consider what young unmarried officers usually are like, and how utterly in- capable they would be, even if they had the will, of undertaking such a charge, we shall be disposed to regard this as not the least characteristic, or the least lovable, passage in the lives of the young hero of Mooltan, or of the afterwards still more dis- tinguished hero of Delhi. During John Lawrence’s sojourn at Simla in 1850, an im- portant change had taken place in the personnel of the Board. I have already endeavoured to indicate the general characteris- tics of the third member of the triumvirate, and have pointed out how valuable, judging from an outsider’s point of view, must have been the makeweight which Mansel’s evenly bal- anced and philosophic temperament offered to the more drastic and impetuous spirits which, for the time being, were linked to his. Both brothers, so far as I can make out, appreciated highly his intellectual gifts, and regarded him with the most friendly feelings. But both looked upon him, also, as a drag upon the coach. They were always, or nearly always, for ac- tion ; he was always, or nearly always, for talking about it. In every question which was brought before him he saw, like other men of his turn of mind, at least three possible courses ; and the tertium. quid on which he seemed inclined to settle, rather than ever actually did settle down at last, was generally one which did not suit precisely the views of either of his col- leagues. When, as often happened, Henry Lawrence had one plan for the solution of a difficult problem, and John another, and they were both brought to Mansel for his deciding voice, he ‘ cushioned ’ both of them ; that is to say, he put them into his pocket, and the question was shelved sine die. lie would sometimes, as I have been told by an eye-witness, walk for an hour or two up and down the verandah in front of the Resi- dency, arguing seriously against some project which Henry was pressing upon him with characteristic earnestness. At the 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 333 end of the discussion he would say quietly, ‘ Well, though I have been arguing thus with you, I have not been speaking my own views ; 1 have only been showing you what might be said by John against your project;’ and he would often do the same with John. This method of procedure was not exactly suited to the proclivities of either brother. John Lawrence was fond enough of discussion, provided it were a preliminary to action, but Mansel’s talk he knew well was apt to end in nothing else ; and Henry, who was of a hotter temperament, and much more intolerant of opposition, in the vexation of the moment would sometimes regard Mansel’s disputations as not only injurious, but insulting. Neither of the brothers, it will be seen, would have altogether approved of the Socratic method of inquiry, and both would, at times, have been disposed to elbow that impracticable philosopher out of their way, as an impediment to energetic and immediate action. When, there- fore, the Residency at Nagpore fell vacant in November, 1850, a post for which both brothers thought Mansel better suited, they agreed in asking Lord Dalhousie to send him thither. Lord Dalhousie assented, and Mansel took the appointment with probably not a little feeling of relief. Indeed, the third place in the Board can have been no bed of roses to its occupant, whoever he might be. Henry Lawrence himself, speaking from his own experience, called it a bed of thorns, and, by a strange coincidence, there stepped into it the man who had been a friend of the Lawrence family from his earliest boyhood, had been at Foyle College with both Henry and John LaAvrence, and with John at Wraxhall also ; had known the wives of both while they were still young girls living in his own neighbourhood amidst the wilds of Donegal ; had kept up his affectionate interest in them and in their husbands while he was gradually rising from one post of duty to another with a rapidly increasing reputation in the North-West; had been, on Henry Lawrence’s recommendation, summoned to Lahore Avhen the annexation of the Punjab took place, and had noAAr, during the last year and a-half, as the Commissioner of the most central and most important district of the annexed province, been brought into close official connection with both him and John. He AA’as thus marked out by his antecedents, by his actual position, and by his promise for the future, to be their colleague on the Board ; and so he stepped, as of natural right, into the vacant seat. 334 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1 849-52 Attached by ties of enthusiastic admiration and love to Henry Lawrence, and by strong affection as well as by general apti- tudes, by official training and by views of State policy, to John, he seemed pre-eminently the man to get on well with both, to pour oil upon the troubled waves, and, if he could not alto- gether remove, at least to lessen, the rubs and annoyances, the heart-burnings and the misconceptions, which, if they had hither- to worked admirably for the State, had not worked equally well for the peace of mind of those who held the reins of power. With an appetite for work sufficient to satisfy the demands of the Lawrences themselves, and perhaps an even greater facility for getting through it ; with a readiness of resource which never failed ; with an equanimity which was depicted even on his countenance and could never be ruffled ; and with a cool cour- age which never allowed him to doubt that things, even when they looked most desperate, would somehow come right at last, and forced those who were of a less sanguine temperament to share his confidence, — he seemed marked out for the place he was to fill, even if the profound peace which then reigned in the Punjab should be succeeded by a time of trouble. No one then foresaw — it was impossible that they could have foreseen — the storm which, some years afterwards, was to burst over India ; but even if it had been foreseen, and its exact course predicted, it is doubtful whether any man could have been found in the whole of the country so admirably adapted to fill the precise niche which he did fill when the outbreak came. If there is any one act in the long roll of the brilliant achievements of the lieutenants of John Lawrence during the Mutiny which maybe singled out from the rest as having been done exactly at the time, at the place, and in the manner in which it ought to have been done — as having been planned with caution as well as cour- age, and carried out with triumphant success, and so, as having given, at the very beginning of the struggle, an omen of its ultimate result — that act was the disarmament of the sepoys at Lahore on the morning of May 13, 1857 ; and the man to whom, by universal consent among all the authorities at Lahore who co-operated so well towards it, it was pre-eminently due was Robert Montgomery. It is difficult, as one thinks of the three men thus brought, after such widely different, but such laborious and such uphill lives, to sit together at the same Council Board, not to let the imagination leap back again and again to the primitive country 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 335 school, with its rough amusements, its meagre education, and its spirit-stirring associations, which I have attempted to de- scribe in the first chapter of this biography. And I am fortun- ately able here to relate an anecdote which will, I think, not allow anyone who reads it, ever afterwards to forget that the triumvirate of Lahore had also been a triumvirate at Foyle Col- lege, or that the two great brothers who could not agree in some matters of public policy were at least agreed in what is more important — in common memories and common affection, in gratitude for services, however humble and however long gone by, and in a generosity which, in the case of the elder brother, was limited only by all that his purse contained ; in the case of the younger, only by a sense of the rival claims which other objects might have upon it. I owe the anecdote, in the first instance, to Dr. Charles Hathaway, the one eye-wit- ness on the occasion. But I may add that its accuracy is also vouched for by the one survivor of the triumvirate, Sir Robert Montgomery, who, at this distance of time, had nearly forgotten the circumstances, but to whom, when once the fountains of memory were tapped, they have come back with nearly their original freshness. On December 25, 1850, the three members of the Board and their wives were taking their Christmas dinner together at the old Residency house at Anarkulli. The host was, of course, the President, Sir Henry Lawrence ; and the only other guest present was Dr. Hathaway, the civil surgeon. The ladies had retired, and there had been a few minutes’ silence, when Sir Henry turned abruptly to his brother, and said, ‘ I wonder what the two poor old Simpsons are doing at this moment, and whether they have had any better dinner than usual to-day ! ’ The Simpsons, it must be explained, were twin brothers in very humble circumstances, who had been ushers in Foyle College. The life of an usher in a private school, never a very easy one, was not likely to have been more than usually pleasant amidst a lot of rough Irish boys ; and the Lawrences, in particular, were fully conscious that, in their exuberant boyish spirits, they had not done as much as they might to make a galling yoke easy, or a heavy burden light. Sir Henry’s sudden apostrophe aw’akened many old memories of the school life at Londonderry ; and, after a few remarks had been made upon the singular coinci- dence, that the three men who had been at school together as boys so many years back, now found themselves associated to- 336 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 gether once more as the rulers of the Punjab, Henry Lawrence, with the impulsive generosity which formed so prominent a part of his character, exclaimed, ‘ I’ll tell you what we will do. The Simpsons must be very old, and, I should think, nearly blind ; they cannot be well off ; let us each put down 50/. and send it to them to-morrow as “ a Christmas-box from a far-off land, with the good wishes of three of their old pupils, now mem- bers of the Punjab Board of Administration at Lahore.” ’ ‘ All right,’ said John, ‘ I’ll give 50/.’ ‘All right,’ said Montgomery, ‘ I’ll give another.’ The cheques were drawn and exchanged on the morrow for a treasury remittance-note on England, which was duly despatched. The kind message with its enclosure found its way safely across the ocean. Weeks passed by, each spent in hard work and rough work, and the subject was nearly forgotten, when one morning, amongst the pile of letters brought in by the dawk, there was one bearing an Irish post-mark. It was from the old Simpson brothers at Londonderry. The characters were written in a tremulous hand, and in many places were almost illegible from the writer’s tears, which had evidently fallen al- most faster than he wrote. That letter, if it could be found, would be worth publishing. Very possibly, it was preserved by Sir Henry ; and had it not been for the unfortunate circum- stances under which his papers were passed about from hand to hand, in order that a record of his life might be handed down to posterity, it might, perhaps, be found among them now. But the memory of him to whom I owe the story has carefully pre- served, through the lapse of thirty years, its general drift and its most salient points. It began : ‘ My dear, kind boys ; ’ but the pen of the old man had afterwards been drawn through the word ‘boys,’ and there had been substituted for it the word 4 friends.’ It went on to thank the donors, in the name of his brother as well as of himself, for their most generous gift, which, he said, would go far to keep them from want during the short time that might be left to them ; but far above the actual value of the present, was the preciousness of the thought that they had not been forgotten by their old pupils, in what seemed to be the very high position to which they had risen. He did not know what the ‘ Board of Administration ’ meant, but he felt sure it was something very important ; and he added in a postscript to his letter, with childlike simplicity, that he had looked out the Punjab in ‘ the old school atlas,’ which they had 1 849—52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE.- 337 so often used together, but he could not find either it or La- hore ! ‘ Oh,’ said Sir Henry, when he came to this part in the letter, to his friend Dr. Hathaway, who happened again to be present, * if you could only see, as I can see it now, that grimy old atlas, grown still more grimy by its use during the thirty years which have passed since I knew it, and the poor old fellow trying to find in it what it does not contain ! ’ It only remains to be added — and it gives a touching finish to the story — that the writer of the letter, old as he was, lived on till he saw one of his three pupils in the flesh once more; and that, when the citizens of Londonderry were giving a ban- quet to Sir Robert Montgomery, who had just then returned from India, with the honours of the Mutiny thick upon him, the half-blind old schoolmaster managed, with the help of a ticket that had been given him, to be present also. His purse may have been as empty, but his heart must certainly have been as full as that of any of the assembled guests ; and it may safely be asserted that by this time he hardly needed to look into ‘ the old school atlas ’ to find where the Punjab lay ; for it was from the Punjab that India had been saved, and it was to his three old pupils and benefactors, Henry Lawrence, John Lawrence, and Robert Montgomery, that its salvation was admitted to be chiefly due. He died very shortly afterwards, happy that he had lived on, like Ulysses’ faithful dog of old, to see the day of his pupil’s, or of his lord’s return. "Apyov S' av Kara p-oip' tAafiev piAavo s Oavaroio A vtlk ISovt 'OSvcrrja ietKourw iviairrui. In January, 1852, Lord Stanley (now the Earl of Derby), who was then making a tour in India, visited Lahore, and was, for a few days, the guest of John Lawrence. It was here that he saw for the first time the man whom, on his return to England seven years later, he was to appoint to the newly formed Indian Coun- cil, and whom, twenty years later again, in his admirable speech at the * Lawrence Memorial ’ meeting at the Mansion House, he was to describe in two words, which, in my opinion, hit off better than any others that which was most essential in John Lawrence’s character. ‘ Without,’ said Lord Derby, ‘ claiming any special intimacy with Lord Lawrence, I may say, as the world goes, that I knew him well, and the impression that his character always left on my mind I can only describe as that of Vol. I.— 22 338 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 a certain heroic simplicity.' Lord Dalhousie, in anticipation of Lord Stanley’s visit to the Punjab, had written previously to both the brothers, begging them, if possible, to prevent his ex- tending his travels to the dangerous North-West frontier, on which the Mohmunds and the Swattis were just then giving trouble. ‘ If any ill-starred accident should happen,’ said he, ‘ it would make a good deal of difference whether it happened to Lord Stanley and Sir Henry Lawrence or to John Tomkins and Bill Higgins.’ But British India is, happily, not like Rus- sian Turkestan ; and not even the most cautious Governor- General would think of putting anything but moral impedi- ments in the way of any visitor, English or Russian, who might wish to see any part of his dominions. ‘ Lord Stanley,’ writes John Lawrence in reply to the Governor-General, ‘ has just left us after seeing all that was to be seen at Lahore. He will join my brother in Huzara and then go with him via Peshawur to the Derajat ; he was not to be dissuaded from the Kohat pass.’ It was the last tour, as it turned out, that Henry Lawrence was ever to take along the frontier of the province which he loved, and which loved him so well. There is little of general or even of biographical interest in the correspondence which passed between John Lawrence and the Governor-General while his elder brother was absent on this and a subsequent tour in the interior. The Mohmunds and Swattis and ‘ fanatics of Sitana,’ afterwards so famous, had been showing signs of hostility, and John Lawrence, as his letters prove, was in favour of offensive operations against them, from which Sir Colin Campbell, with his usual caution, seemed to shrink. It is quite clear how averse Sir Colin Campbell is to entering the hills at all. Whatever reasons he may give, his real one is a want of confi- dence in the Regular Native Infantry. This feeling is not only shared by nearly all the Queen’s officers but by many of the Company’s officers also. I believe if they expressed their real opinion they would prefer go- ing with any infantry but the Regulars. The Guides, Ghoorkas, Punjab Irregulars, are all thought more of for hill warfare than the Regulars. Would it not then, my Lord, be well to reduce the number of the lat- ter, and increase our Irregular infantry ? I would not advocate too large a reduction of the Regulars. Their fidelity and habits of obedience will always make them valuable, but a mixture of troops of other races would make our army more efficient in time of war, and quite as safe in peace. . . . I feel convinced that until we do inflict a real chastisement on either the Mohmunds or Swattis, the Peshawur valley will never be 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 339 tranquil, ami that the longer the punishment is delayed, the more mani- fest this will be. I cannot believe that it would be a difficult matter to effect our object, if we only go at it with a real will. About this time George Edmondstone, the able Commissioner of the Cis-Sutlej States, fell ill and was obliged to contemplate a visit to England, and the arrangements for filling his place, and that of the still more important Commissionership of La- hore, rendered vacant by the elevation of Montgomery, occu- pied very much of John Lawrence’s time and thoughts. He brought the claims of all possible candidates before Lord Dal- housie, with whom the patronage rested, with judicial impar- tiality, and after weighing them in his own mind, ended by recommending George Barnes for the one appointment, and Charles Raikes, Collector of Mynpoorie, and formerly, as will be remembered, his own assistant at Paniput, for the other. Henry Lawrence was inclined to recommend other arrange- ments, but the Governor-General, as usual, agreed with John. It is hopeless (John Lawrence had written to him) to look for results of real value unless the Commissioner is a first-rate officer, thoroughly un- derstanding that which he has to teach. In looking back on the past three years since annexation, I feel that we owe much to these officers. We may lay down rules and principles, but these fall still-born to the ground without Commissioners to explain their scope and meaning, and see them carried out. The progress in each division has been in a di- rect proportion to the zeal, the energy, and the experience of its Com- missioners. I write to your Lordship frankly and openly. I feel that the good of the country and my own reputation depend on the men who are selected for high employment. . . . Thornton has excellent qualities. He is a good revenue officer, perhaps the best we have, and is efficient in all departments. His main excellence is the pains he takes to instruct and train the men under him. It may be convenient here, and it is certainly just and right, now that ive have reached the time when the Board which had done such splendid work in the Punjab was about to be swept away, to bring together the names of the more prominent or more promising of those officers to whom the Lawrence brothers were so anxious to put it on record that a large part of their success was due. Many of their names have occurred before in this biography ; many of them will occur again and again, some as among the foremost heroes, military or civil, of 340 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 the Mutiny, some as excellent generals in India or outside of it, some as able administrators of provinces as vast or vaster than the Punjab itself, others again as civil engineers, as writers, as explorers, as statesmen — but all of them connected by ties of friendship or respect with the subject of this bio- graphy, and all of them, also, fellow-workers with him in a school where there was no room for the unwilling, the laggard, the incompetent. Of the seven Commissionerships, then, into which the whole annexed Sikh territory had been divided, Lahore had fallen at first to Montgomery and afterwards to Raikes, Jhelum to Ed- ward Thornton, Mooltan to Edgeworth, Leiaand the Derajat to Ross, Peshawur and Huzara to Mackeson, the Cis-Sutlej at first to Edmondstone and afterwards to Barnes, the Trans-Sutlej, John Lawrence’s own first post of dignity, to Donald Macleod. But many of the subordinate positions were held by men who were quite as promising, and some of them have risen to even greater distinction than those I have already mentioned. Such were men like Robert Napier and Neville Chamberlain, John Nicholson and Herbert Edwardes, George Macgregor and James Macpherson, George Lawrence and Harry Lumsden, John Becher and Alexander Taylor, James Abbott and Saun- ders Abbott, Crawford Chamberlain and Reynell Taylor, George Campbell and Richard Temple, Henry Davies and Robert Cust, Edward Lake and George Barnes, Hercules Scott and Richard Lawrence, Lewin Bowring and Edward Brandreth, Richard Pollock and Douglas Forsyth. Probably never, in the whole history of our Indian Empire, have there been so many able men collected together within the limits of a single province, and never has there been a province which could, with so little favour, open to so many able men so fair a field. But the Lawrence brothers, whose fame had brought all these distinguished men together, and had made employment in the Punjab to be an object of ambition throughout India, had now, as it seemed, pretty well completed such good work for it as they could do best in double harness. The Board had never been looked upon either by Lord Dalhousie, who estab- lished it, or by the members of which it was composed, as more than a provisional arrangement to meet temporary needs. These needs it met, as I have already pointed out, in a way in which no other arrangement would, probably, have done. 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 341 Under its rule the country had quieted down. Its fierce and fanatical soldiers had become peaceful agriculturists. The military arrangements for the defence of the frontier, and the police arrangements fflr the suppression of crime and the pre- servation of order, had been almost completed. Organised bri- gandage and violent crime had ceased to exist. The land-tax had been lightened, and the whole revenue arrangements over- hauled. Material improvements of every kind — bridges, roads, canals, courts of justice, barracks, schools, hospitals, asylums — had been projected and had been taken in hand. The old order, in fact, had already changed, and had given place to the new ; and if much still remained to be done, the country had been fairly launched on a career of peaceful progress and con- tentment. And now a normal state of things throughout the newly annexed province seemed to call for a less abnormal government than that of a Board. These general considerations in favour of a change derived fresh force from the idiosyncracies of the triumvirate. The differences of temperament, of training, of aptitude, and of methods of work, which had been pretty well apparent between the brothers before the Board was formed, were forced into prominence as soon as it met, and became more and more marked as the work grew under their hands, and all pointed to the dissolution of a partnership as the best, though a melan- choly, cure for a state of things which had become intolerable to the partners. The advent of Montgomery, the lifelong friend of the two brothers, full of promise as it had seemed at the moment, made things worse rather than better, at all events to the mind of the brother who had first summoned him to the Punjab. Montgomery was, in a special sense, the friend of Henry. But his training and general views of policy tended to make him in almost all disputed questions agree with John. Recommended by Henry for the Board in the hope that he would oppose John’s views, it turned out that, like Balaam, he blessed him altogether, and Henry Lawrence, one of whose besetting faults, as it appears to me, was an inability at times to distinguish between honest disagreement and personal or interested antagonism, seemed to feel once and again that, like Ahithophel, his own familiar friend had lifted up his heel against him. The question of public policy on which, as I have often pointed out, the two brothers differed most was that of the 342 • LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 treatment of the jagheerdars, or men who, under the native system of government, had received in return for services — past, present, or future, rendered or only imagined — a lien on the land revenue of particular districts. It was a question be- set with difficulties everywhere, but more particularly so in the Punjab, where tenures of the kind were unusually numerous and important. A large part of Runjeet Sing’s army had con- sisted of cavalry contingents furnished by chiefs who had held their lands by this kind of feudal tenure. The principal minis- ters of the Lahore Court, the families of Runjeet Sing’s chief warriors, the wives, widows, and concubines of himself and his three shadowy successors, the royal barber and the royal apoth- ecary, the royal astrologer and the cook who had invented a new dish which suited the royal palate, Brahmins and fakirs, schools and charitable institutions, were all supported at the time of annexation, not by payments in hard cash from the treasury, but by alienations of the land-tax, or, to speak more accurately, by the right given to the incumbents to squeeze as much revenue as they could out of a given district. These alienations had, sometimes, been continued by the na- tive rulers from generation to generation, sometimes they had been immediately and arbitrarily resumed. But in all cases it was within the power of the Government to recall them at its pleasure. Such a system might suit a government which cared only for revenue which it should be no trouble to collect, and for an army which it should be no trouble to raise and to main- tain, but such could not be the methods or the objects of the English Government. The Sikhs administered the country by means of jagheerdars, and paid them by their jagheers ; the English administered it by highly paid British officers, at the same time that they endeavoured to lower the land-tax, and to introduce grand material reforms. Was it possible to combine the two methods of government ? This is the kernel of the whole question, and on the answer given to it will depend the verdict that we give on the chief cause of dispute between the brothers. It was, of course, a question of degree rather than of kind between them. Certain general principles were laid down by the Supreme Government which seem, under the circumstances, to have been liberal enough. For instance, all authorised grants to former rulers and all State pensions were to be main- tained in perpetuity so long as the object of the endowment i 849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 343 was fulfilled. It was in the details of the cases which could not be fixed by any hard and fast rule, and were wisely left for special consideration, that the two brothers came most into col- lision. In these Henry, alike from temperament and policy, always leaned to the view most favourable to the jagheerdar. John leaned, in like manner, to the view most favourable to the interest of the masses, and therefore also to the objects of the English Government. The preliminary inquiries which had to be instituted were of portentous proportions. There were some ten thousand cases of pensions alone, not to speak of an indefinite number of jag- heers, varying in size from a province to a village. Herbert Edwardes had been especially appointed to conduct the prelim- inary inquiry in each case, and, when he was wanted elsewhere, John Becher succeeded to the duty. Becher, whose general sympathies were more in accord with Henry, usually recom- mended a settlement very much in favour of the jagheerdar. He would take the case first to the President, who was working in one room of the Resider.cy, and who always countersigned his recommendation ; he then took it to John, who was work- ing in an adjoining room, and who would say, with a merry twinkle of his eye which no one appreciated more than John Becher himself, ‘ Ah, I see you want to get over me and let these lazy fellows waste the public money. No, I won’t have it ; sweep it away ! ’ Becher then took the case to Montgom- ery, who generally agreed with John. Thus it happened, as Richard Temple once acutely remarked to Herbert Edwardes, that, in these matters, while each brother was a salutary check on the other, they, at the same time, confirmed each other’s faults. Henry was more lavish in his proposals because he thought that John would attempt to cut them down, whatever their nature, and John was more hard and economical upon parallel reasoning. The advent of Montgomery, in October, 1851, and the at- tempt made by John in the interests of peace to procure a di- vision of labour, had seemed, for the moment, to lessen the friction. Aut it was for the moment only. In May, 1852 — in the interval, that is, between his last tour to the Derajat fron- tier and that to Dhurmsala — Henry wrote to Montgomery a long letter of complaint against John, with the request that he would show it to the delinquent ; and John replied, on the following day, at much greater length, carrying the war into the enemy’s 344 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 country, and ending with a similar request. Montgomery, ‘ a regular buffer,’ as he humorously describes himself, ‘ between two high-pressure engines,’ in forwarding John’s reply to Henry, gave him some wise advice, in every word of which those who know him well may see the man. ‘ Read it,’ he said, ‘gently and calmly, and I think you had better not answer it. I doubt not that you could write a folio in reply, but there would be no use. With your very different views you must both agree to differ, and when you happen to agree, be thank- ful. It had been far happier for me were your feelings on pub- lic matters more in unison. I am happy to be a friend of you both. Though differing from you often, I have never found you judge me harshly. I try to act as fairly and conscientiously as I can, and would, in my heart, much rather agree than differ from you.’ It is hardly necessary to say, that, in spite of this good advice, a folio was written in reply. But the ever-ready peacemaker asked permission not to show a letter which he thought would only make matters worse. ‘ I will tell John, verbally, that you told me that you felt hurt at his letter, and will mention some of the most prominent of your remarks as mildly as I can.’ Never surely did any ‘ buffer ’ do such highly moral work, or strive so manfully to keep two high-pressure engines from in- juring each other ! Extracts from the correspondence, sufficient to show its gen- eral purport, have been given by Herman Merivale in his life of Sir Henry ; and, like him, I see no good end which could be answered by publishing, at this distance of time, the exact charges and counter-charges brought against each other by two high-spirited and noble-minded brothers, whose devotion to each other was, after all, only less than their devotion to what each considered to be his public duty. Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites Et tu dignus, et hie. Many of the faults alleged, such as the interference of one brother with the duties of the other, were no faults at all, but were the result of the purest benevolence ; others, if they were faults, were at least faults on virtue’s side, and turned out to be most advantageous to the public interest others, again, ex- isted only in the heated imagination of the writer. What por- tion of the mutual recriminations I deem to have been, to some i 849-5 2 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 345 extent, well founded — the uncontrolled temper, the personal antagonism, the desultoriness and dilatoriness in office work of Henry ; the bluntness even to a fault, the masterful spirit, the unbending will, and the imperfect sympathy with men who were the victims of a bad system, of John, I have endeavoured to indicate in the course of the foregoing narrative. I feel that I am acting more in the spirit of Montgomery’s advice, and, at the same time, doing what each brother would, in his cooler moments, have preferred, if, instead of reproducing their heated recriminations, I quote here rather a letter written by John to Lord Dalhousie, as far back as November 23, 1849 — a few months only, that is, after annexation — which states with judi- cial fairness the differences which, even then, he felt that no ef- forts could bridge over, and, at the same time, shows how ready he was to be thrown overboard, like Jonah, if, by that means, the ship of the State might be enabled to carry more sail and proceed more cheerily on her voyage. My Lord, — I have the honour to acknowledge your Lordship’s kind note of the 20th, and beg to offer my sincere thanks for the handsome terms in which you have been good enough to express your sense of my exertions. It is, unquestionably, a source of gratification to know that one’s services, however humble, are appreciated by those best qualified to judge. Your Lordship may be assured that, so long as I remain at Lahore, my best exertions shall never be wanting in whatever berth it may be my fortune to fall. I have all my life been a hard worker, and it has now become a second nature to me. I work, therefore, as much from habit as from principle. My constitution is naturally a strong one, and I have never tried it un- fairly. But it requires a good deal more exercise and work out of doors than I am now able to afford time for. Had I followed the dictates of my own feelings I would have retained my old berth in the Trans-Sutlej territory, where my duties so happily blended mental with physical exertion. This post had no charms for me ; the solitary one, that of ambition, no longer existed w'hen Mr. Man- sel was appointed above me. I felt, however, that it was the post of honour, that I was expected to accept it, and that to have refused would have led to misconceptions. Having done so, I have endeavoured to dis- charge the duties to the best of my ability. How onerous these duties are, few can understand who are not behind the scenes. There are many drawbacks to my position, however high and honourable, inde- pendent of that of health, particularly to a man of decided opinions and peculiar temperament. If I know myself, I believe I should be happier and equally useful to the State if I thought and acted on my own bottom. I am not well fitted by nature to be one of a triumvirate. Right or 346 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 wrong, I am in the habit of quickly making up my mind on most subjects, and feel little hesitation in undertaking the responsibility of carrying out my views. The views of my brother, a man far abler than I am, are in many respects opposed to mine. I can no more expect that on organic changes he will give way to me, than I can to him. He is my senior in age, and we have always been staunch friends. It pains me to be in a state of antagonism towards him. A better and more honourable man I don’t know, or one more anxious to discharge his duty conscientiously ; but in matters of civil policy of the first importance we differ greatly. With Mr. Mansel I am on excellent terms ; but his views incline more to my brother’s than my own. Thus I have not only my own work to do, but have to struggle with my colleagues. This is not good for the pub- lic service. Its emergencies require a united and vigorous administra- tion. I have no claims on your Lordship’s patronage, but if there is another post available in which my talents and experience can be usefully em- ployed, I shall be glad to be considered a candidate. I have always had the credit of some administrative talent, and for three years previous to annexation not only brought my own charge — the Trans-Sutlej territory — into the flourishing condition it is in now, but for many months, during the two first years, was also employed at Lahore, on duties foreign to my own post. Had I been a soldier and not a civilian, I should have received rank and honours. Men who were my assistants, who were commencing their career then, have gained them, and justly. When the late Governor-General left India, the last letter he wrote was to me, thanking me for my services, and telling me that, had he re- mained, he would have served me. Though a little vexed at the mode in which Sir Frederick Currie superseded me at Lahore, I felt no very anxious desire for the berth ; for I knew too well its difficulties and dan- gers, and was satisfied with what I had. I feel myself now in a false position, and would be glad to extricate myself if I can do it with hon- our. I would not have thus intruded my hopes and wishes on your Lordship but for the consideration I have experienced at your hands. I will not further weary your Lordship with my affairs. I will simply add, that if it is necessary that I stay at Lahore, I will do so with cheerfulness, and fulfil my duties as long as health and strength may last. Lord Dalhousie shelved the request thus pathetically made by the just and pregnant remark that, however the brothers might suffer, the result was unquestionably beneficial to the public. And so the public-spirited John clung gallantly to the ship which did for another three years speed steadily on her course, but with ever-increasing strain to those who had to work her and to stand in all weathers at the helm. At last, in December, 1852, the crisis came. The Residency at Hyderabad fell vacant, 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 347 and both brothers wrote — almost simultaneously — to Lord Dal- housie, requesting him to transfer one or other of them to the vacant post. Each avowed frankly his own preference for the Punjab, but each expressed his readiness and even anxiety to leave it rather than prolong the existing state of'things. Make any arrangement, was the upshot of their request, by which we may yet do good service to the State, but let it be in lines where our different views may obtain their appropriate field. John wrote to Courtenay, the Secretary to the Governor-Gen- eral. The letter is long, but it is important, and I quote the greater part of it. Lahore : December 5. 1852. My dear Courtenay, — The circumstance that General Fraser is about to leave Hyderabad has led me to a hope, perhaps a vain one, that it may give an opening for some change in my present position. I am well aware how decidedly the Governor-General was, last year, opposed to my leaving the Punjab, and how much kindness he showed me in giv- ing Mansel Nagpore. But it is just possible that the same objections may not appear so cogent now. Be this as it may, I feel a strong desire to explain to you the perplexities of my situation. My brother and I work together no better than we formerly did. Indeed, the estrange- ment between us has increased. We seldom meet, and still more seldom discuss public matters. I wish to make no imputation against him. His antecedents have been so different from mine, we have been trained in such different schools, that there are few questions of internal policy connected with the administration on which we coincide. I have now, as I have always had since annexation, a very large portion of the work to do. I have endeavoured, but in vain, to secure a division of labour, not simply because I was impatient of advice, or averse to hear the opinions of my colleagues, but because I found it was the only way to prevent continual collision. I can understand each member working his own department, enjoying the credit of success, and responsible for failure. I can understand three members working in unison who have a general unity of view, and the work of all thereby lightened. But what I feel is the mischief of two men brought together, who have both strong wills and views diametrically opposed, and whose modes and habits of business do not conform. The Governor-General once remarked to me that, however much we might both suffer from such a state of things, the result has been publicly beneficial. It may have been so, but this is daily becoming less apparent. You once remarked that had I given way more, it was not improbable that my brother would ere this have gone home. But this is a mistake. He will stay in India as long as he can. He does not like England ; his wife absolutely dislikes it. He will live and die in harness, as I have often heard him express it. But, setting all this 348 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 aside, I should be sincerely sorry to benefit at his expense. Moreover, it would have been neither honourable nor becoming to have given up my deeply rooted and long-considered views of public matters in the hope of personal benefit. The result, also, in the administration would have proved different. Our antagonism has had the effect of securing a middle course, but it has lessened the force of the administration ; it has delayed the despatch of business, and given rise to anomalies and incon- sistencies in our correspondence and policy, and lessened the influence we should possess over our subordinates. To me this state of things has been so irksome, so painful, that I would consent to great sacrifices to free myself. I care not how much work I have, how great may be my responsibilities, if I have simply to depend on myself ; but it is killing work always pulling against wind and tide, always fighting for the unpop- ular and ungrateful cause. I am the member of the Board for economy even to frugality ; my brother is liberal even to excess. I see that the expenses of the country are steadily increasing, and its income rather decreasing, and thus that useful and necessary expenditure must be denied. I am constantly urged to give my countenance to measures I deem inexpedient, and my refusal is resented as personally offensive. I am averse to passing any questions, to recommending any measure, without scrutiny ; this necessity is not felt by my brother, or he satisfies himself by a shorter process, and hence I have to toil through every detail. Even when I go away for a time I gain little, for I still carry my own immediate work, and when I return find accumulated arrears. If I feel so heavily the discomfort of my position, my brother is equal- ly sensible of his own. He thinks he has not that power and influence which, as President, he should have, or which his general ability and force of character should ensure for him. He deems himself checked and trammelled on all sides. . . . If Hyderabad is not thought suited to me, or is wanted for another, I shall be glad of any berth which may fall vacant. Rajpootana, Lucknow, Indore, would, any of them, delight me. I would even accept a Commissioncrship, and go back to the hum- drum lifeof the North-West, if I can do so with honour. My first impulse was to write to the Governor-General. On reflection I prefer addressing you. A refusal through you will, perhaps, be less distressing than one from his Lordship. You can say as little or as much to him as you think fit. He has always treated me with frankness and consideration, nor do I wish him to think me insensible of such treatment. I can write to you with more ease than would be becoming if I addressed his Lordship. The two resignations being thus practically placed together in Lord Dalhousie’s hands, it remained for him to make the embarrassing choice, which he had so long managed to post- pone, between them. Ilad it still been his wish to prolong the existence of the Board, his choice would hardly have been i S49-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 349 doubtful between the soldier who disagreed with so much of his policy and the civilian who heartily approved of it. liut he had long since made up his mind, when a convenient oppor- tunity should occur, to dissolve the Board itself now that its work was done, and to substitute for it the rule of a single man. This made his decision to be almost beyond the possi- bility of doubt. No conscientious Governor-General would be likely to confide the destinies of so vast and so important a province to the supreme command of a man with whom he was only half in sympathy and to whom, owing to the differences between them, he had never given more than half his confi- dence, when there was a rival candidate on whom he could place the most implicit reliance, and with whom he could feel the full- est sympathy. The Hyderabad vacancy had already been filled up by the appointment of Colonel Low, but the ‘ Agency to the Governor-General in Rajpootana,’ a post, in many respects, admirably suited to a man who had such keen sympathy with native dynasties and which required its occupant to travel about all the cool season, and allowed him to rest all the hot in the pleasant retreat of Mount Aboo, was offered to Henry Law- rence instead. But Rajpootana was not the Punjab. It was not the country in which he had made warm personal friends by thousands, and round which the labours and the aspirations of a lifetime had gathered. What booted it that his salary as Agent was to be made equal to that which he had had as member of the Board ; that the work was less heavy and less trying ; and that the Governor-General, by way of sugaring the bitter pill which he had to swallow, told him that if Sir Thomas Monro himself had been a member of the Board he would still have been driven to appoint ‘ a trained civilian ’ in preference to him as Chief Com- missioner ? All this was like so much vinegar poured into, his open wounds; for Henry Lawrence, if he was not ‘a trained civilian,’ and if he failed therefore in the more mechanical parts of a civilian’s duty — method, accuracy of detail, continuous ap- plication— seems to have been altogether unconscious of the failure ; and it is not too much to say that for twenty years past he had filled civil and political offices in the North-West, on the Punjab frontier, and in the Punjab itself, in a way in which few civilians in India could have filled them. His life was henceforward to be a wounded life, and he carried with him to the grave a bitter sense of what he thought was the in- 350 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1849-52 jury done to him by Lord Dalhousie. Perhaps he would have been more or less than human if it had not been so. But if he needed any assurance of the way in which his work had told, and of the impress which he would leave behind him in the country of his choice, it would have been given by the scene which, as more than one person who was present has described it to me, was witnessed at Lahore when the decision of Lord Dalhousie — fully expected, yet almost stupefying when it came ; quite justified by the facts, yet, naturally enough, resented and condemned — was made known there. Grief was depicted on every face. Old and young, rich and poor, soldiers and civil- ians, Englishmen and natives, each and all felt that they were about to lose a friend. Strong men, Herbert Edwardes conspic- uous amongst them, might be seen weeping like little children ; and when the last of those last moments came, and Henry Law- rence, on January 20, 1853, accompanied by his wife and sister, turned his back for ever upon Lahore and upon the Punjab, a long cavalcade of aged native chiefs followed him, some for five, some for ten, others for twenty or twenty-five miles out of the city. They were men, too, who had nothing now to hope from him, for the sun of Henry Lawrence had set, in the Pun- jab at least, for ever. But they were anxious to evidence, by such poor signs as they could give, their grief, their gratitude, and their admiration. It was a long, living funeral procession from Lahore nearly to Umritsur. Robert Napier, now Lord Napier of Magdala, was the last to tear himself away from one who was dearer to him than a brother. ‘Kiss him,’ said Henry Lawrence to his sister, as Napier turned back, at last, heart- broken towards Lahore. ‘ Kiss him, he is my best and dearest friend.’ When he reached Umritsur, at the house of Charles Saunders, the Deputy-Commissioner, a new group of mourners and afresh outburst of grief awaited him ; and thence he passed on into Rajpootana, ‘dented all over,’ to use his friend Herbert Edwardes’ words, ‘with defeats and disapprovals, honourable scars in the eyes of the bystanders.’ They were honourable, indeed, because they were all of them received, in accordance with his own chivalrous character, ‘ in defence of those who were down.’ ‘ To know Sir Henry was to love him,’ says one of his friends. ‘No man ever dined at Sir Henry’s table without learning from him to think more kindly of the natives,’ says another. ‘ His character was far above his career, distinguished as that career 1849-52 HENRY AND JOHN LAWRENCE. 351 was,’ said Lord Stanley. * There is not, I am sure,’ said Lord Canning, when the disastrous news of his soldier’s death at Lucknow thrilled throughout England and India, ‘any English- man in India who does not regard the loss of Sir Henry Law- rence as one of the heaviest of public calamities. There is not, I believe, a native of the provinces where he has held authority who will not remember his name as that of a friend and gener- ous benefactor to the races of India.’ It has been my duty in the course of this narrative to point out some of the specialities in his training and his character which, in my judgment, rendered him less eligible than his younger brother for the post of Chief Commissioner of the Punjab. It is, therefore, all the more incumbent upon me to say, that having studied large portions of his unpublished cor- respondence, and having conversed with most of his surviving friends and relations, some of them followers and admirers of the younger rather than of the elder brother, it is my deliberate conviction that, take him all in all, his moral as well as his in- tellectual qualities, no Englishman who has been in India has ever influenced other men so much for good ; nobody has ever done so much towards bridging over the gulf that separates race from race, colour from colour, and creed from creed ; no- body has ever been so beloved, nobody has ever deserved to be so beloved, as Sir Henry Lawrence. CHAPTER XIII. CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 1852-1853. The departure of Sir Henry Lawrence from the Punjab, if it gave an immediate feeling of relief from an intolerable tension, was also a cause of sore distress of mind to the brother who had been working with him under such strained relations but with such truly brotherly affection. How painful and how dis- tressing the whole circumstances had been to him his innermost circle of friends and relations alone knew fully. But it may also be inferred from the whole course of the preceding narra- tive. To have worked as he had done for and with his brother, often at the expense of his personal inclinations, of his health, of his family life for years past, ever since, in fact, our connec- tion with the Punjab had begun, and then to have been driven at last to take the place which that brother might have been expected, and had himself expected, to fill ; to feel that some of the best officers in the Punjab, men who had been attracted thither by Henry, and regarded him with enthusiastic affection, were looking askance at him, perhaps attributing to him un- worthy acts or unworthy motives, and perhaps, also, preparing, like Nicholson, to leave him in the lurch and follow the for- tunes of their old master ; to feel that the iron had entered so deeply into his brother’s soul as to make it doubtful whether he would ever care to see him again, or to be addressed by the old familiar name of ‘ Hal,’ 1 — all this must have been distres- sing enough, and, for the time at all events, must have thrown the other feeling of relief into the background. In reply to a touching letter which his brother had written to him on the eve of his departure, begging him to treat the dispossessed chiefs kindly, ‘ because they were down,’ and wish- ing him all success in his new post, John Lawrence replied as follows, — His letters to his brother after this period always begin, * My dear Henry.’ 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 353 My dear Henry, — I have received your kind note, and can only say in reply that I sincerely wish that you had been left in the Punjab to carry out your own views, and that I had got another berth. I must further say that where I have opposed your views I have done it from a thorough conviction, and not from factious or interested motives. I will give every man a fair hearing, and will endeavour to give every man his due. More than this no one should expect. . . . It is more than probable that you and I will never again meet ; but I trust that all unkindly feeling be- tween us may be forgotten. Yours affectionately, John Lawrence. It was a melancholy beginning for the Chief Commissioner- ship — a post inferior in importance to few in India, and one which Sir Charles Napier had himself said he would prefer to the command-in-chief of the Indian army. But, once more, it may be observed that it was to the advantage of the State, not less than of the brothers themselves, that the change had at last been made. Henry Lawrence had bridged over the interval be- tween the native and the English systems, had eased the fall of the privileged classes, had attracted the affections of all ranks to himself, and so, in a measure, to the new Government, in a way in which John by himself could certainly not have done. The work of pacification — Henry’s proper work — was over. The foundation of the new edifice had been laid, in much tribula- tion, perhaps, but by a happy compromise between the ex- tremer views of the two brothers. It now remained to build upon the foundation which had been laid, to develop, to organ- ise, to consolidate. This could be better done by one man than by three ; and the warmest admirers of Henry will admit that, when the crisis came four years later, it was well for England and well for India that there were then, and that there had been for those four preceding years, no divided counsels in the Pun- jab. It was well that there was one clear head, one firm will, one strong hand, to which anybody and everybody could look, and which would be free to judge, to issue orders and to strike, on its own undivided responsibility. The work of John Lawrence was, as I have already pointed out, to be, in the main, one of development — of progress, that is, within lines which had been, to a great extent, laid down. It is unnecessary^, therefore, to treat the four years of peaceful rule which follow with the particularity of detail with which it seem- ed desirable to describe the virgin soil and the new fields of enter- Vol. I.— 23 354 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i852-53 prise and activity which opened out before the Board. The ques- tions which confronted John Lawrence as Chief Commissioner were much the same as those with which he had had to deal as one of the triumvirate. There was the same difficult mountain frontier to defend ; the same turbulent and faithless tribes to civilise, to conciliate, or to coerce ; the same deeply rooted social evils, which had as yet been scotched only, not killed, to grapple with. There was the same standing question — which can hardly be said to have been solved even now — of how a rev- enue may best be raised from the land, which should not unduly depress the cultivator and yet leave a margin for those grand material and social improvements which had been set on foot. Finally, there were the same diversities of character and temper in the staff of able assistants who had flocked to the Punjab, as to the crack regiment of the service, from all parts of India, to be studied and humoured, stimulated, reconciled, or controlled. It would be easy, with the help of the six folio volumes of let- ters written by Lord Lawrence during this period, and which, of course, I have myself carefully studied throughout, to show in detail how he dealt with each of these and a hundred other difficulties as they arose. But it would require at least a folio volume so to do, and it would, in my judgment, both here and in the case of his Viceroyalty, defeat the primary object which a biographer ought to keep in view throughout — the bringing before his readers in the boldest possible outlines the central figure. In such a folio volume the man would almost necessarily be lost in the details, very often in the driest and most mechan- ical details, of his work. If it revealed to us everything that he did, it would be at the cost of knowing much of what he was. I do not, therefore, propose to describe, in order of time or in minute detail, the steps by which each wild tribe that crossed our frontier was repelled and punished, and sometimes gradual- ly drawn towards a quiet life ; but rather to show what that general scheme of frontier policy was, which has been so much attacked and so much misrepresented, but which will always, as I think, be most honourably connected with Lord Lawrence’s name — a policy which has insured the safety of India, has hus- banded her resources, has respected the rights of weaker and more barbarous races, and has imposed a salutary check on the aggressive tendencies which are always natural, and not always to be severely condemned, in the military leaders of an ener- getic and expansive race. Neither do I propose to give minute 1852—53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 355 statistics, such as may be found in the Punjab Reports, of the rise and fall of the revenue or of the increase or diminution of crime, or to explain how this or that misconception in the mind of a subordinate against a brother officer, or against his chief, was removed by an infinite expenditure of tact and patience on the part of that chief ; but rather to point out how he impressed his own strong personality, his own single-minded devotion to the public service, on the whole body of his subordinates ; how he got rid of the incompetent, how he stimulated the slow, how he doubled the energies even of the most energetic. It is by such a sketch as this, rather than by a detailed history of his ad- ministration, that I hope I shall be able to make clear to others, within the limits of two or three chapters, what I think I have at least made clear to myself by long and laborious study — how it was that, when the crisis came, John Lawrence, with the help of the men whom he had gathered and had managed to keep around him, proved equal to the emergency ; and how it was that, in the Punjab and outside of it, everybody alike, his enemies as well as his friends, the natives as well as the Europeans, felt that nothing could well go wrong so long as he was at the helm. On the final abolition of the Board, in February, 1853, John Lawrence was gazetted ‘ Chief Commissioner of the Punjab.’ He alone was to be responsible to the Supreme Government for carrying out its orders. He was to be the head of the executive in all its branches, to take charge of the political relations with the adjoining states, to have the general control of the frontier force, of the Guide corps, of the military police, and of the Civil Engineer’s department. Under him there were to be two ‘ Prin- cipal Commissioners,’ the one the head of the Judicial, the other of the Financial departments of the State. The division of la- bour for which, as a member of the Board, he had so often and so earnestly pleaded, was thus carried out under the most favour- able auspices. Each of the two officers under him was to have sole control over his own department instead of a divided joint control over all. In this manner his attention was concentrated and his individual responsibility fixed, while uniformity of de- sign and of practice was secured by the appointment of a single head. The two men selected to fill the post next to John Lawrence in dignity were both of them men after his own heart. Mont- gomery, of course, was one of them. He became Judicial Commissioner, and, as such, he was not merely to be the chief 35<5 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 judge of appeal and assize, but was to discharge many purely executive functions, to superintend the roads, to be the head of the police, to have the control of the local and municipal funds, and to be responsible for the execution of miscellaneous improvements, especially for the progress of education. The Financial duties fell to George Edmondstone, who had just filled the difficult and complicated post of Commissioner in the Cis- Sutlej States, and whose contemplated return to England had filled John Lawrence with anxiety only a few weeks before. Everything now went smoothly enough. Arrears of all kinds were rapidly cleared off. Those officers who had threatened, in their vexation, to leave the Punjab, did not carry out their threat, and few of them ever talked again of doing so. Those who were away on furlough and who said, in their vexation, that they would never return to it, now that it had lost Henry Lawrence, were glad enough to do so when they found how much of what was best in Henry Lawrence’s administration was also to be found in John’s. Nicholson, in particular, whose presence among the wild tribes of Bunnoo John Law- rence pronounced, a few months later, to be ‘ well worth the wing of a regiment,’ in spite of the hasty resolve which I have just mentioned, and in spite also of many misunderstandings which were rendered inevitable by his masterful spirit and un- governable temper, was induced or enabled by the unvarying tact and temper of his chief to remain at his post even till the Mutiny broke out. A few sentences from the first letter which John Lawrence wrote to him — the first letter which he wrote to anyone after he became Chief Commissioner— may, in view of the romantic interest attaching to the recipient and the char- acteristic mixture of frankness and friendliness on the writer’s part, fitly find a place here. Lahore : January 22. My dear Nicholson,— . . . You have lost a good friend in my brother, but I hope to prove just as staunch a one to you. I set a great value on your zeal, energy, and administrative powers, though I may sometimes think you have a good deal to learn. You may rest assured of my support and goodwill in all your labours. You may depend on it that order, rule, and law are good in the hands of those who can under- stand them, and who know how to apply their knowledge. They in- crease tenfold the power of work in an able man, while, without them, ordinary men can do but little. I hope you will try and assess all the rent of Bunnoo this cold weather. It will save you much future trouble. Assess low, leaving fair and liberal margin to the occupiers of the soil, 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 357 and they will increase their cultivation and put the revenue almost be- yond the reach of bad seasons. Eschew middle-men. They are the curse of the country everywhere. The land must pay the revenue and feed them, as well as support the occupiers. With a light assessment, equally distributed over the village lands, half your labour will cease, and you will have full time to devote to police arrangements. Yours sincerely, John Lawrence. How well the promise that he would support Nicholson in all his labours was kept, is evidenced by some hundreds of let- ters which passed between the two men, and by the whole of their subsequent history. James Abbott, indeed, did leave the Punjab, to the relief, perhaps, of his immediate superiors — Mackeson and Lord Dalhousie, who had found him somewhat impracticable and wayward — but to the deep regret of the wild inhabitants of Huzara, who regarded him as a father, and with the warm appreciation of what was good and great in him (and there was very much that was both good and great in him) on the part of John Lawrence. ‘ He is a right good fellow,’ said the Chief Commissioner, ‘with ability of a high order.’ It should be added that his departure had been arranged for be- fore the abolition of the Board, and was in no way due to the change of masters. Herbert Edwardes succeeded him in Hu- zara, the halfway house, as John Lawrence pointed out, to the much more important post of Peshawur — a post which he was pre-eminently the man ‘to have and to hold’ during the troublous times that were drawing near. Hodson, who had once been a friend of Henry Lawrence, a man of great courage and energy, but with a moral twist which was to lead him all awry, succeeded to the command of the Guides in place of Harry Lumsden, who had gone home on furlough. Hathaway became Inspector of Prisons ; Raikes filled the Commissioner- ship of Lahore, vacated by Barnes, while Barnes went to the Cis-Sutlej States to take the place of Edmondstone. These were the only changes of importance in the early days of the Chief Commissionership ; and thus, though there was some shifting of the parts, the actors in the great drama, with one important exception, remained the same. It was a new act, or a new scene ; but the play was an old one, and the plot re- mained unbroken throughout. It may also be remarked here that, when once the spirit of mutual antagonism had been removed by the removal of his 358 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-S3 brother, John Lawrence's policy in the matter of jagheers and rent-free tenures began to gravitate slightly, but sensibly, to- wards that of Henry. Perhaps the last moving appeal of Henry Lawrence on behalf of ‘ those who were down ’ had touched a chord in his heart of the existence of which he may have been hardly conscious before. But in any case the recommenda- tions on the subject of such tenures — some sixty or seventy thousand of which had not yet been considered — which were made by him, as Chief Commissioner, tended to be more lib- eral in their character than any which he had ever sanctioned as member of the Board. So liberal were they, that they were often disallowed by Government, and, at last, drew down a letter of rebuke from Lord Dalhousie himself, who appealed from the John Lawrence of the present to the John Lawrence of former days. It must have been one drop of comfort in Henry Lawrence’s bitter cup, if he realised that it was so. In personal character too, I think I am not wrong in saying that John Lawrence bore, henceforward, a greater and con- stantly increasing resemblance to his brother. Without losing a particle of his energy, his independence, his zeal, he did lose, henceforward, something of his roughness, something of that which an outsider, or an opponent, might have put down as hard or harsh. ‘ The two Lawrences,’ says one who knew them intimately and appreciated them equally, General Rey- nell Taylor, ‘ were really very much alike in character. They each had their own capabilities and virtues, and, when one of them was removed from the scene, the f rater superstes succeed- ed to many of the graces of his lost brother.’ In this sense it is, I believe, true that the influence of Henry Lawrence was greater on his brother, and was even more felt throughout the Punjab Administration when he had left the country for ever, than while he was living and working within it ; just as the words, the looks, the memory of the dead have often a more living influence on the survivors than had all the charms of their personal presence. The memorable words, ‘ If I be lifted up from the earth I will draw all men unto me,’ are true, not in their literal and their original sense alone. They give ex- pression to a great fact of human nature, which — as He who uttered them would have been the first to point out — are true, in their measure, of all 1 1 is followers, and, most of all, of those who follow Him most closely. Throughout his future career when any particularly knotty 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 359 question came up, John Lawrence would ask himself as one — and that not the least important — element for his consideration how his brother Henry would ha\*e acted under the circumstan- ces. ‘ My brother Henry used to say so and so,’ were words which those who knew him best, have told me came very fre- quently to his lips ; and only a few months before his death, when he had just decided to throw himself into the breach, in the hope that he might still stop the iniquity of the Afghan war ; ‘ I believe,’ he said pathetically to Mrs. Hart, the only daughter of Sir Henry Lawrence — ‘ I believe your father would have agreed with me in what I am doing now.’ As to his own feelings now that he was able to stand on his own foundation, and to get through double the amount of work with less than half the former amount of worry, John Lawrence writes thus to the Governor-General : — I am infinitely indebted for the kind and handsome manner in which my new post has been conferred. The manner in which the favour has been granted has added greatly to its value. I only trust that I may prove worthy of the distinction. . . . Whatever may be the result of the new system, I must say that I feel no fears or misgivings on that account. I have with me some of the very best men whom the Civil Service can produce, as Commissioners. If any incentive to exertion was wanted, which I feel there is not, it is that the honour of the whole Civil Service is, to a large extent, in my hands. I desire earnestly to show what a man bred and educated as a civilian can do in a new country. To his friend Raikes he writes in similar terms. ‘ We are getting on swimmingly. The peace and comfort of the new arrangements are almost too much for one’s good. I scarcely think that I deserve to be so comfortable.’ It was not that he had more leisure, for, as he tells one correspondent, ‘ his pen was hardly ever out of his hand and he b^gs another never to cross his letters, for he was ‘ almost blind with reading manu- script.’ It is the first indication that I have been able to find of the calamity which was ultimately to overtake him. Of course there were plenty of troubles to come, but divided coun- sels and arrears of work were seldom to be among them. In one very sanguine moment, indeed, he expresses his expectation that under the new system his work will be reduced one-half, and that he will for the future be able to have more of the lux- ury of thought. But this was not a hope destined to be realised, nor would he have been a happier man if it had been. 360 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 * To get the pay of the Punjab officers raised to an equality with those of other parts of India, and so to remove a stand- ing grievance, from which they, if any officers in India, de- served to be free ; to instruct — personally to instruct, as though he had been their immediate superior — young and raw civilians in the routine of their duties, and so to bring his personal in- fluence to bear upon them from the very beginning of their career; to induce men who, like Nicholson or Mackeson or Hodson, were essentially men of action, to become — what was much more difficult and still more essential for good govern- ment— men of business also, and to keep and send in the re- ports of their administration punctually ; to induce men who, like Nicholson again, or Edwardes or James, were before all things soldiers, and whose notions of justice were essentially military notions — a short shrift or a quick delivery — to adhere rigidly to the forms of justice : to take care, for instance, that even when a murderer was caught red-handed on the Trans- Indus frontier he should be confronted with witnesses, should be allowed to summon them for himself, and to have the charge, the evidence, and the sentence carefully put on record ; to in- duce men who, like Nicholson once more, must have been con- scious of their unique powers of command and of their superior military ability, to be ready always to consult and to obey their superior in military rank ; to persuade energetic military politi- cals, like Coke, who were always burning to take part in mili- tary operations which were going on, perhaps, some fifty miles from their civil station, that the chief test of a good officer was his willingness always to remain at his post ; to keep the En- gineers, with Robert Napier at their head, within bounds in carrying out their magnificent works, and to convince them — though in this not even he, much less anyone else, could have succeeded — that one of the most necessary parts of their public duties was a strict and punctual preparation of their accounts ; to correspond at great length, and with infinite tact, with his friend Courtenay, Private Secretary to the Governor-General, on important and embarrassing questions of State, for which he was gradually to prepare the ‘ Lord Sahib’s’ mind, and then put them before him for decision in the fitting manner and at the fitting time and place ; to bring before the Governor-General himself, with judicial impartiality, the conflicting claims of every candidate for every important post in the Punjab ; to in- duce him, at whatever cost, to remove an incompetent, an un- 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 361 willing or an unworthy officer, on the principle on which he himself had always acted, that it was better that one man should die for the people than that a whole people should die for one man ; to suggest to overworked and overwilling men, like John Becher, the necessity — a necessity which John Lawrence cer- tainly never recognised in his own case — of sparing themselves, and to point out the precise methods by which they could best do so ; to help those who, like Donald Macleod, with the best intentions and the highest ability, were yet, owing to unconquer- able idiosyncrasies, always hopelessly in arrears, by actually himself going through hundreds of their papers and clearing them off ; to protect the natives generally, particularly the native soldiers, from all ill-treatment, whether of a blow, a word, or a contemptuous gesture from officers who occasionally, even in the Punjab, dared to forget that difference of colour or of race implied only an increase of moral responsibility ; to order or counter-order, or keep within the limits of justice and of moder- ation,the retaliatory expeditions which the raids of thewild tribes upon our frontier, after long forbearance on our part, often rendered inevitable ; to keep down, in view of the paramount necessity, in so poor a country, of economy, the demands for additional assistants which crowded upon him from the Com- missioners and Deputy-Commissioners as they found their work growing under their hands ; to decline civilly, but decidedly, the request of wives for their husbands, or of mothers for their sons, that he would give them appointments for which they were not competent ; to inculcate upon his subordinates his own salutary horror of jobs of every degree and every description, and to keep them as far as possible — as he had always kept himself till his health had broken down and the doctors told him that a change in his habits was essential to his stay in India — from gravitating, if I may so say, towards the hills, those delectable temptations, as he regarded them, to the neglect of work and duty ; — these were some of the subjects, perhaps a tithe of the whole, with which the correspondence of the first few months shows he had to deal, and they form, I think, a fair sample of his whole work and responsibilities as Chief Com- missioner. His correspondence with Lord Dalhousie and with John Nicholson would each fill a volume, and a volume replete with historical as well as biographical interest. That with Lord Dal- housie gives, perhaps, a higher idea, as a whole, than any other 362 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 of his loyalty and his manly frankness, of his insight and his statesmanlike breadth of view ; that with Nicholson, of his pru- dence and his patience, of his forbearance and his magnanimity — in a word, of his determination, cost him what it might, to retain in the Punjab a man whom, stiff-necked and masterful as he was, he recognised as a commanding genius, and as a single-hearted and devoted public servant. The one set of let- ters shows John Lawrence’s readiness to obey, the other his claims to command. The one gives the most convincing testi- mony to the powers of his head, the other to the still more sterling qualities of his heart. It is difficult, by any mere selection from John Lawrence’s correspondence, to give an adequate idea of the way in which he dealt whith such questions as I have enumerated ; and I have therefore put into the first place the judgment which I have myself been led to form from a minute study of them as a whole. I proceed, however, to give a few extracts which, if they do not go very far, go at least some way towards justify- ing and illustrating what I have said. A rather inexperienced, but energetic and promising, civilian, named Simson, had been thrown suddenly on a district which had been sadly neglected by his predecessor ; and, finding himself in great difficulties, frequently applied direct to the Chief Commis- sioner for help. The Chief Commissioner thus responded : — Work away as hard as you can, and get all things into order. If you succeed you will establish a claim to early promotion which cannot be overlooked, and which, as far as I go, shall not be passed over. I made my fortune, I consider, by being placed, in 1834, in a district in a state similar to Leia, in which I worked for two years, morning, noon, and night, and after all was superseded! Nevertheless, all my prosperity dates from that time. Your charge of Leia will prove a similar one in your career. ... I would throw my strength into putting things straight for the future, and leave off complaints of the past, as much as possible, weeding out bad officials, and ihaking an example in a summary but legal way here and there. . . . Without being too formal and technical, put on record all that occurs, and be careful that you act in accordance with law and justice. . . . You may give such reductions as you may consider fair and reasonable. Don’t give it merely because people scream, but where it is necessary. Better give a little too much than too little ; it will be true economy in the end. Nicholson, Simson’s neighbour at Bnnnoo, was not disposed to take his complaints and difficulties in quite such good part, 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 363 and wrote to the Chief Commissioner to that effect. The Chief Commissioner’s answer was to the point. 4 Simson is doubtless a bit of a screamer ; but the people scream even louder than he does against the bad system that has prevailed there.’ The very high opinion which John Lawrence had formed of Nicholson from the earliest times, and retained to the end, in spite of frequent trials of strength, will come out abundantly in the sequel. But the following will give some idea of one of the many difficulties which he had in dealing with him. I consent to an expedition against the Sheoranis, who have lately burnt and plundered one of our villages. I wish, however, that the Bri- gadier (Hodgson) should approve and concur in the necessity of the ex- pedition, and that either he or Fitzgerald should command. I do not wish that either you or Coke should go into the hills unless no other equally efficient officer is available. As district officers, it is desirable that you both remain in your district ; most mischievous results might ensue if either of you were killed or wounded ; for the whole of the ad- ministration would be hampered. A thoroughly characteristic remark this, and one which the recipient may, very possibly, at the time have not altogether appreciated ! A man is seldom able to contemplate his own wounds or death simply from .the point of view in which they may effect the government of the day, and he may not unnatur- ally resent the head of that government appearing to do so either. But it was John Lawrence’s way always to put public considerations in the front, leaving private considerations, as they are generally able to do, to assert themselves ; and could Nicholson have seen the terms in which this apparently un- compromising disciplinarian was even then writing to Lord Dalhousie 1 and others about his vast capacities and his intrin- sic worth, still more could he have foreseen the strong personal regard, nay, the enthusiastic admiration, which, years after- wards, when the news came — the news of a lifetime — that Del- hi had fallen, threw all joy into the background, and forced tears from the eyes of his chief, because, with the news of 1 E.g. on August 31, 1853 : ‘ I look on Major Nicholson as the best district officer on the frontier. He possesses great courage, much force of character, and is at the same time shrewd and intelligent. He is well worth the wing of a regiment on the border ; for his prestige with the people, both on the hills and plains, is very great. He is also a very fair civil officer, and has done a good deal to put things straight in his district. 3^4 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 victory, came, also, the news that he was dead, — he would have been able to read between the lines of this and similar letters, and would, perchance, have loved the man almost as much as he admired the ruler. Nicholson’s answer on this occasion does not seem to have removed the misgivings of his chief, that he might be induced by a little extra provocation to go on an expedition on his own account ; and John Lawrence writes to him again, thus : — I shall be very glad if you punish the Sheoranis, but get Hodgson to agree in your measures. Don’t think that I wish you to go into the hills with too small a force ; on no account risk anything in this way. . . . Pray report officially all incursions. I shall get into trouble if you don’t. The Governor-General insists on knowing all that goes on, and not un- reasonably ; but I can’t tell him this if I don’t hear details. A few days later the danger still seemed imminent. If you must go into the hills, by all means try and have the Brigadier in favour of it. It will not do to go against his opinion. Be he what he may as Brigadier, his opposition would be fatal if aught went wrong ; so pray try and have him in favour of the scheme, and don’t go without his consent. Even success would not justify your doing it. If he thinks you should have more troops, get him to apply to Mooltan for a corps, and say I authorise his doing so. Don’t suppose that I fear the respon- sibility of allowing you to go into the hills. I shall willingly take upon myself that responsibility, but it seems essential that the Brigadier who commands on the frontier should be in favour of the measure. Govern- ment gave the Board, and has given me the power to authorise offensive measures when absolutely necessary ; but they would not support us if aught went wrong and we had set aside the Brigadier’s opinions, so pray recollect this. And again, a few days later, he writes : — I have received your letters, public and private, regarding the Sheo- rani business, and Hodgson’s delay in attacking them. I am far from saying that you were not correct in urging an immediate attack. But as Hodgson was averse to do this, and the matter was a purely military one, he is the man to decide the question. After once giving my opinion on the matter, I would not do more. It is of much more importance that you should pull well together than that this or that plan should be fol- lowed. Well might Lord Dalhousie write: ‘I know that Nicholson is a first-rate guerilla leader ; but I don’t want a guerilla policy.’ A guerilla policy it is likely enough there would have been, all 1852—53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 3^5 along the five hundred miles of frontier, under such provoca- tion as our frontier officers were constantly receiving, had there been a less powerful and, at the same time, a less patient ruler than John Lawrence at the helm. It need only be added that the expedition did come off at last, that it was confined within reasonable limits, that it effected its purpose, and, thanks to John Lawrence’s efforts, caused no breach between the Briga- dier and his impetuous subordinate. Robert Napier, with his magnificent ideas and his regard- lessness of expense, was a help and a difficulty of a somewhat similar kind. Everything he did was well — probably it could not have been better — done. Like Nicholson, he had come into the Punjab under the auspices of Henry Lawrence ; and when John, ‘the member of the Board,’ as he described him- self, * who was for economy, even to frugality, succeeded to his brother’s place, it was inevitable that there should be some friendly passages of arms between them. Napier, conscious, no doubt, of his great powers, and as fond of work almost as John himself, wished — as it was only natural that he should — that as many public works as possible should be started and com- pleted in the best possible way and in the shortest possible time. The Chief Commissioner, who was responsible for the well-being of the province as a whole, and therefore for its solvency, was compelled to put the drag on ; to ask that no new works should be begun before the old were completed ; that all new works should be duly authorised ; and, above all, that progress-reports, and accounts should be sent in as regu- larly as possible. I am bound to say that in this he only very partially succeeded, and perhaps it was not altogether bad for the State that it was so. The pressure he put upon Napier was, by no means, entirely voluntary on his part. It is amus- ing, in the mass of correspondence before me, to note how the Directors were continually putting economical pressure upon Lord Dalhousie, which he handed to John Lawrence, which he, knowing his man, handed on with interest to Napier, which he, also knowing his men, after a good deal of passive resist- ance, and probably with large reductions, handed, in turn, to his subordinates. It was the case of the water which would not quench the fire, and the fire which would not burn the rope, and the rope which would not hang the man ! Napier’s subordinates — Alexander Taylor, for instance, who was in charge of the Peshawur Road, and has described the 366 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 state of things to me — were employed every day and all day on the great works on which they were engaged, and had no time, or fancied they had none, to send in elaborate reports to their chief, which. he might then have transmitted to John Lawrence in good time for their publication in the biennial ‘ Punjab Re- ports,’ or for the quieting of the financial anxieties of the Gov- ernor-General. The Engineers were thus a constant, if not an involuntary, source of trouble to the Chief Commissioner, who used to tell them humorously, that they ‘could not open their mouths without taking in a lac of rupees.’ But, as I have said, the system did not work so badly for the State, and it certainly did not affect the respect and regard of John Lawrence for Napier. It was at John Lawrence’s earnest request, as well as by the Governor-General’s own sense of the fitness of things, that Napier was appointed Chief Engineer of the Punjab in 1854. ‘ I am very glad,’ said John Lawrence on May 6, 1854, ‘that the Governor-General has given Napier the Chief Engi- neership. He is a fine fellow, and there cannot be a question that he is the man who should get it. The work he has done since annexation is enormous, and would have killed many men.’ And years afterwards, when the Abyssinian war was in prospect, and John Lawrence was asked whom he would send as Commander-in-Chief, ‘So-and-so would do,’ he said, ‘ pretty well ; but, if you want the thing thoroughly well done ’ — and he doubtless thought, as he spoke, of the Grand Trunk Road and the Bari Doab Canal — ‘go to Napier.’ A few more extracts from John Lawrence’s letters during the first year of his Chief Commissionership, will give some idea of the way in which he rebuked the wrong-doer, helped the willing or the ill-instructed, tried to keep down extrava- gance, and got rid of inefficient officers. To Captain Coke, an officer of much energy and ability, but rather new to civil work, and then in charge of Kohat, he writes, on March 20, 1853 : — You must not be annoyed at not being allowed to go with your regi- ment to a distance from Kohat. It is very natural, and very soldier- like, that you should wish to do it. But it is my duty to look to the public weal, and this requires that you should be at Kohat, above all things, at the time when it has been weakened by the absence of a por- tion of its force. I look on it that the absence of the district officer from Kohat or Bunnoo is equal to the absence of an extra wing of infantry. Besides, in your absence, how is the civil work to be carried on ? If 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 3 67 you are killed or wounded, who is to supply your place ? . . . Take my advice : get a copy of the ‘ Accountant’s Manual,’ and study it for half-an-hour a week, and get a general idea of its contents. Afterwards, when anything bothers you, turn to the Manual, or make your clerk do so, and in three months you will get your office into order, and in six months you will be as au fait at all these matters as Mr. Grant himself. Unless you do this you will always be in trouble, and some day be put down as incompetent. If you are to be a civil officer you must master civil details. Don’t be annoyed at my plain mode of dealing with the matter. It is the best way to put the thing right. You must serve an apprenticeship in these things. Don’t let Mackeson rest until he passes, or gets passed, all your bills. I will help you ; but I can only do so thoroughly when you come up in an official form. ... I am ready to help you by showing you how to go about things. It is a pity that your Commissioner does not do this himself. To Captain on March 21, he writes : I think it right to tell you that I hear the Sirdars of your district ex- press a good deal of discontent with your administration. I understand they complain much of your spies, informers, and omlah (native staff). I beg you will look to this. We should all try to do our duty without giving cause of offence. There is no machinery so difficult to manage as that of espionage. On July 17 he writes to Nicholson : — 681 Rupees per mensem is, doubtless, no great thing in itself, but it is pot a solitary case. Our pensions and pay have eaten up the larger por- tion of the revenues of the Punjab already, and there is seldom a day that more claims don’t come up. The consequence is that .good and useful projects are refused or stinted for finance considerations. You may, perhaps, not care for such considerations, like many other of our friends ; but I am bound to do so. Sooner or later that consideration predominates over all others. I see the poor Court of Directors has gone smash because we chucked away fifteen millions in the Afghan war, and could not afford the mate- rial improvements India required. Don’t send up any more men to be hanged direct, unless the case is very urgent ; and when you do, send an abstract of the evidence in English, and send it through the Commis- sioner. Here is one of many letters which touch on a subject on which he felt very strongly — the proper treatment of the na- tives by English officers. There had been serious discontent, approaching to mutiny, in the Third Sikh Local Infantry in 368 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 Huzara ; and inquiry showed that, if the men were somewhat to blame, the commanding officer was much more so. Accord- ingly, John Lawrence writes thus to Lord Dalhousie : — Captain did not succeed to an easy charge ; certainly not to such an orderly and well-disciplined corps as the First Infantry Locals. But it appears evident to me that he has not the qualities which fit an officer for so important and delicate a trust as the command of an Irreg- ular Corps. It is notorious that some of our European officers cannot speak civilly to a native of India. They cannot restrain themselves from giving vent to gross abuse, when in any way excited, if the party has a black face. Captain seems to be one of this class. Edwardes, in his private note, admits that ‘ he slangs the men dreadfully.’ Is it likely that he habitually thus addressed the men, and was more consid- erate with the native officers ? The natives of all classes, though they may not show it, are particularly sensitive on this point. A kindly free manner, a soft tone, a general accessibility in their superiors, are the qualities which win their attachment, perhaps even more than imparti- ality and a high sense of honour. One of the great advantages of the present system of officering irreg- ular corps is the facility which exists of getting rid of incapable officers by sending them back to their own regiments. I strongly recommend that this be done to Captain . It is impossible to place any confi- dence in his judgment, temper, or firmness. He recurs to the same subject in a letter to Lord Dalhousie’s private secretary : — You will see what I say of the Third Sikhs. It will not be necessary to disband them. Get rid of the viufsids (mischievous fellows), and send to his corps and put areal soldier in his room, and all will come straight. There are good soldiers in the Company’s army, and while they are to be had, such a man as should never have been selected. I fear you will think me an iron-hearted fellow ; but when I see the evils which arise from using incompetent tools, I think we cannot be too careful — first, in our selections, and secondly, in getting rid of any man who proves that he is unfit for his work. However careful we may be, some mistakes must be made. The sooner they are corrected the better. Mercy to in- dividuals is cruelty to the mass and ruination to the public service. I think if is not removed it will be a grave mistake. I have no idea of flooring the native officers and sparing the English ones. One would think that the former got all the honour and glory, and the European officers nothing, for directly there comes a rumpus, all blame is thrown upon the natives. It only remains to be added that the Chief Commissioner’s remonstrances were successful, and that the regiment, placed 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 369 under a new commanding officer, was reported within a few months as being in excellent order, and as having volunteered for service wherever they might be required in any quarter of the world. The taking or the offering of a bribe has happily been a rare occurrence in the history of British India, but one such case actually occurred in the Punjab. The following is written to the culprit : — July 16, 1853. I received your note of the 14th, and regret I am unable to give it any other public answer than I have done. I really do not know what to recommend, and yet I do not like to say nothing to help you. It strikes me that the simplest course is for you to write to Mr. J. P. Grant, and throw yourself on the Governor-General’s mercy ; admit that you were a fool and a madman, and say you are ready to suffer the penalty of your fault. I see not that you can do otherwise to any advantage. This is a very sad business. I mean not to reproach you in your afflic- tion, but in the whole course of my service, I never knew a case where a civilian gave or received a bribe. Why did you not write and ask me about your promotion ? It is useless my trying to help you. There is no remedy for the error you have committed other than to bear the penalty and express your contrition. To his great friend John Becher of the Engineers, who had only just taken to civil work, he writes in a strain which is so unlike his usual one, bidding him not to do more, but to be content with less work, that I quote a sentence or two from it. Umritsur : April 22, 1853. I had the pleasure of receiving yours of the 20th. I should have re- joiced to have seen you, as we passed through, but I understand and appreciate your motives in not coming. I am afraid you have a weary life of it at Buttala, and that the work presses heavily on you. . . . Don’t overdo the thing ; don’t work too hard. Divide your work, and make all do their share. Becher was in time transferred to Huzara, and proved a worthy successor there of James Abbott and of Herbert Edwardes. He was still much oppressed by his work, and, knowing alike his willingness and his ability, his chief writes in much the same strain, hoping to suggest a remedy. His incidental remarks on his own powers of work are of biographical interest. Vol. I. — 24 370 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 March 16, 1854. I cannot understand how two men cannot do the Huzara work with ease. I know you work hard, perhaps more so than is necessary, cer- tainly more than is good for you ; but I cannot understand how it happens that you do not make more way. So far from marching about delaying my work, I have always found it was the best time for getting through anything like arrears. When I was a district officer, I was, at least, six months of the year under canvas, and found that I got through every- thing and had time for everything. I made settlements, decided bound- aries, got over maafi (rent-free holdings) and foujdari (magisterial cases). I suspect that you want confidence in yourself, and, though you are always grinding, that you procrastinate when you come to the actual de- cision. Abbott may have left you arrears which I wot not of, or it may be that Pearce does not take his share. There must be a hitch some- where. Huzara is a mountainous country, thinly peopled, with little commerce. How there can be much work in such a place passes my comprehension. I have been literally but truly on the move ever since the end of August, and my office was never in better order than at present. I do not write this to glorify myself or to underrate your labours, but that you may turn the matter over in your mind, and discover where the mis- take lies. Nicholson is here. He is a first-rate ‘ warden of the marches.’ The district is in capital order. To complete this account of John Lawrence’s treatment of his subordinates during the early part of his Chief Commis- sionership, I submit here a trenchant but kindly criticism of the man whom perhaps he loved more than any man living — one who was soon to be in close connection with him as ‘ Fi- nancial Commissioner ’ in Edmondstone’s place, was to work on with him in perfect harmony throughout the Mutiny, and after- wards, when he was Viceroy, was to be recommended by him for the Lieutenant-Governorship of the Punjab itself — the late Sir Donald Macleod. John Lawrence loved him for his good- ness, and, when he was already overwhelmed with work, would gladly take over any number of his papers, and go through them himself. The description is lifelike, and by no one would it have been more enjoyed, or its truthfulness more readily acknowledged, than by Macleod himself. August i, 1853. Dear Edwardes, — I have known Donald Macleod for twenty-five years, and appreciate his real worth and merit as much as any man can do. Morally and intellectually he has no superior in the Punjab, per- haps no equal. But, as an administrator, he is behind Edmondstonc, Raikes, and even Barnes. He is too fond of polishing, and his execu- 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 371 tion is not equal to his designs. He wastes much time on unimportant matters. He spends as much time on a petty case as on an important one. His Commissionership has not fair and honest work for a man of ability and knowledge for six hours a day. I know it, for I was Com- missioner there for three years when it had to be licked into shape. It is useless saying that we must choose between quality and quantity. We must have both, or the result is a failure. There are certain things to be done in an official berth, and a certain time to do them in. A good and efficient administrator will so distribute his time as to do them all. He will economise when it can be done safely, and throw in his power when it is wanted. Edmondstone has not the intellect of Donald ; he has not his knowledge of the customs and habits of the people ; but, by order and economy of time, joined to an iron constitution, he did treble the work that Donald does ; and, on the whole, he did it better. He would not do a given case so well perhaps, but he would do a hundred while the other would do ten, and he would do them rightly. Donald spends half the day writing elegant demi-official chits. I spin off a dozen in a day, and they don’t take an hour. They may want the elegant turn he gives to his, but they are to the point and do all that is necessary. Ed- mondstone, Raikes, and Barnes have more settlements than Macleod. The revenues of the country cannot afford more men. We must either reduce the salaries, and thus effect a saving to pay for more men, or we must get more work out of our Donalds. An assistant is of little or no use to a really efficient Commissioner. The mere drudgery of the office should be done by the head clerk, who gets the pay of an educated man. No practical man would have kept such a man as for his head clerk for a month. Donald moans, but retains him. At this moment he has not sent up any report of his administration for the past three years, and has several hundred appeals standing over, some as long as four years. He has men under trial in jail for upwards of a year. ‘Bis dat qui cito dat’ is a good motto in administration. Donald is not fit for a new country ; he has, with all his virtues, radical defects. I see this, who love the man ; what more can I say ? The only events in the Punjab or its dependencies which involved any possible political complications during the first year or two of John Lawrence’s Chief Commissionership, were a contest for the succession in the adjoining State of Bahawul- pore, and the murder of Mackeson at Peshawur. How did he deal with them ? Bahawulpore is an extensive tract of country to the south of the Sutlej, between the Punjab and Rajpootana, which, so far back as 1809, had acknowledged British supremacy, but had always retained its internal independence. The Nawab, who died at the end of 1852, had done us good service in the second Sikh war, and it was by his special request that we recognised 3 72 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 the succession of his third son Saadut Khan, to the exclusion of the eldest, Haji Khan. The elder brother, thanks, doubtless, to the humanity encouraged by the British connection, was saved from the fate which he would have suffered under simi- lar circumstances, at any purely native court, and was only confined in prison. He soon escaped, and a civil war followed. The Chief Commissioner was at first disposed to prevent dis- turbances which would, probably, spread to the adjoining dis- tricts of the Punjab, by giving help to the younger brother ; but, finding that the Daoudputras, the dominant clan in the country, were in favour of the elder, wisely determined, with Lord Dalhousie’s advice, to leave the matter to settle itself — as it usually does in the East — by the survival of the fittest. The elder brother gained the day ; and the Chief Commissioner then stepped in, on the plea of humanity alone, negotiated the release of the younger brother from prison and from death, and gave him an asylum at Lahore, on the understanding that he was never to revive his claims. It was a trifling episode, but was managed with skill, and in- volved, as I am inclined to think, important consequences ; for it was the first instance of that wise non-interference with the internal affairs of neighbouring States which henceforward be- came a ruling principle of John Lawrence’s policy, and to which he consistently adhered, even when, as in the case of Shere Ali, and the rival claimants to the Ameership of Afghanistan, it ex- posed him to the easy ridicule and the persistent hostility of those who would secure, or endanger, our Indian frontier by a series of aggressive or unnecessary wars beyond it. By non- interference in this instance he had avoided a war and the still worse evil of forcing a ruler on unwilling subjects. In how many frontier wars should we have been, ere now, engaged, and how many puppet kings should we have placed upon neigh- bouring thrones, and then have seen dethroned again, had he adopted and had the Governments of England and of India ap- proved of the contrary policy ! The tribes on our western frontier — partly, perhaps, because they were overawed by our conquest of their formidable op- pressors, the Sikhs, and partly also because they were surprised and satisfied by our unaggressive attitude towards themselves — had hitherto given us much less trouble than the character of their country and the whole course of their history would have led us to expect. But barbarians are often ready to attribute 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 373 forbearance and moderation-qualities of which they know so little themselves— to a consciousness of weakness ; and it was not till various tribes had essayed to cross our frontier and burn our villages, and had tested, to their cost, the adequacy of our frontier posts and frontier force, for purposes of offence as well as of defence, that they began to attribute our moderation to its true cause— a just, and wise, and consistent policy, based on the knowledge, not of our weakness, but of our strength. Most of these raids were repelled or punished at the cost of very few men and very little money. But Peshawur, surrounded as it was by hostile or lately subdued tribes on three sides, was still a standing source of anxiety. Peshawur (wrote John Lawrence, on September the 1st) is unlike any other place, except, perhaps, Bunnoo. In these two districts all the people have been robbers and murderers from their cradles. It is not a section of the people with whom we have to deal ; it is the whole mass. The letter had hardly been written when news came that Mackeson, the Commissioner of Peshawur, a first-rate soldier and a good political officer, had himself fallen a victim to the dagger of the assassin. A shoemaker by trade had come with a petition, as he was sitting, without a guard, in the verandah of his house, and, while he was reading it, had stabbed him mortally. The deed was put down, in the panic which ensued, to the instigation of the Ameer of Kabul, to the Akhund of Swat, and I know not how many potentates besides. Expe- ditions against all of them were talked of by irresponsible poli- ticians in the cantonments and station of Peshawur. James, who had to ‘ officiate ’ as Commissioner of Peshawur in Macke- son’s place, condemned the murderer to death without observ- ing any of the forms of justice. Troops were ordered up by the military authorities from Wuzeerabad to Rawul Pindi, and from Rawul Pindi to Peshawur, and then were counter-ordered be- fore they reached their destination, to the great increase of the general confusion and alarm. A plot was discovered, or im- agined, to seize the cantonments at Rawul Pindi when deserted by their proper garrison, and Nadir Khan, a discontented son of the Raja of Mandla, escaped to the hills, hoping to gather the hill-tribes round him. But John Lawrence, who happened to be at Simla, kept his head ; rebuked James sternly by return of post for his neglect 374 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 of the rules of procedure, and for having yielded to the general panic ; ordered the execution of the murderer to be put off till all legal forms had been duly complied with, and till some ef- fort had been made to find out whether he had accomplices ; suggested all the precautions in Peshawur and its neighbour- hood which seemed really necessary, and was soon able to con- vince others, as he had already convinced himself, that, in a hotbed of fanaticism like Peshawur it was unnecessary to look for any prompting from Kabul or from Swat for such a deed. The murderer was hanged, after his case had been duly rein- vestigated, and, by John Lawrence’s suggestion, his body was burned and his ashes scattered to the winds, to prevent the place of his burial being turned into a place of pilgrimage, and so into an incitement to fresh murders, by the barbarous sur- rounding tribes. His confession on the scaffold corroborated the Chief Commissioner’s opinion that his deed had had no instigators, while Edward Thornton’s promptitude and courage enabled him, at the expense of a bullet-wound in the throat from a skulking foe, to overtake and capture Nadir Khan be- fore any rising in the hills had taken place. Other reassuring measures produced their proper effect, and the panic, which had at one time threatened to be a disgraceful and dangerous one, subsided almost as quickly as it had spread. But the unsatisfactory state of things revealed by the murder of Mackeson, and its sequel, determined John Lawrence to go to Peshawur himself, that he might see with his own eyes how far the measures suggested by him two years before had been carried out, and that he might concert with the new Commis- sioner, whoever he might be, measures which might make life and property more secure, and attach the inhabitants to our rule. Mackeson (he says) looked only to political and military matters, and neglected that which he never understood — the civil administration. He was always looking beyond the border rather than into our own manage- ment. We are strangers and infidels in the eyes of the people. If we cannot give them peace and security, how can we make our rule popu- lar ? Though it is not necessary, and probably not practicable, to give the same polish to things on the border as in the interior of the coun- try, a vigorous and intelligent executive is even of more consequence there than elsewhere, for neglect produces more fatal and pernicious consequences. ... It seems to me, the mistake we make is this : We put incapable men into the command of the garrison, and then, to mend matters, we select good soldiers for our civil administrators. Thus 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 375 both departments go to the dogs. Give the Peshawur command to such men as Patrick Grant, or Franks of H.M. 10th ; reorganise your mili- tary system there, or, rather, organise a proper one ; have troops armed and equipped for hill service ; thoroughly subdue every hill-tribe which gives us just cause of complaint, and make your civil officers devote their energies to the administration of the country. You will then over- come the tribes, satisfy the people, and be respected everywhere. As it is now, we are neither feared by our enemies nor respected by our subjects. No man appreciated Mackeson’s high qualities more than I did, but work I could not get out of him. I have written five times offi- cially, and three times privately, before I could get an answer to an or- dinary reference ! Everything was in arrears. The people felt that their affairs were not attended to ; and yet we are surprised and indignant that they do not like us. The important and immediate question was, who the new Commissioner of Peshawur was to be. Lord Dalhousie had candidates of his own in view, and had more than once met the Chief Commissioner’s recent recofnmendations with what the Chief Commissioner himself happily called ‘ an imperial No.' But this was an occasion on which John Lawrence could not afford to be modest, and, with all his earnestness and de- cision, he pressed on the Governor-General the pre-eminent claims of Herbert Edwardes for Peshawur, and of John Becher for Huzara. The answer was that they might go there now, but it must be distinctly understood that their appointments were only temporary. But John Lawrence was not to be silenced, and his reply is interesting, partly as giving his deliberate opinion of his distinguished subordinate — an opinion so abundantly justified by the result — partly as showing, what I think has never been made public before, nor was known to the person most concerned, nor even to his biographer — that J^ord Dal- housie’s candidate for Peshawur was a man more distinguished still — the Bayard of India — the late Sir James Outram. There were obvious objections to such an appointment, which John Lawrence was not slow to urge, but it is not without interest to those who know the circumstances to speculate as to what might have been the result on the destinies of both men and both provinces had the most distinguished ‘soldier political’ of the Scinde frontier been transferred to the post of danger on that of the Punjab, and become subject to the control of the great Punjab civilian, who had so much of a soldier’s heart. 376 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 Would Sir James Outram, for instance, have been able, or would he have desired, to introduce into the Punjab frontier policy any part of what was best in that of the rival province ? Would he have been able, without entering on any aggressive wars, to have acquired over the untamed Afridis and Moh- munds any such influence as that which he had acquired over the more manageable and peaceful Beluchis and Bheels ? Would, finally, the chivalrous defender of native princes and races everywhere have taken up the weapons which had dropped from Henry Lawrence’s hand, and so have renewed the struggles of the Board ; or would he have been able to work cordially with the modified views of his new master ? John Lawrence writes, on October 6, 1853 : — Lahore. My Lord, — I feel grateful for the consideration which your letter dis- plays, and the best return which I can make will be to state honestly and fully my views on the important point of naming a Commissioner for Peshawur. I have already informed your Lordship that I consider that Edwardes would worthily fill the appointment. After thinking well over the sub- ject, and comparing in my mind his qualities with those possessed by others, I have no hesitation in saying that I would much prefer to have him there. In original ability, and in education, he will bear comparison with any officer, civil or military, that I know. He has excellent judg- ment, good temper, force of character, and considerable knowledge of the natives. His military and political talents are considerable. He does not possess extensive civil experience, but has had two years’ good training, which, to a man of his ability, is equal to double that period with most other people. He has had the advantage of seeing the work- ing of the civil administration in all its details by having charge of a dis- trict which had been regularly settled and managed, and he has served under one of the ablest Commissioners (Donald Macleod) in India. When he left Jullundur, Macleod pronounced him to be the best district officer he had ever met with. Without subscribing to this opinion, I know few better ones ; and, as a Commissioner, he would perhaps be more at home than even in charge of a district. Edwardes possesses broad views, a conciliatory and kindly disposition, and a natural aptitude for civil administration, which he admires. Such a man is more likely to reconcile the Peshawuris to our rule than any other who is available, while he has all the qualities to command the esteem of his military com- rades, and the respect of the frontier tribes. I have known him intimately for seven years, and we are on terms of the most affectionate intimacy. There is a considerable difference in our ages, and I am sure I possess much influence with him. My wishes and judgment are, therefore, strongly in his favour. 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 377 Edwardes’ reputation has, no doubt, excited the jealousy of his own service, to which he is an honour, but that feeling has greatly lessened since his return from England. He was much liked at J ullundur. He is, doubtless, a young soldier, but cannot be less than from thirty-two to thirty-three years old, and possesses sufficient military rank. . . . As regards Qutram, 1 feel much delicacy in even discussing his char- acter. He is a fine soldier and a noble fellow ; but he is much my senior in age, and has been accustomed to the highest charges. Such a man could not brook, not merely my control, which would be sufficiently irksome, but that of the Judicial and Financial Commissioners. It is not possible that he possesses any knowledge of civil administration. He has been bred in the political school altogether, and must, therefore, follow its re- ceived opinions. He will look to the feelings and prejudices of the higher classes, and not to the interests of the mass of the people. No man can teach that which he does not know. Be his intentions what they may, he will naturally follow the bent of his own views and experience. That assiduous attention to the routine of administrative details, that prompt response to all references, however apparently trivial, and that exact at- tention to instructions, can only be secured in officers regularly trained to their duties. We are strangers in language, colour, and religion to the people, who, beyond the Indus, are peculiarly intractable, fanatical, and warlike. To reconcile them to our rule requires the most careful and able manage- ment. The decision of every social question becomes of political im- portance. We require a light and equable land-tax, carefully distributed, that the influential and the cunning may not shift a portion of their bur- then on to their humbler neighbours. We want a system of police which shall be prompt, resolute, and discriminating, but not oppressive ; a form of procedure of the utmost simplicity, and, at the same time, so carefully guarded that the facilities for oppression shall be minimised ; a judicial system stern and decided, but thoroughly intelligible. All these qualities it may be difficult to secure under the greatest precau- tions, but it is hopeless to find them in any system without the careful training of our officers. . . . Having now said my say, I can only add that, on whomsoever your Lordship’s choice may fall, I will do all I can to make his position easy and to facilitate business. It is hardly necessary to say that representations so forcible were met on this occasion by an ‘imperial’ Yes, and Edwardes was at once gazetted Commissioner of Peshawur. Before the middle of the month John Lawrence had set out to join him there. His intention was to settle, in concert with him, so far as they admitted of an immediate settlement, the many burning questions at Peshawur : to improve the defences of the frontier, to suggest alterations in the composition of the garrison, to co- 373 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 erce the Afridis and other barbarous tribes who had broken their engagements and menaced our possession of the Kohat Pass, and, finally, to clear off the arrears left by Mackeson — among other things ‘ twenty-four sessions cases a year and upwards old ! ’ This done, he proposed to visit Mooltan, a pai;t of the Punjab which, strange as it may seem, he had never yet seen, and which he had reason to believe was much behind the rest of the country in organisation and development. Thence he was to travel up the whole length of the Derajat to Peshawur, again inspecting all the frontier posts and forts, and judging for him- self of the success of the administration, and of the condition of the people in each district. This programme, extensive as it was, he carried out to the letter. It was a good six months’ work, and his letters to Lord Dalhousie, to Courtenay and others are so numerous during the early part of it, that here, if nowhere else in his life, they serve almost the purpose of a diary, from which I propose to make such short quotations as possess any special interest, or are characteristic of the man, or of his work. To Courtenay. October 11, 1853. There is no extraordinary difficulty in managing Peshawur, if we go about it in the right way. . . . I will engage, with Edwardes’ aid, to have it in excellent order ip six months. The military part is not so easy. With one-half of the army screaming through the press for active measures, we have the other half averse to service in the hills. This latter feeling arises from various causes, but mainly from a want of con- fidence in the leading officers, and the inability of our native troops, with their present arms and equipments, to cope with the mountaineers. If this be the real evil, the remedy is in our own hands. Select the officer who shall command at Peshawur — Outram would do it admirably. Give him brevet rank. Take away the Regular Infantry of your native army, and place a portion of them at Attock. Keep three European corps of infantry at Peshawur and Noushera, with the proper proportion of guns, and raise several Irregular corps of infantry of picked men of different castes, all armed and' accoutred for mountain warfare. Put none but first-rate officers to these corps. Do this, and you will hear no more of these alarms and dangers from insurrections and religious wars. To the same. Jhelum : October 16. The object of mounting the guns ‘ quietly’ was to prevent excitement. While preparing to pitch into a fellow, 1 would not frighten him into a revolt. Quietly as guns are put up, folks arc not slow to see them. 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 379 Nothing, in my mind, conduces more to overawe the natives than a quiet, resolute demeanour. It is these cursed ranting fellows, who see a conspirator in every chap they meet, who march and countermarch troops and the like, that do the mischief and make the natives think we funk. One soldier like Will Mayne, or Outram, is doubtless worth a brigade, if in command, on such occasions. If we could make an ex- ample of one Afridi clan, as Mayne has done, we should hear no more of their villany and insolence. Thomason is a great loss, a greater one than many can understand. He was a real administrator, not a brum- magem. The Governor-General’s eulogium on him was a just and kind one. I hit on John Colvin as his successor the moment I heard of poor Thomason’s death. ... I never dreamed of the appointment my- self ; I feel that I am tied to the Punjab for the rest of my official exist- ence, which, however, I hope may not be a very long one. To Edwardes. Jhelum : October 16. I am very glad that you will be at Peshawur by the 1 8th. I think it is a great pity that our officers write and speak as they do. They seem determined to damage themselves and the administration as effectually as they can. It was quite refreshing to get a chit from Johnnie Becher, corroborating as it does your account of the peaceful disposition of the Huzara people. To Lord Dalhousie. Camp Hutti, fourteen miles from Attock : October 26, 1853. The regular Sepoys hate Peshawur, though food is cheap there. They prefer this side of the Indus without the batta to Peshawur with it. They are unfit for service in the hills from habit, discipline and organisation ; but they will do sufficiently well as a counterpoise to more efficient troops. To keep Peshawur quiet, we want an efficient and popular ad- ministration, and the thorough subjection of every hill-tribe. By subjec- tion, I mean that they must learn to fear and obey us, not that they should become our subjects. Picked troops, armed with rifles and lightly equipped, would carry the terror of our arms into the most rugged fastnesses and the steepest hills. To Courtenay. Camp Noushera : October 29. I think poor Charlie Napier will probably make an ass of himself in his posthumous work. Like Falstaff’s sack, which bore so large a pro- portion in his daily expenditure compared with bread, there will be in Napier’s work very much about himself, and little about India. He was so eaten up with passion and prejudice that his really good qualities had not fair play. 3 So LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 Lord Dalhousie had asked his Lieutenant pointedly in one of his letters, ‘ Which way do your eyes turn in the future, to Council or to Agra ? ’ and added in a postscript, which may be worth quotation, as showing the growth of intimacy between John Lawrence and the ‘ Lord Sahib,’ who never himself forgot, or allowed anyone else to forget, that he was Governor-General : ‘ I have just cast my eyes by chance on your letter, and see, what never struck me before, that “ My Lord ” begins and ends it. Don’t you think “ My dear Lord ” would suit the terms of friendship and cordiality on which we have long been ? I think so for my part.’ The following was the answer : — My dear Lord, — I think the selection of John Colvin for the Lieutenant- Governorship of the N.-W. Provinces will give general satisfaction. There is no civilian there who can challenge comparison with him. I have never myself had a thought of leaving the Punjab, so long as I pos- sessed health and strength, and Government were satisfied with my ser- vices. The circumstances under which I was selected for the post bound me by every tie of honour to look for nothing more. It is a very arduous post, and one in which we cannot always command success. I have no ambition to be a member of Council. If ever Agra was offered to me, and I could take it with honour, I should hardly, perhaps, refuse. But I would prefer remaining here for many years, so long, that is, as I can do the duty efficiently. I should like to fix my own impress on the ad- ministration, and show what even a civilian can do in a new country. Your Lordship will perceive that I have taken advantage of the kind invitation contained in the postscript of your note, and beg to subscribe myself, my dear Lord, Yours sincerely, John Lawrence. John Lawrence arrived at Peshawur on October 31, but found that so large a number of the garrison there were still prostrate with sickness that none could be spared to join him in coercing the hostile Afridis of the two passes which lead thence to the famous Kohat valley. But he found plenty of other work to do. He inspected in company with Robert Napier the fortifi- cations of the town. He endeavoured to press on to its com- pletion that remote portion of the Grand Trunk Road, by ap- plying to Golab Sing for the help of 500 Kashmiris. He spent the mornings of each day, from a very early hour up to noon, in reconnoitring the position of the enemy, and the afternoons in clearing off the sessions cases of a year’s standing left by 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 381 Mackeson, ‘all of them,’ observes John Lawrence, ‘desperate fellows.’ He built the long-talked-of fort at the entrance to the Kohat pass, as a means of coercing the Afridis of that pass; and he made one more effort for peace by sending for the Mul- liks of the Afridis belonging to the other pass, and, after three days of consultation with them, succeeded in bringing them to terms. But there was one clan among them — the Bori Afridis — who were not so amenable to reason. They inhabited a cluster of villages in the interior of the hills, supposed to be impregnable. During the last two years they had made many raids into the Peshawur valley, had harboured twenty-four outlaws of the Rawul Pindi district, had furnished them with horses for the express purpose of robbery and murder, and had repeatedly carried off British subjects, whom they still held to ransom. The Chief Commissioner demanded that the prisoners should be set free, the plunder restored, and the horses of the robber band surrendered. The demand was flatly refused, and the Boris sent a message to him bidding him to do his worst. This was too much for the Chief Commissioner. His old military ardour was aroused. He had a just cause and, what was not likely to occur again in his lifetime, a chance of planning and directing military operations himself. An elaborate plan for attacking the mountaineers simulta- neously at very different points, so as to inflict more signal re- tribution and produce more lasting effect, was prepared by him in person and was approved of, to his great delight, by such good soldiers as Norman, Lumsden, Cotton, and James, and was only given up when it was found that General Roberts, who was then in command at Peshawur, and who will be known to posterity chiefly as the father of his illustrious son, Sir Fred- erick Roberts, was still unable to supply the contingent which was necessary'. ‘ Well,’ said John, ‘ if we cannot do all we want, at least we will do all we can.’ And he sent off at once for the Guides from Hoti Murdan, whose presence would raise the troops at his own disposal to 1,300 men. Coke, ‘ a fine plucky soldier, positive and opiniated, but honest and straight- forward,’ was still for trying other measures, but the Chief Commissioner stood firm. ‘An example,’ he said, ‘is abso- lutely necessary. I think that I have long enough given up my own plans to assist yours, and that the time has come to resume the former. ... I hold to my plan to attack Bori on Tues- 382 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 day. I am not to be dissuaded from it on any account.’ The attack was accordingly made on November 29, and with the result which he described on the following day, in a spirited letter to Lord Dalhousie. November 30, 1853. My dear Lord, — I write a line to say that we, yesterday, crossed the low range and entered the valley in which the Bori Afridis are, destroyed their villages, and came out the same day. We were out in this affair sixteen hours ; so it was a very hard day’s work for the troops. We had a splendid little force : Guides, 450 ; Ghoorkas, 400 ; Europeans, 400 ; Native Infantry, 20. The Afridis fought desperately, and the mode in which the Guides and the Ghoorkas crowned the heights which com- manded the villages was the admiration of every officer present. These are, indeed, the right sort of fellows. Our loss is eight men killed and twenty-four wounded. The men got no water and suffered a good deal. I think this expedition is calculated to do much good. The Bori val- ley has not been entered by an enemy for many hundred years, I believe, and the prestige which will attend the affair will be proportioned to the success of the operation. The Afridis of the lower hills at the mouth of the pass behaved extremely well. They sat on the heights around, but did not fire a shot. The Afridis of the lower hills were those, it should be ex- plained, with whom he had just come to terms, and who might have been expected, after the manner of their kind, to rise against him all the more readily. ‘ But,’ says the Chief Commissioner, ‘ I sat during the en- gagement for two. hours yesterday in the villages of Toorana, with the sides of the hill covered with these armed men, and I saw our troops come through the gorge and not a shot was fired at them. They brought our men water to drink, and, in fact, behaved remarkably well towards us.’ The arts of the Chief Commissioner were, on this occasion, as successful as his arms. And I have dwelt’on the operations, small as they were, all the more because of the characteristic enjoyment and ardour with which eye-witnesses have told me that he planned and took part in them, and because I have myself heard him, when he was enfeebled with age and disease, speak, with boyish glee and a visible sparkle in his almost sightless grey eyes, of the occa- sion when, as Chief Commissioner, he had managed so far to thwart his peaceful destiny as, for one day at least, to be ‘ under fire ! ’ I may add that the destruction of so strong a place had the best effect, and there was no subsequent trouble from the Bori quarter. 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 383 An attempt to assassinate Lieutenant Godby of the Guides at Murdan followed with startling rapidity upon the assassina- tion of Mackeson. But the panic which followed Mackeson’s death had fortunately been allayed before this new deed of violence. And, still more fortunately, the Chief Commissioner happened to be at Peshawur when it took place, and no new panic was possible in his presence. Peshawur : December 2, 8 p.m. My dear Lord, — I came in here this day. I am sorry to say that about two P.M. a horseman came in from Hoti Murdan, where Lieutenant Godby was with the Guide Cavalry, and told us that that officer had been stabbed in the back this morning by a man who was cut to pieces on the instant, by the Guides. The man who came in was a jemadar, a very intelligent fellow. He says that poor Godby was standing in the middle of camp, superintending the loading of some camels, when a snake came out from beneath some stones, on which he ran and put his foot upon its head. While bending down doing this, a little, old- looking man, whom nobody had noticed, rushed forward and stabbed him in the back. Nobody seemed to know who he was or whence he came. I will write again directly I hear further particulars. Happily Godby was a young man, and of a spare habit of body. This gave him a better chance of life, and in ten days he was pronounced to be out of danger. After an inspection of the frontier forts to the north of Pe- shawur, the Chief Commissioner returned by December 9 to Lahore, that he might spend a few days with his family before the second great break in it occurred. Three of his children, — his two eldest sons, John and Henry, and his third daughter, Alice Margaret — he was obliged to send to England. But as in the case of his two eldest daughters, some kind friends — Mr. and Mrs. Charles Saunders, of Umritsur — volunteered to es- cort them, and a few days after their departure, John Lawrence and his wife, with the one child, a baby, who was now left to them, were glad to exchange their desolate home at Lahore, which he ‘ found insupportable,’ for the excitement of camp life and the tour to Mooltan and the Derajat. An extract from a letter to Edwardes, written just as he left Lahore, gives some particulars of his power of getting through work which have a biographical interest. Our officers should be young men, rough-and-ready fellows, fit to put* their hands to any work against time and tide. I cannot believe that the Treasury can take up the time of one officer. If I were Deputy- 384 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 Commissioner I would be bound to prove that it did not take up one- half his time. I don’t speak without cause ; I had charge of a treasury for six years, unaided, and the time it occupied was hardly appreciable. For instance, if I had to see money counted, I took my work to the treasury, and while my ears were hearing reports and cases, my eyes were looking at money being counted. I signed and checked bills while evidence was being taken by my side. Half-an-hour a day sufficed to look over the accounts, with perhaps a couple of days’ extra work in a couple of months. At Mooltan he examined, with a soldier’s interest, the spots made famous, by the murders of Agnew and Anderson, by the daring deeds of Edwardes, and by the chequered but ultimately successful siege. Then, passing through a wild and uncleared country, in which he found, to his surprise and disgust, that thefts and burglary and cattle-stealing were still very common, he reached Dera Ghazi Khan. Here he left the ladies of his party — his wife and Mrs. Macpherson, the wife of his indefati- gable Military Secretary — and, with his horse and a small camp dropped down the river to Mitthancote, the southern extrem- ity of his province, and the point where the Indus receives in one stream of hardly less volume than its own the united waters of the five rivers of the Punjab. Thence he marched back again, along the frontier posts and forts, to Dera Ghazi Khan, where he received a visit from a wild Khatteran chieftain, Haji Khan, a man who came from far beyond our frontier, and had ‘ never seen a European before,’ but offered to forward him let- ters from Kandahar — which might be of importance in view of the Russian war just then breaking out — and even volunteered to join us in an expedition against the formidable Murris. Lord Dalhousie, in reply to John Lawrence’s letter, detailing the circumstances of this interview, writes : — Perhaps you may make something of Haji Khan Khatteran. By the way, as this man had never seen a European before, it was very politic of you to show yourself to him as the first specimen of the conquering race ! I have no doubt he will be as desirous to retain a recollection of you as I am, and as I have lately taken the liberty of showing. For I have to apol- ogise to you for getting a dagucrrotype taken from the portrait of you which Mr. C. Saunders brought down. It was exceedingly like, and I have great pleasure in possessing it. You will pardon, I hope, my tak- ing it without leave. Lord Dalhousie had proposed to give a jagheer, in recogni- tion of his services, to Futtch Khan Khuttuck, a russeldar of 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 385 the Guides, who had performed strange deeds of daring on our behalf, and had recently done us good service in the fight in the Bori valley, but had been obliged, in consequence of a disa- greement with Hodson, the commandant, to leave the regiment. John Lawrence admitted the value of his services, but objected to this mode of requiting them, and he gave a description of the man which is worth quoting for its vigour. I frankly confess I am afraid to try Futteh Khan in such a position, or indeed as a jagheerdar at all. I have seen a good deal of the man, and have heard much more. The value of his services I admit ; his peculiar martial qualities I admire ; but I look upon him as a perfect devil when his blood is up, and this is very often. At such a moment he would murder his nearest and dearest relative or friend. He has many and bitter feuds throughout Khuttuck, and is grasping and domineering beyond all bounds. Such a man, in possession of a jaghecr, would screw the cultivators, oust the proprietors of the soil, and invade the boundaries of his neighbours. Let him alone, and he would become a pest ; attempt to curb him, and he resents the interference as a deadly wrong. I confess, when I have seen his eye flashing and his whole frame quiv- ering with emotion, as he narrated his real or fancied injuries, I could not but think what a dangerous enemy he could prove, if vested with any power. Lumsden was Futteh Khan’s great friend and supporter, but even he found it difficult to manage him. Futteh did much to injure Lumsden’s reputation by his acts. I will mention an anecdote I once heard of Futteh Khan from Lums- den himself. Futteh Khan and his two brothers often quarrelled, though they made common cause against others. During one of these disputes, the three brothers never met, even at their meals, except with their weapons bare, ready for use. The two younger were on one side and Futteh on the other. This went on for some three months, when, one day, the youngest brother was called suddenly away. Futteh took the opportunity to dart on the other, seize him by the hair, and force his head into the hot ashes, where he held it until his victim called out ‘ tobah ’ (repentance), and gave in. . . . Futteh Khan was for many years a regular freebooter, and would not hesitate to return to the same life. It is a very delicate and difficult thing to manage a tract by means of a native chief. One can make it over to his tender mercies, but this is not managing it. Under 11s, a chief can really do more harm than if he is independent or under a native ruler, for then he must, to a considerable extent, conciliate the people. Under us there is no such necessity. It is difficult to say whether a weak or energetic chief is most mischievous. If strong, he plunders for himself, makes himself hateful, and brings on us reproach. If weak, his followers plunder, and he is despised, and the country falls into disorder. It is most difficult, also, to get at the real state of affairs ; all in power are interested in concealing the truth ; those Vol. I. — 25 386 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 who are injured exaggerate their wrongs ; and those who might give use- ful information are indifferent, averse to the trouble and even the danger, of such interference. It need hardly be added that after such a letter no more was heard of a jagheer for Futteh Khan. His merits, such as they were, were acknowledged in another and less objectionable fashion. During the whole of this period John Lawrence was much occupied by troubles connected with the famous Hodson, who was in command of the Guides, and one or two of his letters, selected from many scores which bear upon the subject, will be read with interest. The correspondence, as a whole, shows convincingly with what forbearance John Lawrence treated Hodson, how he appreciated his soldier-like qualities, and his varied talents, how he bore with his shortcomings, and how unwilling he was, so long as he could possibly do otherwise, to believe the worst of him. It was very slowly and reluctantly that he came to that belief : all the more slowly, I am persuaded, from his chivalrous desire to stand by a man whom, in his ear- lier and better days, his brother Henry had taken under his patronage. John Lawrence did not know then what many of his friends knew well enough — for Sir Henry had told them so himself— that his brother had entirely ceased to believe in Hod- son’s integrity from the time when he had accompanied him in his tour to Kashmere and had found himself in command of the money-chest there. That Hodson had many fine and engaging qualities, to begin with, is certain, and that his moral decline was gradual is also certain. Nemo repente fuit turpissimus. It is certain, once more, that when he first entered the Pun- jab as a friend of Henry Lawrence, every friend of Henry Law- rence— and there was no one in the Punjab who was not his friend — was prepared to welcome, to help, and to like him. It is preposterous, therefore, to suppose, as Ilodson’s fraternal biographer appears to do, that there was a general conspiracy against him — a conspiracy of some of the best and ablest men who have been in India, men who were intimate friends of Henry Lawrence and had the minutest knowledge of all the facts of the case, the officers of Hodson’s own regiment, and the Commissioners and Deputy-Commissioners of his own and adjoining districts ! 1 8 52—53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 387 Hodson had been appointed to the command of the Guides by Lord Dalhousie, and, with John Lawrence’s approval, had received at the same time the civil charge of the Eusofzye dis- trict. It was the post of all others which he had coveted, and which seemed to give the best opening to his splendid qualities as a soldier. It is certain, therefore, that in September, 1852, when he received the command, neither Lord Dalhousie nor John Lawrence can have had any prejudice against him. He had hardly entered on his duties when complaints began to pour in, from both soldiers and civilians, of arbitrary and oppressive treatment ; and as early as March 22, 1853, I find John Law- rence writing thus to Courtenay : — Hodson is, I believe, very unpopular, both in the Guides and with military men generally. I don’t know exactly why this is. It cannot be that he has got promotion too early, for, though a young soldier, he is almost a middle-aged man. He is an officer of first-rate ability, and has received an excellent education. He is gallant, zealous, and intelli- gent, and yet few men like him. It is the case of the famous Dr. Fell, whom the young lady did not like, but could not tell why she did not do so. John Lawrence would not have acted like himself if he had heard of these complaints without trying to remove their cause, and the letter of which I quote a few sentences is again any- thing but unfriendly in its tone. August 7, 1853. As regards the general feeling of the regiment to yourself, you must not be hurt at what I say, for I do it simply and solely for your own good. You may depend on it that neither the European nor the native officers are as rasi (contented) as they might be. I have heard it from half-a-dozen different quarters. At Lahore I have heard it talked of by several parties. I have heard it direct from Peshawur and direct from Calcutta. There may have been faults on their part, and the discipline may not have been altogether what it ought to have been. But sudden changes are best avoided. The corps got a great name under Lumsden, who was beloved, I may say, for even his very defects, to say nothing of his virtues. If right men go wrong, people will blame you. I don’t think that Pathans can bear a very strict system of drill and setting up at any time. For all these reasons, therefore, I would introduce my reforms very slowly and carefully, carrying them out in a way as little vexatious as possible. What I write is for your private ear alone. I wish you to take counsel of me, not to repeat what I write, which will only make matters worse. I heard that you addressed Futteh Khan as Futteh Khan Mazool (turned out) ; this was sufficient to set such a chap all of a blaze. 388 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 The next extract indicates that the tension was becoming greater. Camp, Mooltan : February 2, 1854. My dear Hodson, — Why don’t you send a reply to official requisitions ? What is to become of you if you will not answer letters ? It will not be practicable to carry on work. I hear that you say you work night and day, but at what I can’t think ! A clever fellow like you ought to have little difficulty in getting through business with proper despatch. I want a reply to the reference about native officers being appointed and dismissed by the commandant of the Guides. I cannot reply to a reference from Government until I get it. There is another matter about which Melvill wrote. I allude to my brother’s Kashmere accounts. If you cannot give the information asked for, why not say so ? If you can, let me have it. Every month’s delay makes the adjustment of them more difficult. . . . What are you doing with Kader Khan’s son in limbo ? What has he to do with the acts of his father ? Why is not Kader Khan brought to trial before the Commissioner ? The next extract indicates greater tension still. Dera Ismael Khan : March 9, 1854. My dear Hodson, — Read the enclosed memo., and tell me when you intend giving the information. It is now nearly six months since you were asked to report on the appointment and dismissal of officers in your corps. Now it is not reasonable to suppose that matters can work well if you thus delay to furnish information required of you. Besides the official reminders, I have written once privately, but with no result. I want you to clearly understand that, if we are to work together, which I sincerely hope we shall do, you must make up your mind to obey punc- tually all requisitions. It will not answer to say that you are over- whelmed with arrears and the like. I see you have time to answer letters when you like. So pray make up your mind to reply to all in due course. This is the last time that I shall write thus on this subject. The next extract has a special interest, as I take it from one of the few letters which passed between the Lawrence brothers during this period. Murri: May 6. 1854. My dear Henry, — I have just got yours of the 24th. ... I am in great tribulation about Hodson of the Guides. I don’t know what to make of him. His courage and ability are unquestioned. I could ex- cuse his not getting on with his subalterns, for a man like Lumsden would spoil most men under him, at least for any other commander. Lumsden also seems to have left the accounts in great disorder, and Hodson has not gone about getting them right. He is now getting rid, 1852—53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 3&9 or has got rid, of the greater part of his Pathans and Afridis. Perhaps even this is better than keeping men who dislike him. But now I hear that all the European people dislike him, and that mischief may get up there. He had a scuffle with a moonshi of the Guides the other day, which ended in the man striking him in the face ! I tell you all this, not that it can do any good, but that you may not think that I have spited him. I was averse to his getting the Guides from a kind of indefinable idea that he was not the man for them ; but, since he has got them, I have endeavoured to get on as well as I could with him. To me, personally, he has always been amiable and most courteous, but I would give a good deal to see him elsewhere, for I fear a row. But soon other and more painful questions came to the front connected with the account-books of his regiment. It is im- possible to go fully into the case here, but a long string of let- ters shows that John Lawrence, if he sometimes could not help fearing the worst, was always anxious to hope for the best re- specting them. I quote one extract. It is a sufficient answer to the imputations attempted to be thrown upon John Law- rence throughout the book called ‘Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life.’ June 27, 1855. The delay in disposing of your case has not been caused by me, nor have I, in the slightest degree, said or done aught to injure your charac- ter. I have wished that your case should be disposed of by the court composed of your brother officers. But I may truly add that I have often expressed an opinion that nothing injurious to your character as a gentleman would be proved. I have believed, and still believe, that ir- regularities, procrastination, and general mismanagement were the main faults of which you were guilty. An officer maybe culpable without be- ing criminal. He may have done nothing dishonourable, and yet be deemed unfit to command a corps like the Guides. ... I have written this letter in reply to your note, because my silence might have been misconstrued. It is with regret that I have said anything to give you pain, and, for the future, I would rather not discuss the merits of your case. If you think that further inquiry would benefit your cause, you should. I think, ask for it from the Commander-in-Chief. The Court of Inquiry, after protracted examination, arrived at conclusions which were very unfavourable to Hodson’s character, and the papers were duly forwarded to Lord Dal- housie for his decision. But, before he had time to go through them, Hodson became involved in another trouble which brought matters to a crisis. It was not, therefore, as has been 390 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 commonly supposed, upon the charge of malversation that Hod- son lost the command of the Guides. It was for his cruel and arbitrary treatment of a rich native chief named Kader Khan, who is alluded to in one of the above letters. Lord Dalhousie, to whom the case was reported, deprived him of his military command and of his civil charge. ‘ Lieutenant Hodson’s case ’ he says (September 26, 1855), ‘has been lately before me. It is as bad as possible, and I have been compelled to remand him to his regiment with much regret, for he is a gallant soldier and an able man.’ The Court of Directors at home, taking an even more serious view of his conduct, gave an order that, under no circumstances should he receive any other command. He thus disappeared from the Punjab, but he was to come to the front again, in the crisis of the Mutiny — a time which was likely to bring out, as we shall see hereafter that it did, some of his very finest and of his very worst qualities. At Dera Ghazi Khan, finding that there were complaints about the land-tax, the summary assessment of which had been lately fixed by the very popular Deputy-Commissioner, Van Cortlandt, the Chief Commissioner went carefully into the matter himself, reduced the assessment still further by thirty thousand rupees, and so brought contentment in his train. ‘The people here,’ he remarks, ‘are on the whole very well disposed, quite a different lot from those about Peshawur.’ A just observation, and one which, as we shall see hereafter, goes to the root of the quarrel between the Scinde and Punjab frontier schools. For the people of the Southern Derajat, and still more those bordering on the Scinde desert, are of Beluchi origin, are of a mild character, and can be managed solely or chiefly by moral methods. The tribes of the Northern Dera- jat are of Pathan origin, restless, fierce, and untamable, and recognise only the right of the strong to restrain them. The Chief Commissioner’s general impression of our Trans-Indus possessions was not very favourable. He writes to Colonel Sleeman : — I have been making a tour of this frontier. The country is desolate and the people poor and wild, but generally docile and well-behaved. Financially the lands on the right bank of the Indus arc not worth hav- ing ; but we require both sides of the river to keep the Punjab quiet, and hold our own against external aggression. The people below Kohat are much less fanatical and hostile than those of the Peshawur valley. . . . The whole of the Derajat is a wretched country, until you pass 1 852—53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 391 the Paizoo range.1 South of that line the soil is a strong clay, as hard and as level as a deal board, and without a sign of vegetation. Without water the land is not cultivable. Murwut looks pretty well. We like the look of Bunnoo : it is a garden of Eden adjoining a wilderness. The Deputy-Commissioner of this garden of Eden and of the adjoining 'wilderness, it is hardly necessary to say, was the redoubtable ‘ Warden of the Marches,’ with whom his chief had been obliged to keep up so brisk a correspondence during the preceding year. Evidences of the good work which John Nicholson had done, in peace as in war. might be seen on every side, and the faithful companion of the Chief Commis- sioner through the long and rough four months’ march, which was now nearing its end, still recalls the pleasure which his society gave to her and to her husband, and the tender care which the chivalrous protector of her two elder daughters on their voyage to England, now lavished, in all the difficulties of the march, on the still younger child who accompanied her. At Kohat, whose turbulent inhabitants, since the military operations of the preceding autumn, had been peaceful enough, the news reached John Lawrence that Edmondstone, the Fi- nancial Commissioner, who had proved, as he said, ‘ a tower of strength ’ to him in the Punjab, had been appointed Foreign Secretary to Lord Dalhousie. There succeeded to his place John Lawrence’s dear friend, probably the dearest friend he ever had, Donald Macleod. The letter he wrote to him on his appoint- ment is not a little characteristic of the two men and of the rela- tions that existed between them. Rawul Pindi : April 15, 1854. My dear Macleod, — I was glad to get your letter of the nth, and to find you were coming over to Lahore to take charge. I am sure you will make a famous Financial Commissioner. If you only firmly resolve to postpone nothing that can be disposed of at the time, daily getting through what comes before you, there will be nothing further to desire. You do not, I think, give yourself fair play. You are like a racer who, instead of starting off directly the signal is given, waits until the others have got well ahead before he commences his running ; or, perhaps, what is nearer the mark, you only consent to make play when you have packed a good maund of traps on your back. Now pray excuse these ungracious remarks. There is no man who regards and respects you more than I do, or who could be better pleased to have you as a col- league. I see but one speck on your official escutcheon, and, like an officious friend, desire to rub it out. 1 S. boundary of Bunnoo. in recent maps called Sheik Boodeen Hills. 392 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i852-53 The ‘ Cunctator,’ as John Lawrence used aptly enough to call him, however willing he might be, was unable, at his time of life, to change his tactics. But, if it could not be said of him, as of his prototype at Rome, that he 4 saved the State by his delay,’ he certainly contributed to that end by the equanimity, the confidence, and the happiness which his mere .presence — the presence of one whom John Lawrence always regarded as one of the highest types of human goodness — gave to the man who, in the struggle that was coming on, was to do most to save it. From Rawul Pindi, where the steps taken by Edward Thorn- ton, the Commissioner, for placing his civil station, his jails, his cutcherries, and the cantonments, all in close proximity to each other, earned John Lawrence’s warm approval, he went with his wife and daughter, who were both of them ill from the fatigue and exposure of this Derajat march, to the new hill station of Murri. It was his first visit to the place, but it was by no means to be his last ; for the orders of his doctors, and the urgent representations of Lord Dalhousie as to what was due, if not to himself, at least to the public good, constrained him henceforward to spend a considerable part of each hot season there. His reluctance to comply with the requests of friends and doctors, and even of the Governor-General, will appear natural enough when we recollect the stern restraint he had always hitherto placed on his own inclinations, as well as on those of his subordinates, to avail themselves, during the fury of the summer of those ‘delectable mountains’ which’ looked down so invitingly from the North. It was an uphill and a thankless struggle, which he could not afford to abandon now, merely because times had changed with him, and because it would seem doubly ungracious to refuse to others what he accepted for himself. His subordinates often thought him un- reasonably stern in this matter, but the struggle was generally carried on with good temper on both sides, and no one ever questioned his public spirit or the sincerity of his convictions. Indeed, it was still his own inclination to slip away from the hills to the plains even in the height of summer, though when he did so it was always to the injury of his health, and some- times, as we shall see, to the danger of his life. I must give a specimen or two of his letters on this subject. Here is a letter to Montgomery which refers to a refusal he had felt it his duty to give to one of his Commissioners who was a friend of both. 852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 393 I am sorry that is riled at the tone of my refusal. It would seem to me that it was the refusal itself which really annoyed him. But, be it the one or the other, I could not help it. What I did was done on public grounds. In such questions 1 have no friends or enemies ; at least I try not to have them. As regards the Chumba affair, if I was cap- able of acting against my own convictions it would have been for your- self. I voted against Chumba being annexed to Lahore when you were Commissioner, and I am convinced that 1 acted rightly. While I admit the benefit which officers derive from going to the hills, I cannot fail to see how injurious it is to the public service. As a rule, Commissioners who have hill retreats would be there the whole season. They begin by putting in their noses like the fox, and end by slipping in afterwards their bodies and even their tails. Donald is the only man who seems to me to have acted rightly in this respect. Another letter to a friend to whom he was much attached, but who was disposed to offend in like manner, is of a later date, but may be inserted here. Camp, Gukhur : November 22, 1855. My dear Barnes, — I am sorry I shall not see you before you go home, as there is no knowing if we may ever meet again. I think, on the whole, you have made a good Commissioner of the Cis-Sutlej, but not equal to Edmondstone. He is a greater workman than you will ever be. You rely too much on your facility in despatching work, and do not give yourself fair play. Your forte is the revenue line, not the judicial. You are too impulsive for the latter. Still Colvin might get a worse judge. If you come back to me I shall be glad ; if you get promotion elsewhere I shall be content. But, if five months are not sufficient for you in the hills, how will you manage when you have to remain at Agra for eleven ? I am sorry to find you are vexed at my conduct about the hills, but you will, I hope, give me credit for acting on public grounds. I do not think you can do your duty as it should be done and stay up longer. I do not think that any- one ought to have more than that period in the hills. I could not see you spending seven months there, and make the Commissioners of the Jhelum and Cis-Sutlej divisions come down sooner. I never go up my- self before the first of May, and, with the exception of this year, have always hastened down early in October. Indeed, last year I nearly killed myself by coming down for two months in the middle of the hot season. Now, I can do my work in the hills much more conveniently than a Com- missioner, and, in coming down as I do, it is much more for example’s sake than for work. You and many others think that I am a hard task- master. Perhaps I am; but my position requires it. Th & dole e far niente will not answer here. I think that the Commissioners of the Cis-Sutlej and Lahore divisions have more work than they can thoroughly perform. I have told Government so twice. But the Government will not admit it, 394 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. *852-53 and therefore I must try and get the work done somehow or other. I as- sure you my position is no bed of roses. If I had the means I would go home to-morrow. ‘ Ah ! Barnes,’ he would remark in conversation to this same correspondent, with that humorous mixture of praise and blame which came so well from him — ‘ Ah ! Barnes, you are a very clever fellow ; you can get through in half an hour what it would take most of us an hour to do equally well ; and if only you would not insist on getting through it in a quarter of an hour instead of half an hour, you would do excellently!’ It would have been difficult to hit off the strength and the weak- ness of his friend more neatly. The Chief Commissioner’s own work went on unremittingly at Murri, in the house of three small rooms which sufficed for his simple wants and those of his wife. ‘ I have been very busy,’ he writes on June 3 : ‘my pen scarcely ever out of my hand. Certainly, writing long reports is very wearisome and my eyes are not what they used to be. I fear, if I live to be fifty, I shall be blind.’ A few days previously, on May 27, a fourth son-*- Charles Napier — had been born, and, as soon as the mother was sufficiently recovered for him to leave her, the father slipped away to Lahore. But it was a liberty for which he soon had to pay the penalty, for he was attacked by a severe fever which put his life in danger. His medical attendants were, at first, afraid to resort to their usual remedy of bleeding, and it was only at his own urgent request that they consented to open a vein in his arm. This relieved his head, but the positive orders of his doctors and his extreme weakness warned him to make his way back to Murri as soon as possible. The concern of Lord Dal- housie when he heard of his Lieutenant’s narrow escape was extreme, and his warning against similar escapades for the fu- ture will illustrate what I have said about the hills — September 7. Murri, I hope, will restore you fully and at once. Next year you must on no account come down into the plains after the hot weather begins. Whatever you do, or leave undone, pray keep your health. And, again, two days later — I now regret very sincerely that I did not urge you strongly against quitting Murri to return to Lahore during the heat. But your health has, of late, been so good that the thought of risk to it during this temporary 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 395 visit to the plains did not present itself to me at the time. I can now only repeat the injunctions which I laid upon you in my last letter, that next summer you are to take advantage of the hill stations, so numerous in every part of your jurisdiction, and are not again to risk your health, on which so much of the public interest depends. For the present I would urge you to take complete rest, if you can — at any rate, as far as you can — until your health and strength are again revived. Never mind the Punjab Report, or any other Report, but coddle yourself, turn idler, and get yourself up again. It was during this visit to Lahore that John Lawrence was able to effect a change which he had long desired, which relieved him of a cruel amount of work and worry, and gave him a co- adjutor whose ready pen had already done him good service, and who was, in the capacity of his Secretary, for many years to come, to be on the most intimate terms with him. How this came about requires explanation. On the first establishment of the Board, Lord Dalhousie, in a moment of apparent aberra- tion, had appointed Philip Melvill to be its under-Secretary. He was a man of ability and education, and always pleasant to deal with, but, as the result showed, he proved to be quite un- fitted by his training and aptitudes for this particular post. Christian, the Secretary who had been selected by the Board, had, after a very short term of service, gone back to the North- West ; and, then in a second, and less excusable moment of ab- erration, Lord Dalhousie had given Melvill his place. Thus the post, of all others in the Punjab, which ought to have been left entirely in the hands of the Board, was the very one — and almost the only one — in the filling up of which they had not been al- lowed to have any voice. In June, 1851, as I have already related, John Lawrence had paid a visit to Lord Dalhousie at Simla, had there met Richard Temple, then a very young civilian, and, stopping at Jullundur, on his way back, had examined the work done by him as set- tlement officer of the district. ‘ Here is the very man,’ he said, in conversation with his friends, ‘ that we want as Secretary. He can understand what I say, and put it into first-rate form. But what can we do ? Melvill has been put upon us for ever by Lord Dalhousie.’ And, writing shortly afterwards to the Governor-General himself, he thus expresses his opinion of the work which he had examined : ‘Young Temple has just finished the settlement at Jullundur ; and, during the fifteen months he has been there, has not only worked in first-rate style, but has 396 • LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. i852-53 done an amount of work which scarcely any other three men in the country could have done. He is pre-eminently the most rising officer in the Punjab.’ Unfortunately this ‘ most rising officer in the Punjab’ had been soon afterwards recalled to the North-West by Thomason ; but, on the urgent representation of John Lawrence, which I have already quoted,' that a new country must require Temple’s energy more than an old one, Thomason consented to surren- der him, and Temple was forthwith appointed to the revenue settlement of the Rechna Doab. Passing through Lahore, in January, 1853, on his way to his new post, he saw there, for the first time, ‘the great triumvirate,’ and often ‘danced before Herod,’ as his future chief used to describe his frequent visits to him. He worked in the Rechna Doab as hard as he had worked in the Jullundur, and when Lord Dalhousie suggested that a Report should be drawn up, showing what had been done in the Punjab since annexation, the thoughts of the members instinctively turned towards him. The duty properly belonged to Melvill, who tried his hand at it. But the results of his efforts were so inadequate, that by general consent — that of Lord Dal- housie as well as of the Board — a deus ex machina was called in, in the shape of the young settlement officer. The summons reached Temple late in the evening ; and that same night he rode down from Shekarghur to Lahore, a distance of seventy or eighty miles, fording many swollen streams in his way. The ride was characteristic of the man, and was, in itself, likely to recommend him still more strongly to his future chief. The task before Temple was delicate and difficult. Portions of the Report had been already written by Henry, portions also by John. The susceptibilities of Lord Dalhousie, as well as of each of the three members of the Board, had to be con- sulted, and this, as all alike were anxious to impress upon him, without the slightest sacrifice of truth. However, the task was accomplished, and in a manner which made its publication to be almost an epoch in the literary history of India. At all events, it was an epoch in the way in which that history could be regarded by outsiders. It is not too much to say that, before its appearance, no document of the kind had ever been read extensively, either in India or in England. Such reports as had been published were unreadable and almost unintelligible, 1 See page 319. 1S52-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 397 thickly interlarded with Hindustani and Persian words, and the whole put together in the most forbidding shape. Temple thus proved to be the rates sacer, without whom much that the Law- rences had done might have remained unrecorded and unknown beyond the pigeon-holes of a Government office, or the limits of the province which was immediately affected. Temple had done the Secretary’s work, but he was not yet to be Secretary ; and even when the Board was abolished and was succeeded by a Chief Commissioner, the Governor-General still refused to sanction any change. In vain did John Law- rence write to Courtenay and to Lord Dalhousie, representing the vast amount of unnecessary work and worry which was thus thrown upon him, and begging that a Residency, or any other post which was suitable to his abilities, might be given to Melvill. In the period of the Board he had had to do much of the Secretary’s work as well as his own. And now, to make matters worse, the offer which was made to Temple by Colvin of a high post at Agra, made it likely that the man on whom he had set his heart as his future Secretary, would, after all, be perma- nently withdrawn from the Punjab. He treated the matter however with characteristic magnanimity. ‘ Temple,’ he wrote to Courtenay, ‘ is the man whom I have long wished for as Sec- retary in Melvill’s room, if only I could have helped the latter to a snug berth. As I cannot do this, I hope the Governor- General will let Temple go ; for it is hard to prevent an able man getting on, merely because one wants him one’s self.’ But the Governor-General peremptorily refused permission ; and the death of Melvill, which happened soon afterwards — a man for whom John Lawrence had always felt a great regard, and had treated throughout with exemplary patience, and even tenderness — at last gave Temple the opening for which he was so well fitted. It was in July, 1854, shortly before the severe attack of fever which I have described, that Temple arrived to enter on his work. What was said and done at the first meeting between the two men I am able to relate on the best authority, and it is highly characteristic. ‘ John Lawrence,’ said Temple to me in conversation, ‘ was very ill with headache, lying down in a dark room, and much depressed. Hearing me enter the outer room, he called out abruptly, “ So glad you are come ; just look at those letters ; ” and said no more. In the afternoon he was better, and able to leave his room. “ Very glad,” he said, “ to 398 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 have got you in your proper place at last ! I am glad of your opinion, and, of course, very glad of your pen ; but remember, it will be my policy, and my views : not yours. Your day may come — it is mine now ; every dog will have its day.” ’ ‘ He seemed,’ remarks Sir Richard Temple, ‘to be unapproachably beyond me then, and so still he does ; but, in one sense, his words came true, for I have filled offices similar to his since.’ And here, perhaps, I may fitly insert a letter which I have received from Sir Richard Temple, giving me some of his earli- est impressions of his new chief. I essay, as requested by you, to note some among my recollections of John Lawrence’s mode of conversing with those who were within his inner circle ; though I cannot, in the space of a single letter, do any- thing like justice to the memory of my revered master. It was one day in the first half of June, 1851, that I was introduced by George Barnes to John Lawrence, who was then living in a picturesquely situated house on the spur of Mount Jacko, in the centre of Simla. You can imagine the interest and curiosity with which I went to this, my first interview, with the man whose repute had left so deep an impression on the public mind, and at whose instance I had broken away from my comfortable anchorage in Hindustan and had embarked on a new career in the then unsettled Punjab. I had, in my imagination, pictured Law- rence as an iron-looking man, somewhat severe in tone and aspect, with a massive brow, straight features, and compressed lips, uttering few words, and those only of a dry and practical import. His conversation, I expected, would tend towards statecraft or political economy, and would proceed to the point and nothing but the point. Great was my surprise, then, on finding that he had an open countenance, an expansive fore- head, a frank, genial bearing, and a vivacious manner of conversation. The lips, so far from being closely set, were parted constantly by smiles and laughter. The conversation turned on the state of the country be- tween Simla and the Punjab, on the rainy season which was just setting in favourably for agriculture, and on the incidents of travel from the valley of the Sutlej to the heights of the Himalayas, as illustrative of the character of the country and the ways of the people. He was full of animation, and seemed anxious to make me feel at ease. It was only when the features occasionally relaxed, after the play of light and fancy during conversation, that I could perceive the full strength and solidity of his head, and the lines which anxious thought and energetic resolve had marked on his face. He concluded a somewhat diversified discourse by asking me one or two questions about my settlement work, and fixed a day on which I was to bring my papers for his inspection. During the several interviews I had with him afterwards regarding settlement work he displayed not only the strong grasp of economic facts, and the quick insight into elaborate statistics which might have been expected from his 1852-53 CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF THE PUNJAB. 399 stirring antecedents, but also more of patience and quiet consideration than a young officer would ordinarily expect to receive from so eminent a superior. Shortly afterwards he told me that the Governor-General (Lord Dal- housie) had asked him to bring me with him to dine quietly at Govern- ment House ; and, no other guests being present, I had a full opportu- nity of observing the two great men engaged in a discussiofi which fell upon the feudal tenures of the Cis-Sutlej States, then being settled by Government. Lord Dalhousie had the staid yet bland demeanour ordi- narily associated with the statesman. Lawrence, though also self-pos- sessed, was full of animation and vivacity, urging with much earnestness some views which Lord Dalhousie did not seem wholly to accept. After dinner they sat again conversing on a sofa. Lawrence was telling some of his own experiences, and Lord Dalhousie was listening with amused attention. I understood, at the time, that Lord Dalhousie used to praise Lawrence’s official writings as being lifelike and as instantaneously con- veying distinct ideas to the mind of the reader. I know not how far the records at a biographer’s disposal indicate the play of wit, the flight of fancy, the originality of illustration, the raciness of expression, the unpremeditated eloquence, which imparted a fra- grance and flavour to Lawrence’s intimate conversation with those who were constantly about him. These qualities were unfailing when he was, as it were, * off duty,’ however reserved or grave he might be when he was actually at work. He used largely the well-known method of illus- tration whereby the features of a country are described by metaphors drawn from human characters, and, vice versa, the disposition and tem- per of persons are set forth by analogies derived from the material world. Though he had not cultivated, and hardly appreciated, the more delicate points in landscape, or the tamer beauties of nature, yet if placed in any scene which was * stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child,’ he would, at once, display something of the artist’s sentiment and the poet’s instinct. I have heard him describe the crossing of the Indus, the valley of Peshawur, the mouth of the Khyber Pass, the rocks of the Kohat defile, the floods of the Sutlej, the thunder-storms of the Hima- layas, in brief, graphic, pithy — though perhaps rugged — sentences, which few men would surpass. He had a discriminating insight for all that related to animal life. He would allude in striking terms to the noteworthy creatures of the East — the elephant, the tiger, the deer, the buffalo, the eagle, the hawk. He regarded the live-stock of an Indian farm — the heifers, the steers, the lambs, the kids — with the affection of a true amateur. He had a sound knowledge of horse-breeding in India, whether in studs or in villages, and it used to be interesting to hear him criticise the colts and fillies, and discuss their build, nourishment, train- ing, temper, and docility. It were superfluous to say, after his practice 400 LIFE OF LORD LAWRENCE. 1852-53 as a settlement officer, that he had an amount of discernment respecting the varieties of soil, the quality of growing crops, the effect of weather upon the harvests, the merits and demerits of native husbandry, which has never been excelled by any Englishman in India. Nobody could ride with him across the fields in the busy season without deriving in- struction as to what should be observed. It was a branch of his great profession to perceive at a glance the material condition of the natives of all ranks and callings. He was benevolently keen to note the signs of poverty or distress in the humblest classes, whereon he would often di- late. It was interesting to walk with him through the rough lanes and alleys of a large village, and to hear his remarks regarding its strong and weak points, its capabilities and resources. Insight into human charac- ter being one of his foremost faculties, and the study of the native dis- position in its practical aspect having been one of his first duties, his knowledge of Indian idiosyncracies, as affecting the business of life, was comprehensive, without, perhaps, being what is commonly termed profound. To converse with him on these topics was to be introduced to a separate world of opinion and feeling. He did not indeed appear to have turned his attention towards the philosophical, ideal, and meta- physical phases of Hindu thought. But of the priestly and fanatical classes among Mohammedans he had a vivid and exact appreciation, which he would embody in forcible language. Though not at all satirical or cynical, he delighted to mark good-hu- mouredly the ridiculous side of everything. His intimate friends prob- ably knew' him to be a laughter-loving man to a degree little imagined, perhaps, by the outer world. He thoroughly acted, however, up to the maxim, ‘ dulce est desipere in loco.' When on horseback, before the public, or in his office chair, he kept his humour quiet, but at meal- times, or after dinner, or in his walks, or when talking with his Secre- tary alone, he hardly touched upon anything without investing it u'ith an air of pleasantry. As I look back through the vista of years to the time when I saw him constantly — from 1851 to 1859 — his bright, gleaming talk, and the sparkle of his peculiar wit, seem to me like the dvrjpidpov yi\a