LORD DALHOUSIE.* MR. EDWIN ARNOLD has disappointed us. We had
hoped when his book was announced to receive a moderate sized and most picturesque history of Lord Dalhousie's administration, the brightest or darkest, but in either view the most stirring, episode in the history of our Indian Empire. We had hoped that an author, himself familiar with India, a poet, and a scholar, would have lifted that one decade out of the haze which envelopes all things Indian, and enabled Englishmen to feel for a moment the greatness of the obstacles their agents had overcome, the grandeur of the prizes their own valour and constancy had half unconsciously secured. We had even dreamed that the central figure in that great drama, the strong man who, landing in India at thirty-five left it at forty-three, having in that short time flung four great kingdoms into his Sovereign's lap, might have been ren- dered intelligible to his countrymen, that Lord Dalhousie might have been made, if only for a year or two, as visible as the man whom he so often resembled, Cortez the Conquistador. The task is left, how- ever, for other hands to accomplish. Mr. Arnold's book threatens to be a very prolix, and is a very dull and annals-like account of the external features of that stirring period, written in the most careless style, and with a want of animation and insight which, considering Mr. Arnold's tastes and the undoubted fancy displayed in his somewhat feeble verses, has taken us by surprise. The work has scarcely an adequate raison d'être, so little does it add to the know- ledge already current in the world. The author seems to have read most of the published accounts of the Punjab and its recent history —though a glance at the "Life of Havelock" would have saved him from a sentence which implies that Ferozeshuhur was a victory—and has probably waded through more worthless despatches than he cares to remember, but he has apparently enjoyed no special means of ac- curate or original information. Lord Dalhousie himself, with a proud scorn for thegeneration which repaid his services by _accusing him as the author of a catastrophe due exclusively to the old Indians
• Dallsousies Administration of British India. Vol. I. By E. Arnold, M.A. Saunders and Otley.
with whom he had all his life contended, sealed up his papers—kept with rigorous care and minuteness—for fifty years, confident that posterity would not misjudge a man who, professing only to be aruler, added four monarchies to his Sovereign's empire, and who before he died saw one of the four, changed into a loyal province by his policy, preserve to her successors, under the lead of the man he himself had selected, the dominion of the remainder. His papers were, there- fore, inaccessible, but there must exist still volumes of manuscript detailing the secret history of his career, volumes of which we shall obtain at least one glimpse when Sir H. Edwardes completes his forthcoming " Life of Sir Henry Lawrence." Even the records of the India House seem to have been closed to the historian, a fact in- telligible enough when we remember the dislike of the bureaucracy there enthroned for the man who despised them, and which will ac- count for the remarkable want of authorities in Mr. Arnold's volume. He quotes even published works but seldom, and has not once, we believe, referred to any manuscript or other source of information not accessible to any man who chooses to spend a few hours in the British Museum or the library of the India House.
The work he has attempted, the "redaction" of current know- ledge into a portable form, has been fairly accomplished, though we could dispense with some sentences which read rather like those of a penny-a-liner than of a grave historian. The writer who calls the Punjab this "fine and fertile conquest" would be capable of describing a victory as a "nice battle," and we have not a notion of the theory of grammar which would make the fol- lowing grandiloquence accurate : " The lustre of their fidelity suf- fices to gild the inauspicious opening of an administration sufficiently illustrious afterwards by the occupations and the achievements of its chief." Great writers as well as little scribes do occasionally speak by a bold figure of "predictions made after the event," but it is only the latter class who would venture on a statement like this : "Many a duty of like nature had been so done, from which no evil resulted or was prophesied by those numerous seers wlaNse predictions coin- cide with events in point of time as well as of fact." The printers may be in fault when an author speaks of "a country now become our frontiers," or when he remarks that "by such a wall the peace of the cis-Indus was secure ;" but how does Mr. Arnold construe this : " The Hindoo respects, in strength and in the will to wield it, the same heralds of supremacy which the Greek tragedian attached as emissaries to Zeus." Or where did he read that Gholab Singh stood prepared, dur- ing the second Sikh war, "to call out seven lakhs of drilled men at a week's notice." Seven lakhs of drilled men ; seven hundred thou- sand trained soldiers ; double the Indian army when at its highest level; more than the whole male population of Cashmere; probably twice the number of the true arm-bearing Khalsa! If Gholab Singh had a tenth of the force, lie played a very cowardly game. In truth, we believe he had about twenty-two thousand, and had he lifted his standard as the last independent Sikh, he might have summoned a hundred thousand more, one third of whom would have been " drilled men." Statements so lax greatly injure a compilation whose value depends so entirely on its accuracy, and are the more inexcusable, because the author animadverts on the Indian habit of exaggerating the enemy's number in bulletins. The real defect of the volume, however, the one which will make it distasteful to every Indian, is the obscurity in which Mr. Arnold has left its principal hero. It is Lord Dalhousie's Administration which he undertakes to record, but he has said little or nothing of Lord Dalhousie. The strong personality which the Governor-Gene- ral impressed on every act of his reign is totally absent from this description of its events, and the Englishman who derived his knowledge from this work alone might be tempted to believe, as some Englishmen do, that the Government of India is a machine in which individual character is worthless or lost. India, indeed, is an empire worked by a bureaucracy to which that description might apply, but it is ruled by an autocrat whose slightest idea, or even caprice, is felt to the smallest details of the administra- tion. The Indian Government is not a locomotive fixed to a groove, but a state carriage, which, though always the same, changes its direction at every sign of its driver. The omission is the more re- markable, because the specialty of Lord Dalhousie's reign was the vigour with which he maintained his personal control. His cha- racter will never be understood, still less fairly described, till the observer accepts his true position. The man was a king, a monarch, occupying a monarch's place, with all the virtues and most of the failings great monarchs have ever displayed. So keenly was this felt in India, that whenever a new difficulty occurred, the con- stant remark was, not what will the Government do, but what does Lord Dalhousie think ; and the answer usually terminated contro- versy. Called to almost absolute power over a fifth of the human race, at an age when Englishmen in England are called rising young men, he found the Empire threatened by the most formidable native army still in existence—how formidable no one will know till Lord Hardinge's secret papers are published---his own army just reduced by fifty thousand men, and his Commasider-in-Chief a General whom the officers, perhaps a little unreasonably, wholly distrusted. The first movements were delayed beyond all reason; the first battle was almost a defeat; but from the moment when Lord Dalhousie ga- thered the reins in his own hands, and standing up by a Barrackpore mess-table, accepted the Sikh challenge, the confidence of all classes in his capacity never swerved. From that day till the moment when, conquering pain which, as he said, made him "yearn to howl," he rose from a sick couch to march down the steps of Government House amid the sobs of the European community, Lord Dalhousie was often criticized and sometimes denounced, but he was never doubted, Author of "Jutland and the Danish Isles. Two volumes. Murray.
never called on to overcome that resistance from within which is the difficulty of Indian Governors, and which has so severely tried Lord Canning. Friends and enemies expected everything of him except the possibility of failure. Much of this power over men he owed, doubtless, to the personal charm which subdued every one who came into immediate contact with him. To this day the officers of his household, who saw more than most men of his moments of weakness, resent hostile criticism of their chief as a personal insult to them- selves. More was due, doubtless, to a singular sympathy for public feeling which enabled him always to do and to say the right thing at the right moment, which gave him the power to keep down European pretensions without wounding the pride of race, and to concentrate all military authority in his own hands without losing the soldiers' attach- ment. But the root of it was his kingliness of character, the abso- lute certainty all men possessed that the empire would go to pieces before Lord Dalhousie swerved, or left his word unfulfilled, or failed to avenge an agent attacked while doing his will. The order which buried the bodies of Agnew and Anderson above the breach in the walla before which they had been murdered, cleared the mind of every Indian officer of the great official bugbear, the dread of want of sup- port. Men felt they were obeying a king, a man of definite aims and decisive will, and a feeling grew up -towards him, which, under other circumstances, and in a different sphere, might have made his power as dangerous to the monarchy as it was beneficial.
His faults were all of the same type. From the day of the battle of Goojerat, a policy which may have been evil, and which was pos- sibly erroneous, but which was certainly one of imperial grandeur, was ever before his eyes. He would change the Indian empire, that cesspool filled with the dibris of broken plans of administration, into a great, homogeneous, military monarchy, supreme in influence in Asia, and the right arm of England in her conflict against the world, and had he remained, he would, we firmly believe, have succeeded in his design. He performed only half of his task; he made Queen Victoria the acknowledged sovereign of India from the Suleiman to the sea, and was just turning to reconstruct the weapon with which lie had done so much, when he was compelled to return. Almost his last act was a demand for European troops to redress the danger- ous weight of the native army. He intended to reduce the one and increase the other till they had regained their old proportions, and, as he quitted Calcutta, expressed in a note to a friend that his greatest regret in leaving was, that he had not time to reconstruct the army, and "remove the most dangerous spot on an administra- tion he could not but otherwise feel successful." This policy, which was to him the object of life, often blinded him to the means he em- ployed, made him as contemptuous of hostile feelings as he avowedly was of hostile menaces, once at Nagpore brought him in conflict with a whole people, and repeatedly made him seem to the native princes guided by some inexplicable hostility towards themselves. Oude he did not annex. He recommended only sequestration, as anybody can see who reads the parliamentary papers, and when Mr. J. P. Grant's advice to annex by the right of the sabre was accepted, he was so irritated that he threatened not to obey the positive orders he had re- ceived. Latterly, too, unbroken success and the long habit of abso- lute power exercised their deteriorating influence, and the Governor- General became too much of a czar, too apt to confound his will and his policy, and to consider that resistance to him implied also resistance to the State he administered. He accused his own Board of Revenue of "unparalleled presumption" for demurring to the appointment of a man suspected of lunacy, and his last letter to the Nizam was in the vulgar style of the irresponsible despot. But his harshness, like his success, sprang from the imperial character of his mind, and posterity will recognize, as the readers of Mr. Arnold certainly will not do, that for the eight most stirring and successful years of its history the Indian Administration meant simply the resistless will and the splendid brain of the Marquis of Dalhousie.
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