 Section 7 of a history of our own times, Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami, Chapter 33, The Hundredth Anniversary of Plessy. The news of the outbreak at Mirut and the proclamation in Delhi broke upon Calcutta with a shock of a thunder clap, yet it was not wholly a shock of surprise. For some time there had been vague anticipations of some impending danger. There was alarm in the air. There had long been a prophecy known to India that the Hundredth Anniversary of the Battle of Plessy would see the end of English rule in Hindustan, and now the Hundredth Anniversary was near. There is a fine passage in Sir Henry Taylor's Philip van Achtwelder in which van Rik says to the hero of the drama, if you mark my lord, mostly a rumor of such things, precedes the certain tidings, and Philip musing the answers, it is strange yet true that doubtful knowledge travels with a speed miraculous which certain cannot match. I know not why, when this or that has chanced, the smoke outruns the flash, but so it is. The smoke had apparently outrun the flash in many parts of India during this eventful season. Calcutta heard the news of what had happened with wild alarm and horror, but hardly with much surprise. For one or two days Calcutta was a prey to mere panic. The alarm was greatly increased by the fact that the throne king of Uwed was established near to the city. At garden reach, a few miles down the huli, the dispossessed king was living. There he lived for many years after, with his host of dependents and hangers on round him. A picturesque writer lately described the grotesque structures in which the old man, with his mania for building, quarters not only his people but his menagerie. Tower after tower rises high above the lower buildings, on the top of each of which, comfortably quartered in a spacious den, abides a huge Bengal tiger, who stripes glisten in the sun in the sight of the passerby on the river. He owns vast flocks of trained pigeons which fly or alight at the word of command. Wild but not unmusical shouts of coulis stationed on the housetops who appear to direct their motions by the waving of long bamboos. The inhabitants of Calcutta, when the news of the mutiny came, were convinced that the king of Oed harbored close to their city, companions more dangerous than pigeons or even than Bengal tigers. They were sure that the place was the headquarters of rebellion, and were expecting the moment when from the residence at garden reach an organized army of murderers was to be sent forth to capture and destroy the ill-fated city and to make its streets run with the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Mark Canning took the prudent course of having the king, with his prime minister, removed to the governor general's own residence within the precincts of Fort William. There is no recklessness, no cruelty, like the cruelty and recklessness of panic. Perhaps there is hardly any panic so demoralizing in its effects as that which seizes the unwarlike members of a ruling race set down in the midst of overwhelming numbers of the subject populations at a moment when the cry goes abroad that the subjected are rising in rebellion. Fortunately, there was at the head of affairs in India a man with a cool head, a quiet, firm will, and a courage that never faltered. If ever the crisis found the man, Lord Canning was the man called for by that crisis in India. He had all the divining genius of the true statesman, the man who can rise to the height of some unexpected and new emergency, and he had the cool courage of a practiced conqueror. The greatest trial to which a ruler can be subjected is to be called upon at a moment's notice to deal with events and conditions for which there is no precedent. The second class statesman, the official statesman, if we may use such an expression, collapses under such a trial. The man of genius finds it his opportunity and makes his own of it. Lord Canning thus found his opportunity in the Indian mutiny. Among all the distracting councils and wild stories poured in upon him from every side, he kept his mind clear. He never gave way either to anger or to alarm. If he ever showed a little impatience, it was only where panic would too openly have proclaimed itself by councils of wholesale cruelty. He could not perhaps always conceal from frightened people the fact that he rather despised their terrors. Throughout the whole of that excited period there were few names even among the chiefs of rebellion on which fiercer denunciation was showered by Englishmen than the name of Lord Canning. Because he would not listen to the bloodthirsty clamors of mere frenzy, he was nicknamed Clemency Canning, as if Clemency were an attribute of which a man ought to be ashamed. Indeed, for some time people wrote and spoke not merely in India but in England as if Clemency were a thing to be reprobated, like treason or crime. Every allowance must be made for the unparalleled excitement of such a time, and in a special for the manner in which the elementary passions of manhood were inflamed by the stories happily not true of the wholesale dishonour and barbarous mutilation of women. And when the fullest allowance has been made for this, it must be said by anyone looking back on that painful time that some of the public constructors of England betrayed a fury and ferocity which no conditions can excuse on the part of civilized and Christian men who have time to reflect before they write or speak. The advice is which some English journals showered upon the government, the army, and all concerned in repressing the mutiny might more fittingly have come from some of the heroes of the Spanish fury. Nay, the Spanish fury itself was, in express words, held up to the English army as an example for them to imitate. An English paper of high and well-earned authority distinctly declared that such mercy as Alva showed the Netherlands was the mercy that English soldiers must show to the rebellious regions of India. There was for a while but little talk of repression, everyone in England well knew that the rebellion would be repressed. It has to be remembered to the credit of England's national courage and resolve that not at the worst moment of the crisis did it seem to have occurred to any Englishman that there was the slightest possibility of the rebellion being allowed to succeed. It is painful to have to remember that the talk was not of repression, but of revenge. Public speakers and writers were shrieking out for the vengeance which must be inflicted on India when the rebellion had been put down. For a while it seemed a question of patriotism which would propose the most savage and sanguinary measures of revenge. We shall see farther on that one distinguished English officer was clamorous to have powers given to him, to impale, to burn alive, and to flay mutineers who had taken part in the murder of English women. Mr. Disraeli, to do him justice, raised his voice in remonstrance against the wild passions of the hour, even when these passions were strongest and most general. He declared that if such a temper were encouraged, we ought to take down from our altars the images of Christ and raise the statue of Malik there, and he protested against making Nana Sahib, of whom we shall hear more, the model for the conduct of a British officer. Mr. Disraeli did indeed, at a later period, show an inclination to back out of this courageous and honorable expression of opinion, but it stands at all events to the credit of his first impulse that he could venture at such a time to talk of morality, mercy, and Christianity. If people were so carried away in England where the danger was far remote, we can easily imagine what were the fears and passions roused in India where the terror was or might be at the door of everyone. Lord Canning was greatly embarrassed by the wild urgencies and councils of distracted Englishmen who were furious with him because he even thought of distinguishing friend from foe where native races were concerned. He bore himself with perfect calmness, listened to everything that any one had to say where time gave him any chance of doing so, read as far as possible all the myriad communications poured in upon him, regarded no suggestion as unworthy of consideration, but made his own resolves and his own judgment the final arbiter. He was greatly assisted and encouraged in his councils by his brave and noble wife, who proved herself in every way worthy to be the helpmate of such a man at such a crisis. He did not for a moment underestimate the danger, but neither did he exaggerate its importance. He never allowed it to master him. He looked upon it with the quiet, resolute eye of one who was determined to be the conqueror in the struggle. Lord Canning saw that the one important thing was to strike at Delhi, which had proclaimed itself the headquarters of the rebellion. He knew that English troops were on their way to China for the purpose of wreaking the wrongs of English subjects there, and he took on his own responsibility the bold step of intercepting them and calling them to the work of helping to put down the mutiny in India. The dispute with China he thought could well afford to wait, but with the mutiny it must be now or never. India could not wait for reinforcements brought all the way from England. In Scots betrothed, the soldier of the night who owns the frontier castle encourages him, when the Welsh are about to attack, by the assurance that the forces of the constable of Chester will soon come to his aid, and that with these reinforcements they will send the Welsh dragon flag flying from the field. The night sadly answers that it must fly from the field before the reinforcements arrive, or it will fly over all our dead bodies. Thus felt Lord Canning when he thought of the strong arms that England could send to his assistance. He knew well enough, as well as the wildest alarmist could know, that the rebel flag must be forced to fly from some field before that help came, or it would fly over the dead bodies of those who then represented English authority in India. He had therefore no hesitation in stopping the troops that were on their way to China and pressing them into the service of India at such a need. Fortune II was favorable to him in more ways than one. The Persian war was of short duration, Sir James Utrim was soon victorious and the Persians sued for peace. The Treaty of Peace was signed at Paris in March 1857 and was arranged so quickly that Utrim inflicted a crushing defeat on the Persians after the treaty was signed, but before the news of its signature had time to reach the seat of war. Utrim therefore and his gallant companions, Colonel Jacob and Colonel Havlock, were able to lend their invaluable services to the Governor General of India. Most important for Lord Canning's purposes was the manner in which the affairs of the Punjab were managed at this crisis. The Punjab was under the administration of one of the ablest public servants India had ever had, Sir John afterwards Lord Lawrence. John Lawrence had from his youth been in the civil service of the East India Company and when Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjab, he made Lawrence and his soldier brother, the gallant Sir Henry Lawrence, two out of a board of three for the administration of the affairs of the newly acquired province. Afterwards Sir John Lawrence was named the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab and by the promptitude and energy of himself and his subordinates the province was completely saved for English rule at the outbreak of the mutiny. Fortunately the electric telegraph extended from Calcutta to Lahore, the chief city of the Punjab. On May 11th the news of the outbreak at Mirut was brought to the authorities at Lahore. As it happened Sir John Lawrence was done away at Rawal Pindi in the upper Punjab. But Mr. Robert Montgomery, the Judicial Commissioner at Lahore, was invested with plenary power and he showed that he could use it to advantage. Myanmar is a large military cantonment five or six miles from Lahore and there were then some four thousand native troops there with only about thirteen hundred Europeans of the Queens and the Company service. There was no time to be lost. If the spirit of mutiny were to spread the condition of things in the Punjab would be desperate but what did the condition of things in the Punjab involve? The possible loss of a province? Something far greater than that. It meant the possibility of a momentary collapse of all British authority in India. For if anyone will take the trouble to cast a glance at the map of India he will see that the Punjab is so placed as to become a basis of operations for the precise military movements which every experienced eye then saw to be necessary for the saving of our Indian Empire. The candle would have been burning at both ends so far as regards the northwest provinces if the Punjab had gone with Delhi and Lucknow. While the Punjab held firm it was like a barrier raised at one side of the rebellious movement not merely preventing it from going any farther in that direction but keeping it pent up until the moment came when the blow from the other direction could fall upon it. The first thing to be done to strike effectively at the rebellion was to make an attack on Delhi and the possession of the Punjab was of inestimable advantage to the authorities for that purpose. It will be seen then that the moment was critical for those to whose hands the administration of the great new provinces had been entrusted. There was no actual reason to assume that the sepoys in me and Mir meant to join the rebellion. There would be a certain danger of converting them into rebels if any rash movement were to be made for the purpose of guarding against treachery on their part. Either way was a serious responsibility, a momentous risk. The authorities soon made up their minds. Any risk would be better than that of leaving it in the power of the native troops to join the rebellion. A ball and supper were to be given at Lahore that night. To avoid creating any alarm it was arranged that the entertainments should take place. During the dancing and feasting Mr. Montgomery held the council of the leading officials of Lahore, civil and military, and it was resolved at once to disarm the native troops. A parade was ordered for daybreak at me and Mir, and on the parade ground an order was given for a military movement which brought the heads of four columns of the native troops in front of 12 guns charged with grape. The artillery men with their port fires lighted and the soldiers of one of the Queen's regiments standing behind with loaded muskets. A command was given to the seapoys to pile arms. They had immediate death before them if they disobeyed. They stood literally at the cannon's mouth. They piled their arms which were borne away at once in carts by the European soldiers and all chances of a rebellious movement were over in that province and the Punjab was saved. Something of the same kind was done at Wultan in the lower Punjab later on, and the province thus assured to English civil and military authority became a basis for some of the most important operations by which the mutiny was crushed and the scepter of India restored to the Queen. Within little more than a fortnight from the occupation of Delhi by the rebels, the British forces under General Anson, the commander-in-chief, were advancing on that city. The commander did not live to conduct any of the operations. He died of cholera almost at the beginning of the march. He had lived long enough to come in for much sharp censure. The temper of the time, both in England and in India, expected men to work by witchcraft rather than wit, and Anson was furiously denounced by some of the principal English journals, because he did not recapture Delhi without having even to march an army to the neighborhood of the city. He was described as a holiday soldier who had never seen service either in peace or war. His appointment was denounced as a shameless job and a tribute altogether to the claims of family and personal acquaintance. We cannot venture now to criticize the mode of General Anson's appointment, and he had not time to show whether he was any better than a holiday soldier. But it would appear that Lord Canning had no poor opinion of his capacity and was particularly impressed by his coolness and command of temper. He died, however, at the very outset of his march, and we only refer now to the severe attacks which were made upon him to illustrate the temper of the nation and the manner in which it delighted to hear itself addressed. We are always rebuking other nations for their impatience and fretfulness under difficulties. It is a lesson of no slight importance for us. To be reminded that when the hour of strain and pressure comes, we are found to be in most ways very like our neighbors. The siege of Delhi proved long and difficult. Another general died, another had to give up his command before the city was recaptured. It was justly considered by Lord Canning and by all the authorities as of the utmost importance that Delhi should be taken before the arrival of great reinforcements from home. Meanwhile, the rebellion was breaking out at new points almost everywhere in these northern and northwestern regions. On May 30th, the mutiny declared itself at Lucknow. Sir Henry Lawrence was governor of Oed. He endeavored to drive the rebels from the place, but the numbers of the mutineers were overwhelming. He had under his command, too, a force partly made up of native troops, and some of these deserted him in the battle. He had to retreat and to fortify the residency at Lucknow, and remove all the European men, women, and children thither, and patiently stand the siege. Lawrence himself had not long to endure the siege. On July 2nd he had been up with the dawn and after a great amount of work he lay on a sofa, not as it has been said to rest, but to transact business in a recumbent position. His nephew and another officer were with him. Suddenly a great crash was heard and the room was filled with smoke and dust. One of his companions was flung to the ground. A shell had burst. When there was silence the officer who had been flung down called out, Sir Henry, are you hurt? At first there was no answer. Then a weak voice was heard to reply in just the words that Browning has put into the mouth of the gallant French lad, similarly questioned by the great Napoleon. I am killed, was the answer that came faintly but firmly, from Sir Henry Lawrence's lips. The shell had wounded him and the thigh so fearfully, as to leave surgery no chance of doing anything for his relief. On the morning of July 4th he died calmly and in perfect submission to the will of Providence. He had made all possible arrangements for his successor and for the work to be done. He desired that on his tomb should be engraved merely the words, here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty. The epitaph was a simple, truthful summing up of a simple, truthful career. The man, however, was greater than the career. Lawrence had not opportunity to show an actual result the greatness of spirit that was in him. The immense influence he exercised over all who came within his reach bears testimony to his strength and nobleness of character better than any of the mere successes which his biographer can record. He was full of sympathy. His soul was alive to the noblest and purest aspirations. It is the duad mixture of romance and reality, he was himself accustomed to say, that best carries a man through life. No professional teacher or philosopher ever spoke a truer sentence. As one of his many admirers says of him, what he said and wrote he did, or rather, he was. Let the bitterest enemy of England write the history of her rule in India and set down as against her every wrong that was done in her name from those which Burke denounced to those which the Madras Commission exposed. He will have to say that men, many men, like Henry Lawrence, lived and died devoted to the cause of that rule and the world will take account of the admission. During the later days of Sir Henry Lawrence's life it had another trouble added to it by the appeals which were made to him from Kanpur for a help which he could not give. The story of Kanpur is by far the most profound and tragic in its interest of all the chapters that make up the history of the Indian mutiny. The city of Kanpur stands in the Doab, a peninsula between the Ganges and the Yamuna, and is built on the south bank of the Ganges, there nearly a quarter of a mile broad in the dry season, and more than a mile across when swelled by the rains. By a treaty made in 1775 the East India Company engaged to maintain a force in Kanpur for the defense of Oed, and the revenues of an extensive district of country were appropriated to the maintenance of the troops quartered there. In 1801, for some of the various reasons impelling similar transactions in India, Lord Wellesley closed the mortgage as Mr Trevelyan puts it in his interesting and really valuable little book, Kanpur, and the territory lapsed into the possession of the company. From that time it took place as one of our first class military stations. When Oed was in next to our dominions there was an additional reason for maintaining a strong military force at Kanpur. The city commanded the bridge over which passed the high road to Lucknow, the capital of our new province. The distance from Kanpur to Lucknow is about 50 miles as the bird flies. At the time when the mutiny broke out in Mirut there were some 3,000 native soldiers in Kanpur consisting of two regiments of infantry, one of cavalry, and a company of artillerymen. There were about 300 officers and soldiers of English birth. The European or Eurasian population including women and children numbered about 1,000. These consisted of the officials, the railway people, some merchants and shopkeepers and their families. The native town had about 60,000 inhabitants. The garrison was under the command of Sir Hugh Wheeler among the oldest of an old school of Bengal officers. Sir Hugh Wheeler was some 75 years of age at the time when the events occurred which we have now to describe. The revolt was looked for at Kanpur from the moment when the news came of the rising at Mirut and it was not long expected before it came. Sir Hugh Wheeler applied to Sir Henry Lawrence for help. Lawrence of course could not spare a man. Then Sir Hugh Wheeler remembered that he had a neighbor whom he believed to be friendly despite of very recent warnings from Sir Henry Lawrence and others to the contrary. He called this neighbor to his assistance and his invitation was promptly answered. The Nanna Sahib came with two guns and some 300 men to lend a helping hand to the English commander. The Nanna Sahib resided at Bitur, a small town 12 miles up the river from Kanpur. He represented a grievance. Bajirao, Peshawar of Pune, was the last prince of one of the great Maratha dynasties. The East India Company believed him guilty of treachery against them, of bad government of his dominions and so forth, and they found a reason for dethroning him. He was assigned however a residence in Bitur and a large pension. He had no children and he adopted as his heir Sirik Dantupant, the man who will be known to all time by the infamous name of Nanna Sahib. It seems almost superfluous to say that according to Hindu belief, it is needful for a man's eternal welfare that he leave a son behind him to perform duly his funeral rites and that the adoption of a son is recognized as in every sense conferring on the adopted all the rights that a child of the blood could have. Bajirao died in 1851 and Nanna Sahib claimed to succeed to all his possessions. Lord Dalhousie had shown in many instances a strangely unwise disregard of the principle of adoption. The claim of the Nanna to the pension was disallowed. Nanna Sahib sent a confidential agent to London to push his claim there. This man was the clever and handsome young Mohammedan who had at one time been a servant in an Anglo-Indian family and had picked up a knowledge of French and English. His name was Azamulakan. This emissary visited London in 1854 and became a lion of the fashionable season. As Haji Baba, the barber's son, in the once popular story, was taken for a prince in London and treated accordingly, saw the promoted footman, Azimulakan, was welcomed as a man of princely rank in our West End society. He did not succeed in winning over the government to take any notice of the claims of his master, but being very handsome and of sleek and alluring manners, he became a favourite in the drawing rooms of the Metropolis and was under the impression that an unlimited number of English women of rank were dying with love for him. On his way home he visited Constantinople and the Crimea. It was then a dark hour for the fortunes of England in the Crimea and Azimulakan swallowed with glad and greedy ear all the alarmist rumours that were afloat in Stambul about the decay of England's strength and the impending domination of Russian power over Europe and Asia. In the Crimea itself, Azimula had some opportunity of seeing how the campaign was going, and it is not surprising that with his prepossessions and his hopes he interpreted everything he saw as a threatened disaster for the arms of England. Mr. Russell, the correspondent of the Times, made the acquaintance of Azimulakan and Constantinople and afterwards met him in the Crimea and has borne testimony to the fact that along with the young Mohammedan's boasts of his conquests of English women were mingled a good many grave and sinister predictions as to the prospects of England's empire. The Western visit of this man was not an event without important consequences. He doubtless reported to his master that the strength of England was on the wane and while stimulating his hatred and revenge stimulated also his confidence in the chances of an effort to gratify both. Azimulakan did afterwards, as it will be seen, make some grim and genuine havoc among English ladies. The most bloodthirsty massacre of the whole mutiny is with good reason ascribed to his instigation. With Azimulakan's mission and its results ended the hopes of Nanasahib for the success of his claims and began we may presume his resolve to be revenged. Nanasahib, although his claim on the English government was not allowed, was still rich. He had a large private property of the man who had adopted him and he had the residence at Bittur. He kept up a sort of princely state. He never visited Kanpur, the reason being it is believed that he would not have been received there with princely honors, but he was especially lavish of his attentions to English visitors and his invitations went far and wide among the military and civil servants of the crown and the company. He cultivated the society of English men and women. He showered his civilities upon them. He did not speak or even understand English, but he took a great interest in English history, customs and literature. He was luxurious in the most thoroughly oriental fashion, and oriental luxury implies a great deal more than any experience of Western luxury would suggest. At the time with which we are now dealing, he was only about 36 years of age, but he was prematurely heavy and fat and seemed to be as incapable of active exertion as of unkindly feeling. There can be little doubt that all this time he was a dissembler of more than common Eastern dissimulation. It appears almost certain that while he was lavishing his courtesies and kindnesses upon Englishmen without discrimination, his heart was burning with a hatred to the whole British race. A sense of his wrongs had eaten him up. It is a painful thing to say, but it is necessary to the truth of this history that his wrongs were genuine. He had been treated with injustice. According to all the recognized usages of his race and his religion, he had acclaimed indefeasible injustice to the succession which had been unfairly and unwisely denied to him. It was to Nana Sahib then that poor old Sir Hugh Wheeler in the hour of his distress applied for assistance. Most gladly we can well believe did the Nana come. He established himself in Kanpur with his guns and his soldiers. Sir Hugh Wheeler had taken refuge, when the mutiny broke out, in an old military hospital with mud walls, scarcely four feet high, hastily thrown up around it, and a few guns of various caliber placed in position on the so-called entrenchments. Everything seemed to have been against our people in this hour of terror. Sir Hugh Wheeler might have chosen a far better refuge in the magazine, in a different quarter of Kanpur. But it appeared destined that the mutineers should have this chance, too, as they had every other. The English commander selected his place in the worst position and hardly capable of defense. Within his almost shadowy and certainly crumbling entrenchments were gathered about a thousand persons of whom four hundred and sixty-five were men of every age and profession. The married women and grown daughters were about two hundred and eighty, the children about the same number. Of the men there were probably four hundred who could fight. It can never be made quite clear whether Nana Sahib had in the beginning any idea of affecting to help the Englishman. If any object of his could have been served by his assuming such a part for any given length of time, or until any particular moment arrived, he assuredly would not have been wanting inpatient dissimulation. But almost as soon as his presence became known in Kanpur he was surrounded by the mutineers who insisted that he must make common cause with them and become one of their leaders. He put himself at their disposal. At first their idea was that he should lead them on to Delhi, the recognized center of the revolt, but he was urged by some of his advisors, and especially by Azimullah Khan, not to allow all his personal pretensions to be lost in the cause of Delhi, and his individual influence to be absorbed into the court of the grand mogul. He was advised to make himself a great man in the first instance by conquering the country all round Kanpur, and overcome by these persuasions and by the promptings of personal ambition he prevailed upon the mutineers not to leave the city until they had first scoured these English dents. The Nanna therefore became the recognized chief of the Kanpur movement. Let us do justice even to Nanna Sahib. It will be hard to say a word for him after this. Let us now observe that he gave notice to Sir Hugh Wheeler, that if the entrenchments were not surrendered they would be instantly attacked. They were attacked. A general assault was made upon the miserable mud walls on June 12th, but the resistance was heroic and the assault failed. It was after that assault that the garrison succeeded in sending a message to Sir Henry Lawrence at Lucknow, craving for the aid which it was absolutely impossible for him to give. From that time the fire of the mutineer army on the English entrenchments never ceased. Kanpur was alive with all the ruffianism of the region. It became an Alsatia for the scoundrels and jailbirds of the country round and of the province of Oed. All these scoundrels took their turn at the pleasant and comparatively safe amusement of keeping up the fire on the English people behind the mud walls. Whenever a regular attack was made the assailants invariably came to grief. The little garrison thinning in numbers every day and almost every hour held out with splendid obstinacy and always sent those who assailed at scampering back, except of course for those assailants as per force kept their ground by the persuasion of the English bullets. The little population of women and children behind the entrenchments had no roof to shelter them from the fierce Indian sun. They cowered under the scanty shadow of the little walls, often at imminent peril of the unceasing seapoy bullets. The only water for their drinking was to be had from a single well at which the guns of the assailants were unceasingly leveled. To go to the well and draw water became the task of self-sacrificing heroes who might with better chances of safety have let a forlorn hope. The water which the fainting women and children drank might have seemed to be reddened by blood, for only at the price of blood was it ever obtained. It may seem a trivial detail, but it will count for much in a history of the sufferings of delicately nurtured English women, that from the beginning of the siege of the Kanpur entrenchments to its tragic end there was not, as Mr. Trevelyan puts it, one spongeful of water to be had for the purposes of personal cleanliness. The inmates of that ghastly garrison were dying like flies. One does not know which to call the greater. The sufferings of the women were the bravery of the men. The Nanna was joined by a large body of the Oed soldiers believed to be among the best-fighting men that India could produce. These made a grand assault on the entrenchments, and these two were driven back by the indomitable garrison who were hourly diminishing in numbers, in food, in ammunition, in everything but courage and determination to fight. The repulse of the Oed men made a deep impression on the mutineers. A conviction began to spread abroad, that it was of no use attempting to conquer these terrible British sahibs, that as long as one of them was alive he would be as formidable as a wild beast in his lair. The sepoys became unwilling to come too near to the low crumbling walls of the entrenchment. Those walls might have been leaped over as easily as that of Romulus, but of what avail to know that, when from behind them always came the fatal fire of the Englishmen. It was no longer easy to get the mutineers to attempt anything like an assault. They argued that when the Oed men could do nothing it was hardly of any use for others to try. The English themselves began to show a perplexing kind of aggressive enterprise and took to making little sallies and small numbers indeed but with astonishing effect on any bodies of sepoys who happened to be anywhere near. Utterly, overwhelmingly, preposterously outnumbered as the Englishmen were, there were moments when it began to seem almost possible that they might actually keep back their assailants until some English army could come to their assistance and take a terrible vengeance upon Kanpur. Meanwhile the influence of the Nanna began sensibly to wane. They who accept the responsibility of undertakings like his soon come to know that they hold their place only on conditions of immediate success. Only great organizations with roots of system firmly fixed can afford to wait and to look over disappointment. Nanna Sahi began to find that he could not take by assault those wretched entrenchments and he could not wait to starve the garrison out. He therefore resolved to treat with the English the terms that is believed were arranged by the advice and assistance of Tantia Topi, his lieutenant, and Azimullah Khan, the favorite of English drawing-rooms. An offer was sent to the entrenchments, the terms of which are worthy of notice. All those, it said, who are in no way connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie, and who are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad. CHAPTER XXXIV The terms had to be accepted. There was nothing else to be done. The English people were promised, during the course of the negotiations, supplies of food and boats to carry them to Allahabad, which was now once more in the possession of England. The relief was unspeakable for the survivors of that weary defense. The women, the children, the wounded, the sick, the dying welcomed any terms of release. Not the faintest suspicion crossed any mind of the treachery that was awaiting them. How indeed could there be any such suspicion? Not for years and years had even Oriental warfare given example of such practice as that which Nanna Sahib and the graceful and civilized Azimullah Khan had now in preparation. The time for the evacuation of the garrison came. The boats were in readiness on the Ganges. The long procession of men, women, and children passed slowly down, very slowly in some instances, because of the number of sick and wounded by which its progress was encumbered. Some of the chief among the Nanna's counselors took their stand in a little temple on the margin of the river to superintend the embarkation and the work that was to follow it. Nanna Sahib himself was not there. It is understood that he purposely kept away. He preferred to hear of the deed when it was done. His faithful lieutenant, Tantia Topi, had given orders, it seems, that when a trumpet sounded some work for which he had arranged should begin. The wounded and the women were got into the boats in the first instance. The officers and men were scrambling in afterwards. Suddenly the blast of a trumpet was heard. The boats were of the kind common on the rivers of India covered with roofs of straw and looking as some accounts describe them not unlike floating haystacks. The moment the bugle sounded the straw of the boat roofs blazed up and the native rowers began to make precipitately for the shore. They had set fire to the thatch and were now escaping from the flames they had purposely lighted up. At the same moment there came from both shores of the river thick showers of grape-shot and musketry. The banks of the Ganges seemed in an instant alive with shot a very rain of bullets poured in upon the devoted inmates of the boats. To add to the horrors of the moment, if indeed it needed any addition, nearly all the boats stuck fast in mud-banks and the occupants became fixed targets for the fire of their enemies. Only three of the boats floated. Two of these drifted to the O-Ed shore and those on board them were killed at once. The third floated farther along with the stream, reserved for further adventures and horrors. The firing ceased when Tantia Topi and his confederates thought that enough had been done and the women and children who were still alive were brought ashore and carried in forlorn procession back again through the town where they had suffered so much in which they had hoped that they were leaving forever. There were some 125 in number women and children. Some of them were wounded. There were a few well-disposed natives who saw them and were sorry for them, who had perhaps served them and experienced their kindness in other days, and who now had some grateful memory of it, which they dared not express by any open profession of sympathy. Certain of these afterwards described the English ladies as they saw them pass. They were bedraggled and dishevelled, these poor English women. Their clothes were in tatters, some of them were wounded, and the blood was trickling from their feet and legs. They were carried to a place called Savada House, a large building once a charitable institution bearing the name of Salvador, which had been softened into Savada by the Asiatic pronunciation. On board the one boat which had floated with this dream were more than a hundred persons. The boat was attacked by a constant fire from both banks as it drifted along. At length a party of some twelve men or thereabouts landed with the bold object of attacking their assailants and driving them back. In their absence the boat was captured by some of the rebel gangs, and the women and the wounded were brought back to Kanpur. Some sixty men, twenty-five women, and four children were thus recaptured. The men were immediately shot. It may be said at once that of the gallant little party who went to shore to attack the enemy hand to hand, four finally escaped, after adventures so perilous and so extraordinary that a professional storyteller would hardly venture to make them part of a fictitious narrative. The Nanna had now a considerable number of English women in his hands. They were removed after a while from their first prison house to a small building north of the canal in between the native city and the Ganges. Here they were cooped up in the closest manner, except that some of them were taken out in the evening and set to the work of grinding corn for the use of their captors. Cholera and dysentery set in among these unhappy sufferers, and some eighteen women and seven children died. Let it be said for the credit of womanhood that the royal widows, the relics of the Nanna's father by adoption, made many efforts to protect the captive English women, and even declared that they would throw themselves and their children from the palace windows if any harm was done to the prisoners. We have only to repeat here that as a matter of fact no indignities other than that of the compulsory corn grinding were put upon the English ladies. They were doomed, one and all, to suffer death. But they were not, as at one time was believed in England, made too long for death as an escape from shame. Meanwhile, the prospects of the Nanna and his rebellion were growing darker and darker. He must have begun to know by this time that he had no chance of establishing himself as a ruler anywhere in India. The English had not been swept out of the country with a rush. The first flood of the mutiny had broken on their defences and already the tide was falling. The Nanna well knew it never would rise again to the same height in his day. The English were coming on. Neil had recaptured Allahabad and cleared the country all rounded of any traces of rebellion. Havelock was now moving forward from Allahabad towards Kanpur with six cannon and about a thousand English soldiers. Very small in point of numbers was that force when compared with that which Nanna Sahib could even still rally round him, but no one in India now knew better than Nanna Sahib what extraordinary odds the English could afford to give with the certainty of winning. Havelock's march was a series of victories, although he was often in such difficulties that the slightest display of real general ship or even soldier ship on the part of his opponents might have stopped his advance. He had one encounter with the Lieutenant of the Nanna, who had under his command nearly 4,000 men and 12 guns, and Havelock won a complete victory in about ten minutes. He defeated in the same offhand way various other chiefs of the mutiny. He was almost at the gates of Kanpur. Then it appears to have occurred to the Nanna or to have been suggested to him that it would be inconvenient to have his English captives recaptured by the enemy their countrymen. It may be that in the utter failure of all his plans and hopes he was anxious to secure some satisfaction to satiate his hatred in some way. It was intimated to the prisoners that they were to die. Among them were three or four men. These were called out and shot. Then some sepoys were sent to the house where the women still were, and ordered to fire volleys through the windows. This they did, but apparently without doing much harm. Some persons are of opinion, from such evidence as can be got, that the men purposely fired high above the level of the floor to avoid killing any women and children. In the evening, five men, two Hindu peasants, two Mohammedan butchers, and one Mohammedan wearing the red uniform of the Nanna's bodyguard were sent up to the house and entered it. Incessant shrieks were heard to come from that fearful house. The Mohammedan soldier came out of the door holding in his hand a sword hilt from which the blade had been broken off, and he exchanged this now useless instrument for a weapon in proper condition. Not once but twice this performance took place. Evidently, the task imposed on these men was hard work for the sword blades. After a while the five men came out of the house quiet now and locked the doors behind them. During that time, they had killed nearly all the English women and children. They had slaughtered them like beasts in the shambles. In the morning it appeared indeed that the work, however zealously undertaken, had not been quite thorough. The strongest arms and sharpest sabers sometimes failed to accomplish a long piece of work to perfect satisfaction. In the morning it would seem that some of the women and certainly some of the children were still alive, that is to say, were not dead. After the five men came then and with several attendants to clear out the house of the captives. Their task was to tumble all the bodies into a dry well beyond some trees that grew near. A large crowd of idlers assembled to watch this operation. Then it was seen by some of the spectators that certain of the women and children were not yet quite dead. Of the children some were alive and even tried to get away. But the same well awaited them all. Some witnesses were of opinion that the Nanna's officials took the trouble to kill the still living before they tossed them down into the well. Others do not think they stopped for any such work of humanity and flung them down just as they came to hand the quick and the dead together. At all events they were all deposited in the well. Any of the bodies that had clothes worth taking were carefully stripped before being consigned to this open grave. When Kanpur was afterwards taken by the English, those who had looked down into that well saw a sight the like of which no man and modern days had ever seen elsewhere. No attempt shall be made to describe it here. When the house of the massacre itself was entered, its floors and its walls tolled with terrible plainness of the scene they had witnessed. The plaster of the walls was scored and seemed with sword slashes, low down and in the corners, as if the poor women had crouched down in their mortal fright with some wild hope of escaping the blows. The floor was strewn with scraps of dresses, women's faded ragged finery, frilling, under-clothing, broken combs, shoes and tresses of hair. There were some small and neatly severed curls of hair, too, which had fallen on the ground, but evidently had never been cut off by the rude weapon of a professional butcher. These doubtless were keepsakes that had been treasured to the last, parted with only when life and all were going. There was no inscription whatever on the walls when the house was first entered. Afterwards a story was told of words found written there by some English woman, telling of hideous wrong done to them and bequeathing to their countrymen the task of revenge. This story created a terrible sensation in England, as was but natural, and aroused a furious thirst for vengeance. It was not true. Some such inscription did appear on the walls afterwards, but it is painful to have to say that it was a vulgar, and what could have been called in later times a sensational forgery. Our country women died without leaving behind them any record of a desire on their part for vengeance. We may be sure that they had other thoughts and other hopes as they died. One or two scraps of paper were found which recorded deaths and such like interruptions of the monotony of imprisonment, but nothing more. The well of horrors has been filled up, and a memorial chapel surrounded by a garden built upon the spot. It was right to banish all trace of that hideous crime, and to replace the house and the well as Mr. Trevellian says by a fair garden and a graceful shrine. Something, however, has still to be told of the Nana and his fortunes. He made one last stand against the victorious English in front of Kanpur, and was completely defeated. He galloped into the city on a bleeding and exhausted horse. He fled, thence the beat tour his residence. He had just time left it is said, to order the murder of a separate captive, a woman who had previously been overlooked or purposely left behind. Then he took flight in the direction of the Nepalese marches, and he soon disappears from history. Nothing of his fate was ever known. Many years afterwards England and India were treated to a momentary sensation by his story of the capture of Nana Sahib, but the man who was arrested proved to be an entirely different person, and indeed from the moment of his arrest few believed him to be the long lost murderer of the English women. In days more superstitious than our own, popular faith would have found an easy explanation of the mystery which surrounded the clothes of Nana Sahib's career. He had done, it would have been said, the work of a fiend, and he had disappeared as a fiend would do when his task was accomplished. CHAPTER 35 RECONQUEST PART I The capture of Delhi was affected on September 20. The siege had been long and difficult, and for some time it did not seem to the general in command, Archdale Wilson, that the small force he had could with any hope of success attempt to carry the city by assault. Colonel Baird Smith, who was chief of the engineer department, urged the attempt strongly on him, and at length it was made and made with success, though not without many moments when failure seemed inevitable. Brigadier General Nicholson led the storming columns and paid for his bravery and success the price of a gallant life. He was shot through the body and died three days after the English standard had been planted on the roof of the Palace of the Moghuls. Nicholson was one of the bravest and most capable officers whom the war produced. It is worthy of record as an evidence of the temper aroused, even in men from whom better things might have been expected, that Nicholson strongly urged the passing of a law to authorize flaying alive impalement or burning of the murderers of the women and children in Delhi. He contended that the idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening. He urged this viewer again and again and deliberately argued it on grounds alike of policy and principle. The fact is recorded here not in mere disparagement of a brave soldier, but as an illustration of the manner in which the old elementary passions of man's untamed condition can return upon him in his pride of civilization and culture and make him their slave again. The taking of Delhi was followed by an act over which, from that time to the present, a controversy has been arising at intervals. A young officer, Hodson, of Hodson's horse, was acting as chief of the Intelligence Department. He had once been in civil charge in the Punjab and had been dismissed for arbitrary and high-handed conduct toward an influential chief of the district. He had been striving hard to distinguish himself and to regain a path to success, and as the leader of the little force known as Hodson's horse, he had given evidence of remarkable military capacity. He was especially distinguished by an extraordinary blending of cool calculated craft and reckless daring. He knew exactly when to be cautious and when to risk everything on what to other eyes might have seemed a madman's throw. He now offered to General Wilson to capture the king and the royal family of Delhi. General Wilson gave him authority to make the attempt, but stipulated that the life of the king should be spared. By the help of native spies, Hodson discovered that when Delhi was taken the king and his family had taken refuge in the tomb of Emperor Humayun, a structure which, with the building surrounding and belonging to it, constituted a sort of suburb in itself. Hodson went boldly to this place with a few of his troopers. He found that the royal family of Delhi were surrounded there by a vast crowd of armed and, to all appearances, desperate adherents. This was one of the moments when Hodson's indomitable daring stood him in good stead. He called upon them all to lay down their arms at once, and the very audacity of the order made them suppose he had force at hand capable of compelling obedience. They threw down their arms, and the king surrendered himself to Hodson. Next day Hodson captured the three royal princes of Delhi. He tried, condemned, and executed them himself on the spot. That is to say, he treated them as rebels taken red-handed and borrowing a carbine from one of his troopers, he shot them dead with his own hand. Their corpses, half naked, were exposed for some days at one of the gates of Delhi. Hodson did the deed deliberately. Many days before he had a chance of doing it, he wrote to a friend who say that if he got into the palace of Delhi, the house of Timur will not be worth five minutes' purchase, I wean. On the day after the deed he wrote, in twenty-four hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the order. I am not cruel, but I confess that I do rejoice in the opportunity of ridding the earth of these ruffians. Sir J. W. K., who comments on Hodson's deed with a just and manly severity says, I must aver without hesitation that the general feeling in England was one of profound grief not unmingled with detestation. I never heard the act approved, I never heard it even defended. Sir J. W. K. was more fortunate than the writer of this book, who has frequently heard it defended, justified and glorified, and has a distinct impression that the more general tendency of public opinion in England at the time was to regard Hodson's act as entirely patriotic and laudable. If in cool blood the deed could now be defended, it might be necessary to point out that there was no evidence, whatever, of the princes having taken any part in the massacre of Europeans in Delhi, that even if evidence to that effect was forthcoming, Hodson did not wait for or ask for it, and that the share taken by the princes in an effort to restore the dynasty of their ancestor, however it might have justified some sternness of punishment on the part of the English government, was not a crime of that order which is held in civilized warfare to put the life of its author at the mercy of anyone who captures him when the struggle is all over and the reign of law is safe. One cannot read the history of this Indian mutiny without coming to the conclusion that in the minds of many Englishmen, a temporary prostration of the moral sense took place under the influence of which they came to regard the measure of the enemy's guilt as the standard for their right of retaliation and to hold that if he had no conscience, they were thereby released from the necessity of having any. As Mr. Disraeli put it, they were making Nana Sahib the model for the British officer to imitate. Hodson was killed not long after. We might well wish to be free to allow him to rest without censure in his untimely grave. He was a brave and clever soldier, but one who unfortunately allowed a fierce temper to over crow as the Elizabethan writers would have put it, the better instincts of his nature and the guidance of a cool judgment. General Havilok made his way to the relief of Lucknow. Sir James Zutrim, who had returned from Persia, had been sent to Oed with full instructions to act as chief commissioner. He had complete civil and military authority. Having on the scene, armed with such powers, he would in the natural order of things have superseded Havilok, who had been fighting his way so brilliantly, in the face of a thousand dangers to the relief of the beleaguered English in Lucknow. But Uttram was not the man to rob a brave and successful comrade of the fruits of his toil and peril. Uttram wrote to Havilok, "'To you shall be left the glory of relieving Lucknow, for which you have already struggled so much. I shall accompany you only in my civil capacity as commissioner, placing my military service at your disposal, should you please, and serving under you as a volunteer.'" Havilok was unable to continue his victorious march. He fought battle after battle against forces far superior in numbers to his own, and on September 25th he was able to relieve the besieged English at Lucknow. His coming, it can hardly be doubted, saved the women and children from such a massacre as that at Kanpur. But Havilok had not the force that might have driven the rebels out of the field. His little army, although it had been reinforced by the coming of Sir James Uttram, was yet entirely inadequate to the task which circumstances had imposed on it. The enemy soon recovered from any momentary panic into which they had been thrown by Havilok's coming and renewed the siege. And if England had not been prepared to make greater efforts for the rescue of her imperiled people, it is but too probable that the troops whom Havilok brought to the relief of Lucknow would only have swelled the number of the victims. CHAPTER 35 RECONQUEST PART II But in the meantime, the stout soldier Sir Colin Campbell, whom we have already heard of in the Crimean Campaign, had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Indian forces and had arrived in India. He received, it was said, the announcement of the task assigned to him one afternoon in London, and before the evening he was on his way to the scene of his command. He arrived in Kanpur on November 3rd, and he set out for Lucknow on the 9th. He had, however, to wait for reinforcements, and it was not until the 14th that he was able to attack. Even then he had under his command only some five thousand men, a force miserably inferior in number to that of the enemy. But in those days an English officer thought himself in good condition to attack if the foe did not outnumber him by more than four or five to one. A series of actions was fought by Sir Colin Campbell and his little force attacking the enemy on the one side, who were attacked at the same time by the besieged garrison of the residency. On the morning of November 17th, Uttrim and Hablok with their staff officers were able to join Campbell before the general action was over, and by the combined efforts of both forces the enemy was dislodged. Sir Colin Campbell resolved, however, that the residency must be evacuated, and accordingly on the 19th heavy batteries were opened against the enemy's position as if for the purpose of assault and undercover of this operation the women, the sick, and the wounded were quietly removed to the Dilkusha, a small palace in a park about five miles from the residency which had been captured by Sir Colin Campbell on his way to attack the city. During some days following the garrison was quietly withdrawing to the Dilkusha. By midnight of the twenty-second the whole garrison, without the loss of a single man, had left the residency. Two or three days more saw the troops established at Alamba, some four miles from the residency in another direction from that of the Dilkusha. Alamba is an isolated cluster of buildings with grounds and enclosure to the south of Lucknow. The name of this place is memorable for ever in the history of the war. It was there that Havlock closed his glorious career. He was attacked with dysentery and his frame exhausted by the almost superhuman strain which he had put upon it during his long days and sleepless nights of battle and victory could not long resist such an enemy. On November twenty-fourth Havlock died. The queen created him a baronet, or rather affixed that honor to his name on the twenty-seventh of the same month, not knowing then that the soldier's time for struggle and for honor was over. The title was transferred to his son, the presence of Henry Havlock, who had fought gallantly under his father's eyes. The fame of Havlock's exploits reached England only a little in advance of the news of his death. So many brilliant deeds had seldom in the history of our wars been crowded in two days so few. All of the fame of that glorious career was the work of some strenuous splendid weeks. Havlock's promotion had been slow. He had not much for which to thank the favor of his superiors. No family influence, no powerful patrons or friends had made his slow progress more easy. He was more than sixty when the mutiny broke out. He was born in April seventeen ninety-five. He was educated at the Charter House in London, where his grave studious ways procured for him the nickname of Old Floss, the school boy's short for Old Philosopher. He went out to India in eighteen twenty-three and served in the Burmese War of eighteen twenty-four and the Sikh War of eighteen forty-five. He was a man of grave and earnest character, a Baptist by religion, and strongly penetrated with a conviction that the religious spirit ought to pervade and inform all the duties of military as well as civil life. By his earnestness and his example he succeeded in animating those whom he led with similar feelings, and Havlock's saints were well known through India by this distinctive appropriate title. Havlock's saints showed whenever they had an opportunity that they could fight as desperately as the most reckless sinners, and their commander found the fame flung in his way across the path of his duty which he never would have swerved one inch from that path to seek. Amid all the excitement of hope and fear, passion and panic in England there was time for the whole heart of the nation to feel pride in Havlock's career and sorrow for his untimely death. Untimely? Was it after all untimely? Since when has it not been the crown of a great career that the hero dies at the moment of accomplished victory? Sir Colin Campbell left General Uttram in charge of Alamba for the purpose of keeping watch upon the movements of the insurgents who were still strong in the city of Lucknow. Sir Colin himself advanced toward Kanpur, where he soon found that there was some serious work to be done. A large hostile force composed chiefly of the revolted army of Sindhya, the ruler of Gwalior, had been marching upon Kanpur and General Wyndham who held the command there had gone out to attack them. It feared with him, however, very much as it had done with Sir Henry Lawrence near Lucknow. He found the enemy far too strong for him, he was compelled to retreat, not without severe loss to his entrenchments at Kanpur, and the enemy occupied the city itself. Sir Colin Campbell attacked the rebels at one place, Sir Hope Grant attacked them at another, and Kanpur was retaken. Sir Colin Campbell then turned his attention to the very important work of reconquering the entire city of Lucknow and dispersing the great body of rebels who were concentrated there. It was not until March 19th, 1858, that Lucknow fell completely into the hands of the English. Our operations had been almost entirely by artillery and had been conducted with consummate prudence as well as boldness. Our loss was therefore very small while the enemy suffered most severely. About two thousand of the rebels were killed in the final attack, and more than one hundred of their guns were taken. Among our wounded were the gallant leader of the naval brigade, Sir William Peel, son of the great statesman, and among the killed was Hodson of Hodson's horse, the executioner of the princes of Delhi. Sir William Peel died at Kanpur shortly after of Smallpox. His death remarked and lamented even amid all the noble deaths of that eventful time. One name must not be forgotten among those who endured the siege of Lucknow. It is that of Dr. Brighton whom we last saw as he appeared under the walls of Jalalabad. The one survivor come back to tell the tale of the disastrous retreat from Kabul. A gifted artist, Mrs. Butler, has lately painted that picture as no words could paint it. Dr. Brighton served through the Lucknow defense and was specially named in the dispatch of the Governor-General. After passing through the Kabul campaign of 1841 and 1842, the Governor-General says of Dr. Brighton. He was included in the illustrious garrison who maintained the position in Jalalabad. He may now as one of the heroes of Lucknow claim to have witnessed and taken part in an achievement even more conspicuous as an example of the invincible energy and enduring courage of British soldiers. Practically the reconquest of Lucknow was the final blow in the suppression of the great Bengal Mutiny. The two centers of the movement were Delhi and Lucknow, and when these strongholds were once more in the hands of the English, rebellion in the land had well-nigh lost its sway. There was hardly after that any rebel camp left to which it would have been worth carrying a flag of truce. Some episodes of the war, however, were still worthy of notice. For example, the rebels seized Gwalior, the capital of the Maharaja's Sindhya, who escaped to Agra. The English had to attack the rebels, retake Gwalior, and restore Sindhya. One of those who fought to the last on the rebel side was the Rani or Princess of Jahasi, whose territory as we have already seen had been one of our annexations. She had flung all her energies into the rebellion regarding it clearly as a rebellion and not as a mere mutiny. She took the field with Nana Sahib and Tantia Topi. Four months after the fall of Delhi she contrived to baffle Sir Hugh Rose and the English. She led squadrons in the field. She fought with her own hand. She was engaged against us in the battle for the possession of Gwalior. In the uniform of a cavalry officer she led charge after charge and she was killed among those who resisted to the last. Her body was found upon the field, scarred with wounds enough in the front to have done credit to any hero. Sir Hugh Rose paid her the well-deserved tribute, which a generous conqueror is always glad to be able to offer. He said in his general order that the best man, upon the side of the enemy, was the woman found dead, the Rani of Jahasi. The Maharaja Sindhya of Gwalior had deserved well of the English government. Under every temptation, every threat, and many profound perils from the rebellion, he had remained firm to his friendship. So too had Holkar the Maharaja of the indoor territory. Both these princes were young when the mutiny broke out. Some twenty-three years old, each of them, at a time of life therefore when ambition and enterprise might have been expected to tempt with fullest fascination. Holkar was actually believed in the beginning to have favored the rebellion. He was deliberately accused of having taken part with it. There are, even still, those who would argue that he was its accomplice. So closely were his fortunes to all appearance bound up with the cause of the mutineers, and so natural did it seem that he should fail to hold out against them. But he disappointed all such expectations on the part of our enemies, and proved himself a faithful friend of England. The country owes much to those two princes for the part they took at her hour of need, and she has not, we are glad to think, proved herself ungrateful. The administration of Patna by Mr. William Taylor supplied an episode which is still discussed with something like partisan keenness. Patna is the Mohammedan capital of the region east of Benares, and the city was the headquarters of the chiefs of the fanatical war like Wahhabis. Mr. Taylor was the commissioner of the district. He suspected that rebellion was being planned there, and he got the supposed religious leaders of it into his power by a stratagem, something like that which the Duke of Alva employed to make Egmont his prisoner. Did the end justify the means as the questions still asked? Was there a rebellious plot? And if so, was it right to anticipate Oriental treachery by a stroke of more than Oriental craft? The episode was interesting, but it is too purely an episode to be discussed at any length in these pages. It is not necessary to describe with any minuteness of detail the final spasms of the rebellion. The Tiotope, the lieutenant of Nanah Sahib, held out obstinately in the field for a long time and after several defeats. He was at length completely hemmed in by the English, and was deserted by the remainder of his army. He was taken prisoner in April, 1859, was tried for his share in the Kanpur massacre, and was hanged like any vulgar criminal. The old King of Delhi was also put on trial, and being found guilty was sentenced to transportation. He was sent to the Cape of Good Hope, but the colonists there refused to receive him, and this last of the line of the grand moguls had to go begging for a prison. He was finally carried to Rangoon in British Burma. On December 20, 1858, Lord Clyde, who had been Sir Colin Campbell, announced to the Governor-General that the campaign is at an end there being no longer even the vestige of rebellion in the province of Oed, and that the last remnant of the mutineers and insurgents had been hopelessly driven across the mountains which formed the barrier between the Kingdom of Nepal and Her Majesty's Empire of Hindustan. On May 1, 1859 there was a public thanksgiving in England for the pacification of India. End of Section 11. Section 12 of A History of Our Own Times, Volume 3 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 36 The End of John Company, Part 1 While these things were passing in India, it is needless to say that the public opinion of England was distracted by agitation and by opposing councils. For a long time, the condition of Indian affairs had been regarded in England with something like absolute indifference. India was, to the ordinary Englishmen, a place where men used at one time to make large fortunes within a few years, and where lately, military and civil officers had to do hard work enough without much chance of becoming Nabombs. In many circles, it was thought of only as the hated country where one's daughter went with her husband, and from which she had, after a few years, to send back her children to England, because the climate of India was fatal to certain years of childhood. It was associated in the minds of some with tiger hunting, in the minds of others with Bishop Heber and missions to the heathen. Most persons had a vague knowledge that there had been an impeachment of Warren Hastings for something done by him in India, and that Burke had made great speeches about it. In his famous essay on Lord Clive, published only seventeen years before the Indian mutiny, Lord Macaulay complained that while every schoolboy, as he put it in his favorite way, knew all about the Spanish conquests in the Americas, about Montezuma and Cortez and Pizarro, very few even of cultivated English gentlemen knew anything would ever about the history of England's empire in India. In the House of Commons, a debate on any question connected with India was as strictly an affair of experts as a discussion on some local gas or water bill. The House in general did not even affect to have any interest in it. The officials who had to do with Indian affairs, the men on the opposition benches who had held the same offices while their party was in power, these and two or three men who had been in India and who were set down as crotchety because they professed any concern in its mode of government. Such were the politicians who carried on an Indian debate and who had the House all to themselves while the discussion lasted. The Indian mutiny startled the public feeling of England out of this state of unhealthy anger. First came the passion and panic, the cry for blood, the wholesale executions, the blowing of rebels from guns. Then came a certain degree of reaction and some eminent Englishman were found to express alarm at the very sanguinary methods of repression and a punishment that were in favor among most of our fellow countrymen in India. It was during this season of reaction that the famous discussions took place on Lord Canning's proclamation. On March 3rd, 1858, Lord Canning issued his memorable proclamation, memorable, however, rather for the stir it created in England than for any great effect it produced in India. It was issued from Allahabad whether the Governor General had gone to be nearer to the seat of war. The proclamation was addressed to the Chiefs of Oed and it announced that with the exception of the lands then held by six loyal proprietors of the province, the proprietary right in the whole of the soil of Oed was transferred to the British government, which would dispose of it in such manner as might seem fitting. The disposal, however, was indicated by the terms of the proclamation. To all chiefs and landholders who should at once surrender to the chief commissioner of Oed, it was promised that their lives should be spared, provided that their hands were unstained by English blood murderously shed, but it was stated that as regards any further indulgence which may be extended to them and the conditions in which they may her after be placed, they must throw themselves upon the justice and mercy of the British government. Read by the light of literalness, this proclamation unquestionably seemed to amount to an absolute confiscation of the whole soil of Oed, for even the favored landowners who were to retain their properties were given to understand that they retained them by the favor of the crown and as a reward for their loyalty. This was the view taken of the Governor-General's Act by one whose opinion was surely entitled to the highest consideration from everyone, Sir James Zutrim, Chief Commissioner of Oed. Sir James Zutrim wrote at once to Lord Canning, pointing out that there were not a dozen landowners in Oed who had not either themselves borne arms against us or assisted the rebels with men or money, and that therefore the effect of the proclamation would be to confiscate the entire proprietary right in the province and to make the chiefs and landlords desperate and that the result would be a guerrilla war for the extirpation, root, and branch of this class of men, which will involve the loss of thousands of Europeans by battle, disease, and exposure. Lord Canning was not ready to admit even indeference to such authority as that of Sir James Zutrim that his policy would have any such effects, but he consented to insert in the proclamation a clause announcing that a liberal indulgence would be granted to those who should promptly come forward to aid in the restoration of order and that the Governor General will be ready to view liberally the claims which they may thus acquire to a restitution of their former rights. In truth, it was never the intention of Lord Canning to put in force any cruel and sweeping policy of confiscation. The whole tenor of his rule in India, the very reproaches that had been showered on him, the very nickname which his enemies had given him, that term of reproach that afterwards came to be a title of honor, might have suggested to the sharpest critic that it was not likely Clemency Canning was about to initiate a principle of merciless punishment for an entire class of men. Lord Canning had come to the conclusion that the English government must start afresh in their dealings with a wed. He felt that it would be impossible to deal with the chiefs and people of the province so lately annexed as if we were dealing with revolted sepoys. He put aside any idea of imprisonment or transportation for mere rebellion, seeing that only in the conqueror's narrowest sense could men be accounted rebels because they had taken arms against the power which but a moment before had no claim whatever to their allegiance or their obedience. Nevertheless, Oed was now a province of the British Empire in Hindustan and Lord Canning had only to consider what was to be done with it. He came to the conclusion that the necessary policy for all parties concerned was to make of the mutiny and the consequent reorganization an opportunity not for a wholesale confiscation of the land but for a measure which should declare that the land was held under the power and right of the English government. The principle of this policy was somewhat like that adopted by Lord Durham in Canada. It put aside the technical authority of law for the moment in order that a reign of genuine law might be inaugurated. It seized the power of a dictator over life and property that the dictator might be able to restore peace and order at the least cost in loss and suffering to the province and the population whose affairs it was his task to administer. But it may be freely admitted that on the face of it the proclamation of Lord Canning looked strangely despotic. Some of the most independent and liberal Englishmen took this view of it. Men who had supported Lord Canning through all the hours of clamor against him felt compelled to express disapproval of what they understood to be his new policy. It so happened that Lord Ellenborough was then president of the Board of Control and Lord Ellenborough was a man who always acted on impulse and had a passion for fine phrases. He had a sincere love of justice according to his lights but he had a still stronger love for antithesis. Lord Ellenborough therefore had no sooner received a copy of Lord Canning's proclamation than he dispatched upon his own responsibility a rathling condemnation of the whole preceding. Other conquerors wrote the fiery and eloquent statesmen when they have succeeded in overcoming resistance have accepted a few persons as still deserving of punishment but have with a generous policy extended their clemency to the great body of the people. You have acted upon a different principle. You have reserved a few as deserving of special favor and you have struck with what they feel as the severest of punishments the mass of the inhabitants of the country. We cannot but think that the precedents from which you have departed will appear to have been conceived in a spirit of wisdom superior to that which appears in the precedent you have made. The style of this dispatch was absolutely indefensible. A French imperial prefect with a turn for eloquent letter writing might fitly thus have admonished the airing mare of a village community but it was absurd language for a man like Lord Ellenborough to address to a statesman like Lord Canning who had just succeeded in keeping the fabric of English government in India together during the most terrible trial ever imposed on it by fate. The question was taken up immediately in both houses of parliament. Lord Shafsbury and the House of Lords moved a resolution declaring that the house regarded with regret and serious apprehension the sending of such a dispatch through the secret committee of the court of directors an almost obsolete piece of machinery we may remark and its publication and that such a course must prejudice our rule in India by weakening the authority of the Governor General and encouraging the resistance of rebels still in arms. A similar motion was introduced by Mr. Cardwell in the House of Commons. In both houses the arraignment of the ministry proved a failure. Lord Ellenborough at once took upon himself the whole responsibility of an act which was undoubtedly all his own and he resigned his office. The resolution was therefore defeated in the House of Lords on a division and had to be withdrawn in a rather ignominious manner in the House of Commons. Four nights of vehement debate were spent in the latter house. Opinion was strangely divided. Men like Mr. Bright and Sir James Graham condemned the proclamation and defended the action of the government. The position of Mr. Cardwell and his supporters became particularly awkward for they seemed, after the resignation of Lord Ellenborough, to be only trying to find partisan advantage in a further pressure upon the government. The news that Sir James Uttrim had disapproved of the proclamation came while the debate was still going on and added new strength to the cause of the government. It came out in the course of the discussion that Lord Canning had addressed a private letter to Mr. Vernon Smith, afterwards Lord Liveden, Lord Ellenborough's predecessor as president of the Board of Control, informing him that the proclamation about to be issued would require some further explanation which the pressure of work did not allow its author just then to give. Lord Canning wrote this under the belief that Mr. Vernon Smith was still at the head of the Board of Control. Mr. Vernon Smith did not tell Lord Ellenborough anything about this letter, and it was of course very strongly urged that had Lord Ellenborough known of such a document being in existence he would have held his hand and waited for further explanation. Mr. Vernon Smith, it was explained, was in Ireland when the letter arrived and did not get it in time to prevent the action of Lord Ellenborough, and Lord Granville stated that he had himself had a letter to a similar effect from Lord Canning of which he had told Lord Ellenborough but that that impetuous nobleman did not show the least interest in it and did not even hear it out to the end. Still there was an obvious difference between a letter to a friend and what might be considered an official communication to Lord Ellenborough's predecessor in the very office on behalf of which he issued his censure, and at all events the unexpected revelation tended greatly to strengthen the position of the government. The attack made by Mr. Cardwell broke down or crumbled away. Mr. Disraeli described the process of its disappearance in his speech which he delivered a few days after at Slough and the description is one of his happiest pieces of audacious eloquence. It was like a convulsion of nature rather than any ordinary transaction of human life. I can only liken it to one of those earthquakes which take place in Calabria or Peru. There was a rumbling murmur, a groan, a shriek, a sound of distant thunder. No one knew whether it came from the top or the bottom of the house. There was a rent, a fissure in the ground, and then a village disappeared. Then a tall tower toppled down, and the whole of the opposition benches became one great dissolving view of anarchy. Assuredly Mr. Disraeli was entitled to crow over his baffled antagonists. Do you triumph, Roman? Do you triumph? It must have been a meeker Roman than Mr. Disraeli who would not have triumphed over so complete and unexpected a humiliation of his enemies. The debate in the House of Commons was memorable in other ways as well as for its direct political consequences. It first gave occasion for Mr. Cairns, as he then was, to display the extraordinary capacity as a debater which he possessed, and which he afterwards made of such solid and brilliant service to his party. It was also the occasion of the Conte de Monde à l'Hombert celebrated pamphlet for which, in its thrilling contrast between the political freedom of England and the imperial servitude of France, he had the honour of being prosecuted by the French government and defended by Mr. Berrier. Lord Canning continued his policy, the policy which he had marked out for himself with signal success. The actual proclamation had little or no effect as punishment on the landholders of Oed. It was never intended by Lord Canning that it should have any such. In fact, within a few weeks after the capture of Lucknow, almost all the large landowners had tendered their allegiance. Lord Canning impressed upon his officers the duty of making their rule as considerate and conciliatory as possible. The new system established in Oed was based upon the principle of recognizing the Taluq dars as responsible landholders, while so limiting their power by the authority of the government as to get rid of old abuses and protect the occupiers and cultivators of the soil. The rebellion had abundantly proved that the village communities were too feeble and broken to hold the position which had been given with success to similar communities in the Punjab. It should be remembered in considering Lord Canning's policy that a proprietary right by whatever name it may be distinguished or disguised has always been claimed by the government of India. It is only parted with under leases or settlements that are liable to be revised and altered. The settlements which Lord Canning effected in India easily survived the attacks made upon their author. They would have been short-lived indeed if they had not long survived himself as well. Canning, like Durham, only lived long enough to hear the general acknowledgment that he had done well for the country he was sent to govern and for the country in whose name and with whose authority he went forth. The rebellion pulled down with it a famous old institution, the government of the East India Company. Before the mutiny had been entirely crushed, the rule of John Company came to an end. The administration of India had indeed long ceased to be under the control of the Company as it was in the days of Warren Hastings. A board of directors, nominated partly by the Crown and partly by the Company, sat in Ledden Hall Street and gave general directions for the Government of India. But the Parliamentary Department, called the Board of Control, had the right of reviewing and revising the decisions of the Company. The Crown had the power of nominating the Governor General and the Company had only the power of recalling him. This odd and perhaps unparalleled system of double government had not much to defend it on strictly logical grounds, and the moment a great crisis came it was natural that all the blame of difficulty and disaster should be laid upon its head. With the beginning of the mutiny the impression began to grow up in the public mind here that something of a sweeping nature must be done for the reorganization of India, and before long this vague impression crystallized into a conviction that England must take Indian administration into her own hands and that the time had come for the fiction of rule by a trading company to be absolutely given up. Indeed, Lord Ellenbra had recommended in his evidence before a select committee of the Commons on Indian Affairs as far back as 1852 that the Government of India should be transferred from the Company to the Crown. As we have already seen, the famous system of government which was established by Pitt was really the Government of the Crown. At least Pitt made the administration of India completely subject to the English Government. The difference between Pitt's measure and that introduced by Fox was that Pitt preserved the independence of the Company in matters of patronage and commerce, whereas Fox would have placed the whole commerce and commercial administration of the Company under the control of a body nominated by the Crown. By the act of 1853 the patronage of the Civil Service was taken from the Company and yet was not given to the Crown. It was in fact a competitive system. Scientific and civil appointments were made to depend on capacity and fitness alone. Macaulay spoke for the last time in the House of Commons in support of the principle of admission by competitive examination to the Civil Service of India. In the beginning of 1858 Lord Palmerston introduced a bill to transfer the authority of the Company formally and absolutely to the Crown. The plan of the scheme was that there were to be a president and a council of eight members to be nominated by the government. There was a large majority in the House of Commons in favour of the bill but the agitation caused by the attempt to assassinate the Emperor of the French and Palmerston's ill-judged and ill-timed conspiracy bill led to the sudden overthrow of his government. When Lord Darby succeeded to power he brought in a bill for the better government of India at once but the measure was a failure. It was of preposterous construction. It bore on its face curious evidence of the fantastic ingenuity of Lord Ellenborough. It created a Secretary of State for India with a council of 18. Nine of these were to be nominees of the Crown. Nine were to be concessions to the principles of popular election. Four of the elected must have served Her Majesty in India for at least ten years or have been engaged in trade in that country for fifteen years and they were to be elected by the votes of anyone in this country who had served the Queen or the Government of India for ten years or any proprietor of capital stock and Indian railways or other public works in India to the amount of two thousand pounds or any proprietor of India stock to the amount of one thousand pounds. The other five members of the council must as their qualification have been engaged in commerce in India or in the exportation of manufactured goods to that country for five years or must have resided there for ten years. These five were to be elected by the parliamentary constituencies of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast. This clause was Lord Ellenbra's device. Anything more absurdly out of tune with the whole principle of popular election than this latter part of the scheme it would be difficult to imagine. The theory of popular election is simply that every man knows best what manner of representative is best qualified to look after his interests in the legislative assembly. But by no distortion of that principle can it be made to assert the doctrine that the parliamentary electors of London and Liverpool are properly qualified to decide as to the class of representatives who could best take care of the interests of Bengal, Bombay and the Punjab. Again as if it was not absurd enough to put elections to the governing body of India into the hands of such constituencies, the field of choice was so limited for them as to render it almost impossible that they could elect really suitable men. It was well pointed out at the time that by the ingenious device of the government a constituency might send to the Indian Council any man who had exported beer in a small way to India for five years but could not send Mr. John Stuart Mill there. The measure fell dead. It had absolutely no support in the house or the country. It had only to be described in order to ensure its condemnation. It was withdrawn before it had gone to a second reading. Then Lord John Russell came to the help of the puzzled government, who evidently thought they had been making a generous concession to the principle of popular election and were amazed to find their advances so coldly and contemptuously received. Lord John Russell proposed that the house should proceed by way of resolutions, that is, that the lines of a measure should be laid down by a series of resolutions in committee of the whole house, and that upon those lines the government should construct a measure. The suggestion was eagerly welcomed and after many nights of discussion a basis of legislation was at last agreed upon. This bill passed into law in the autumn of 1858, and for the remainder of Lord Darby's tenure of power, his son, Lord Stanley, was Secretary of State for India. The bill which was called an act for the better government of India provided that all the territories previously under the government of the East India Company were to be vested in Her Majesty and all the company's powers to be exercised in her name. One of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State was to have all the power previously exercised by the company or by the Board of Control. The Secretary was to be assisted by a Council of India to consist of fifteen members of whom seven were to be elected by the Court of Directors from their own body and eight nominated by the Crown. The vacancies among the nominated were to be filled up by the Crown, those among the elected by the remaining members of the Council for a certain time, but afterwards by the Secretary of State for India. The competitive principle for the civil service was extended in its application and made thoroughly practical. The military and naval forces of the company were to be deemed the forces of Her Majesty. A clause was introduced declaring that except for the purpose of preventing or repelling actual invasion of India, the Indian revenues should not, without the consent of both Houses of Parliament, be applicable to defray the expenses of any military operation carried on beyond the external frontiers of Her Majesty's Indian possessions. Another clause enacted that whenever an order was sent to India, directing the commencement of hostilities by Her Majesty's forces there, the fact should be communicated to Parliament within three months, if Parliament were then sitting, or if not within one month after its next meeting. These clauses were heard of more than once in later days. The Viceroy and Governor-General was to be supreme in India, but was to be assisted by a Council. India now has nine provinces, each under its own civil government and independent of the others, but all subordinate to the authority of the Viceroy. In accordance with this act, the Government of the company, the famed John Company, formally ceased on September 1, 1858, and the Queen was proclaimed throughout India in the following November with Lord Canning for her first Viceroy. It was but fitting that the man who had borne the strain of that terrible crisis, who had brought our Indian Empire safely through it all, and who had had to endure so much obliquy and to live down so much calamity, should have his name consigned to history as that of the first of the line of British Viceroys in India. It seems almost superfluous to say that so great a measure as the extinction of the East India Company did not pass without some protest and some opposition. The authorship of some of the protests makes them too remarkable to be passed over without a word. Among the ableist civil servants the East India Company ever had were James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill. Both had risen in succession to the same high post in the company's service. The younger Mill was still an official of the company when, as he had put it in his own words, it pleased Parliament, in other words Lord Palmerston, to put an end to the East India Company as a branch of the Government of India under the crown and convert the administration of that country into a thing to be scrambled for by the second and third class of English parliamentary politicians. I, says Mr. Mill, was the chief manager of the resistance which the company made to their own political extinction into the letters and petitions I wrote for them and the concluding chapter of my treatise on Representative Government I must refer for my opinions on the folly and mischief of this ill-conceived change. One of the remonstrances drawn up by Mr. Mill and presented to Parliament on behalf of the East India Company is, as able, a state paper, probably, as any in the archives of modern England. This is not the place, however, in which to enter on the argument it so powerfully sustained. It has been the destiny of the Government of the East India Company, says Mr. Mill in the closing passage of his essay on Representative Government, to suggest the true theory of the Government of a semi-barbarous dependency by a civilized country, and after having done this to perish. It would be a singular fortune if, at the end of two or three more generations, this speculative result should be the only remaining fruit of our ascendancy in India, if posterity should say of us that having stumbled accidentally upon better arrangements than our wisdom would ever have devised. The first use we made of our awakened reason was to destroy them and allow the good which had been in course of being realized to fall through and be lost from ignorance of the principles on which it depended. D. Meliora, Mr. Mill adds, and we are glad to think that after the lapse of more than twenty years there is as yet no sign of the realization of the fears which he expressed with so much eloquence and earnestness. Mr. Mill was naturally swayed by the force of association with and confidence in the great organization with which he and his father had been connected so long, and moreover no one can deny that he has in his protests fairly presented some of the dangers that may now and then arise out of a system which throws the responsibility for the good government of India wholly on a body so likely to be alien, apathetic, unsympathetic as the English parliament. But the whole question was one of comparative danger and convenience. The balance of advantage certainly seemed even as a matter of speculation to be with the system of more direct government. It is a mistake too to suppose that it was the will or the caprice of Lord Palmerston that made the change. Rightly or wrongly it is certain that almost the whole of English public opinion cried out for the abolition of the East India Company. It was the one thing which everybody could suggest to be done at a time of excitement when everybody thought he was bound to suggest something. It would have required a minister, less fond of popularity than Lord Palmerston, to resist such an outcry or pretend that he did not hear it. In this, as in so many other cases, Lord Palmerston only seemed to lead public opinion while he was really following it. One other remark it is also fair to make. We have no indications as yet of any likelihood that the administration of India is to become a thing to be scrambled for by second and third class parliamentary politicians. The administration of India means of course the vice royalty. Now there have been since Lord Canning five viceroys and of these three at least were not parliamentary politicians at all. Sir John Lawrence never was in parliament until he was raised to the peerage after his return home from India. Lord Elgin may be fairly described as never having been in parliament, unless in the technical sense which makes every man on whom appears title is conferred a parliamentary personage, and the same holds true of Lord Lytton, who had no more to do with parliament, than was involved in the fact of his having succeeded to his father's title. Lord Mayo and Lord Northbrook to whom perhaps an invidious critic might apply the term second or third class parliamentary politicians on the ground that neither had obtained very high parliamentary distinction proved nevertheless very capable and indeed excellent administrators of Indian affairs, and fully justified the choice of the ministers who appointed them. Indeed the truth is that the change made in the mode of governing India by the act which we have just been describing was more of name than of reality. India was ruled by a governor general and a board before, and it has been ruled by a governor general called a viceroy and a board since. The idea which Mr. Mill had evidently formed in his mind of a restless and fussy parliament forever interfering in the affairs of India proved to have been a false impression altogether. Parliament soon ceased to take the slightest interest collectively in the affairs of India. Once more it came to be observed that an Indian budget or other question connected with the government of our great empire in the east could thin the house as in the days before the mutiny. Again as before some few men profoundly in earnest took care and thought on the subject of India and were condemned to pour out the results of their study and experience to a listening undersecretary and a chill array of green leather benches. At intervals when some peaked question arose of little importance saved to the court official or the partisan, like the project for conferring an imperial crown, brand new and showy as a stage diadem, on the wearer of the great historic emblem of English monarchy, then indeed public opinion condescended to think about India and there were keen parliamentary debates and much excitement in fashionable circles. Sometimes when there was talk of Russian ambition, seeking somehow a pathway into India, a sort of public spirit was aroused, not perhaps wholly unlike the manly emotion of Squire's sullen and the beau stratagem when he discovers that a foreigner is paying court to the woman he has so long neglected. But as a rule, the English parliament has wholly falsified Mr. Mill's prediction and has not intruded itself in any way upon the political administration of India. End of section 13.