BRITISH RULE UNDER THE EAST INDIA COMPANY
The basic fact which has governed the whole evolution of British rule in
India is that we went there in the first instance as traders, and not as
conquerors. For trade meant co-operation. There could be no successful
trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to
co-operate with them in trade. That we ever went to India at all was due
to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to
the sea in ships and to trade with distant lands. When the rise of great
Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern shores of the
Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks,
blocked the overland trade routes from Christendom into the Orient, our
forefathers determined to emulate the example of the Spaniards and
Portuguese and open up new ocean highways to the remote markets credited
with fabulous wealth which would have been otherwise lost to them
indefinitely. The handful of English merchant-venturers who under Queen
Elizabeth's charter first established three hundred years ago a few
precarious settlements on the far-flung shores of a then almost unknown
continent no more dreamt of ruling India than did the great East India
Company of which they had laid the foundations when it first sought to
extend its trading operations into the interior and sent an embassy to
court the goodwill of the mighty Moghul emperors then at the height of
their power. Throughout those early days co-operation between Indians
and Englishmen, though then for the sole purpose of trade, was the
principle that guided British enterprise in India, and the venturers
would never have grown and thriven as they did had they not laid
themselves out to secure the confidence and co-operation of the Indians
who flocked to their "factories." At home too it was not dominion, but
the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the
nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the
eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which
endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which,
like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day,
attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of
security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India
Company consent to depart from their policy of absolute non-intervention
in the internal affairs of India. Nor was it till, in the course of the
great duel between England and France for the mastery of the seas which
only ended at Trafalgar, the genius of Dupleix threatened the very
existence of the East India Company that the British nation began to
face the responsibilities of British dominion in India as the only
alternative to the greater danger of French dominion. It was the French
challenge to Britain's position all over the world far more than any
deliberate policy of conquest in India that drove successive agents of
the East India Company to enlarge the area of British authority, and
successive Governments at home to acquiesce and aid in its enlargement,
until ultimately the whole peninsula was made subject to the paramount
British power from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.
But even that long period of irresistible expansion was a period of
almost constant co-operation between British and Indians. The East India
Company extended its authority quite as much by a system of alliances
with indigenous rulers, who turned to our growing power to save them
from destruction at the hands of Haidar Ali or of the Mahratta
confederacy, as by mere force of arms, and, when it had to use force,
its most decisive victories in the field were won by armies in which
Indian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops. At
Plassey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, when the destinies of India were
still in the balance, the British, though the backbone of the Company's
forces, formed only a tithe numerically of the victorious armies that
fought under Clive and Munro. The traditions of loyal comradeship
between the Indian and the British army, only once and for a short time
seriously broken during the Mutiny of 1857, can be traced back to the
earliest days of British ascendancy, just as the map of India to-day,
with hundreds of native States, covering one-third of the total area and
nearly one-fourth of the total population under the autonomous rulership
of their own ancient dynasties, testifies to the wisdom and moderation
which inspired the policy of the East India Company in preferring,
wherever circumstances made co-operation possible, co-operation based
upon alliances to submission enforced by the sword.
In the same spirit there grew up at home with the extension of British
dominion in India a definite determination on the part of the British
Government and the British people to control the methods by which
British dominion was to be exercised and maintained. So when the British
in India ceased to be mere traders and became administrators and rulers,
they had behind them not only the driving power, but the restraining
force also, of a civilisation which was producing in England new
conceptions of personal rights destined profoundly to affect the
relations between those who govern and those who are governed. Those
conceptions which underlay both the great Cromwellian upheaval and the
more peaceful revolution of 1688 were at first limited in their
application to the free people of Britain, but they began before long to
influence also the attitude of the British people towards the alien
races brought under their sway. The motives which prompted English
colonial enterprise in its earliest stages did not differ materially
from those which prompted the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Dutch and
the French. All were impelled primarily by the desire to attain wealth.
But whilst our competitors never got much beyond that stage, and for the
most part imagined that the only way to attain wealth was by a crude
exploitation of subject countries and peoples, the British were saved
from similar short-sightedness by the very different spirit with which
the development of their own national institutions had imbued their
rulers at home. By the middle of the eighteenth century a British
Government had a very different sense of its responsibilities to the
British people for the welfare of the nation as a whole from that which
any continental ruler had been taught to entertain in regard to his own
people. That sense of responsibility the British Government and the
British people applied in a modified form to the administration of their
Indian possessions.
So long as British settlements were confined to trading factories on the
shores of the Indian Ocean, the problems of administration were simple.
The three "Presidents" who with their large and rather unwieldy Councils
carried on at the beginning of the eighteenth century the affairs of the
East India Company on the west coast, at Madras and in Bengal were
chiefly concerned with commercial operations, and they provided in their
own way and out of their own resources for the maintenance of the public
peace within the narrow areas subject to their jurisdiction. But matters
assumed a very different complexion when instead of merely taking
abundant tithe of the wealth acquired by the enterprise and ability of
British traders in a far-away land, the British people had to lend
financial and military assistance in order to rescue the East India
Company from destruction at the hands of their French rivals as well as
from the overwhelming ruin of internecine strife all over India. The
grant of the _Diwani_ to the Company by the titular Emperor of Delhi
gave the Company not only the wealth of Bengal, the richest province in
India, but full rights of government and administration, which were at
first ruthlessly exercised with little or no regard for the interests of
the unfortunate population, who alone gained nothing by the change. The
magnitude of the financial transactions between the Company and the
British Government, which was sometimes heavily subsidised by the
Company's coffers and then in turn compelled to make considerable
advances in order to replenish them, and the splendour of the fortunes
amassed by many of the Company's servants who returned from India to
spend them in ostentatious luxury and in political intrigue at home,
combined with the brilliant achievements of British arms on Indian soil
to focus public attention on Indian affairs. They became one of the live
issues of British party politics.
There was much that was squalid and grossly unjust in the rancorous
campaigns conducted first against Clive and then against Warren
Hastings. But behind all the personal jealousies and the greed of
factions there was a strong and healthy public instinct that the
responsibilities assumed by the East India Company were greater than a
trading association could safely be left to discharge uncontrolled, and
that the State could not divest itself of the duties imposed upon it by
the acquisition of vast and populous possessions. It would be idle to
pretend that the British people already entertained any definite
conception of a tutelary relationship towards the peoples of India, or
were animated by purely philanthropic solicitude for the moral welfare
of India. But the passionate oratory of Fox and Burke and their fervid
denunciation of oppression and wrongdoing in India awoke responsive
echoes far beyond the walls of Westminster. In 1762, when France had
claimed, in the course of the peace negotiations which led to the Treaty
of Paris, the restitution of the possessions she had lost to the East
India Company, the British Government pleaded the absence of "any right
of the Crown of England to interfere in the legal and exclusive property
of a body corporate." Only eleven years later, the House of Commons
passed resolutions to the effect that "all acquisitions made under the
influence of military force or by treaty with foreign princes do of
right belong to the State," and the Commons had the country behind them.
From 1773 onward British public opinion never hesitated to support
Parliament in claiming and exercising supreme control over Indian
affairs.
A very brief survey of the long series of enactments in which
Parliament, asserting the right of "eminent dominion over every British
subject in every country," gradually established its authority over
Indian administration and moulded it to the shape which it virtually
preserved until the Crown assumed direct sovereignty in 1858, shows how
steadily the strengthening of Parliamentary control kept pace with the
extension of British dominion in India. The first of these legislative
measures was Lord North's Regulating Act, which was passed in 1773, just
eight years after the East India Company had acquired for the first time
the right of revenue and civil administration over vast territories in
Bengal and in the Madras "Northern Circars," and thereby taken over the
duties of government in respect of a great native population, absolutely
alien in race, in religion, and in customs. Lord North's Act did not
attack directly the problem of Indian government, but it sought to
facilitate its solution by the East India Company itself by reforming
its constitution at home, where the jealousies and intrigues of rival
factions in the Board of Directors had often reached the dimensions of a
public scandal, and by centralising the Company's authority in India,
where, as the result of recent developments which had now established
the centre of British gravity in Bengal, the post of Governor-General
was created for the Bengal Presidency and invested with powers of
control over the other Presidencies, Madras and Bombay, which had
hitherto enjoyed a status of practical equality. At the same time an
attempt was made to strengthen control from home by enjoining upon the
Governor-General to keep the Board of Directors in London fully informed
and to abide by its instructions, whilst a check was placed upon the
executive authority in Bengal by the creation of a Supreme Court in
Calcutta from which the present High Court is descended.
The defect of this legislation--a defect inherent to the situation in
India itself--was the dualism it created by endeavouring to enforce
Parliamentary restraints upon a Company which derived its title to
government over the greater part of its possessions from the
irresponsible despotism of the Moghul emperors. The Company was thus
made to serve two masters, and at the same time it remained essentially
a great trading corporation whose commercial and fiscal interests were
always liable to conflict, and sometimes did conflict, with its duties
towards both masters. The total collapse of the Moghul Empire removed
before long one of the ambiguities of this situation, but the other
endured in a greater or less degree until the East India Company itself
disappeared, though every subsequent measure of Indian legislation at
home tended to bring the Indian executive more and more fully under the
control of the home Government.
Eleven years later Pitt's famous Government of India Act of 1784 marked
a very important step forward. Another great war had been brought to an
end by the Peace of Versailles in 1783, and whilst at its close we had
lost the greater part of our North American Colonies, the genius of
Warren Hastings had saved and consolidated British power in India. It
was easy to criticise, and if we are to judge in accordance with modern
standards, it is doubtless right to condemn some of the devices to which
he resorted in the course of the long struggle he was often left to wage
with little or no help, and sometimes in the face of active obstruction
from those who, at home and in India, should have been the first to
support him. Whatever his errors may have been, they were more than
atoned for by the cruel persecution to which he was subjected whilst
England was harvesting the fruits of his energy and courage. Pitt's Act
was in fact the solemn consecration of all his greatest achievements,
whilst it brought India into closer and more direct relationship with
the Crown. Not the least of the difficulties with which Hastings, the
only Governor-General appointed by the East India Company, was
confronted arose from frequent opposition in his own Council, where he
was merely _primus inter pares_. Pitt took care to provide against the
recurrence of similar trouble in the future. But having strengthened the
Governor-General's position, he took away the right of appointing him
from the Company and transferred it to the Crown. Nor was that all. The
Company itself was placed under the effective control of the Crown by
the establishment in London of a Board of Control, of which the
President was ultimately to develop into the Secretary of State for
India, over the Courts of Directors and Proprietors. In substance, if
not in form, India was already becoming a Dependency of the British
Crown.
Nor was Pitt's Act concerned only with the relations of the Company to
the Crown. Its numerous and very drastic provisions for the prevention
and punishment of the corruption and oppression which had become rampant
amongst the Company's servants after the grant of the _Diwani_ testified
to the determination of Parliament, whilst acquiescing in the extension
of the British dominion, to uphold and enforce at the same time in the
governance of Indian peoples the principle of justice for all to which
the British people had gradually fought their way. A strong impetus was
thus given to the great reforms already initiated by Clive himself, and
still more drastically by Warren Hastings, which, within the framework
as far as possible of the old indigenous system of judicial and civil
administration, built up on solid foundations of integrity and
efficiency a capacious and elastic structure easily extended to the vast
territories that were still to pass under British rule. But then no
more than at any later period could the machinery of government have
worked smoothly, or even at all, without the co-operation of the Indians
themselves, who were recruited in large numbers into the Company's
service. Respect for their traditional customs and beliefs, and
encouragement, of which Warren Hastings was the first to recognise the
importance, to Indian education, though still only on the old lines with
which Indians were already familiar, secured the growing loyalty of
their co-operation. Then, as now, it was nowhere more effective than in
the judicial administration, and side by side with new tribunals, which
conformed with Western jurisprudence, the old ones, purified and
reorganised, continued to dispense justice in accordance mainly with
Hindu and Mahomedan and Indian customary law. With the consolidation of
the British Paramount Power Indians learnt to identify it with their
ancient conception of the State, and the Company's service came to enjoy
the popularity and prestige which had always attached to the service of
the State under their indigenous rulers and even under Mahomedan
domination.
The renewal of the Company's Charter, which took place at intervals of
twenty years, dating from Lord North's Act of 1773, afforded a
convenient opportunity for the revision, when required, both of its
relations to the Crown and of its methods of government in India. The
abrogation of its trading monopoly in 1813 was mainly a concession to
opposition at home, quickened by the loss of the European markets which
had been closed against Great Britain by Napoleon's continental system,
and for the renewal of its Charter the Company had to surrender its
trading monopoly. It was the first step towards the abrogation of all
its trading privileges twenty years later, when the Company, finally
delivered from the temptations which beset a commercial corporation,
became for the first time a purely governing body, free to devote its
entire energies to the discharge of the immense responsibilities that
had devolved upon it. This was, however, only one, though not the least
significant of the momentous changes that accompanied the renewal of the
Charter in 1833.
The trend of events in Europe after the peace in 1815 had tended to
accentuate the profound divergency of views between Great Britain and
the leading continental Powers in regard to fundamental principles of
government, which, dating back to the seventeenth century, had been
arrested at the close of the eighteenth by the exigencies of common
action against the excesses of the French Revolution and the inordinate
ambition of Napoleon. Under the auspices of the Holy Alliance, the
continent of Europe was drifting into blind reaction. The British
people, on the contrary, were entering upon a further stage of
democratic evolution at home, and, under the influence of new liberal
and humanitarian doctrines, their sympathies were going out abroad to
every down-trodden nationality that was struggling, whether in Greece or
in South America, to throw off the yoke of oppressive despotisms. Their
growing sense of responsibility towards alien races which they
themselves held in subjection was manifested most conspicuously in the
generous movement which resulted in the abolition of slavery in our West
Indian Colonies. It could not fail to be extended also to India. Under
Lord Hastings British dominion had again rapidly expanded between 1813
and 1823, when he left it firmly established from the extreme south to
the Sutlej in the north. Then ten years of internal and external peace
had followed in which the educational labours, chiefly in Bengal, of a
generation of great missionaries began not only to meet with unexpected
reward in India itself, but also to stir the public mind at home to new
aspects of a mission which came to be regarded as providential, and to
the moral duties which it imposed upon us in return for the material
advantages to be derived from political dominion. Some of our great
administrators in India were themselves beginning to look forward to a
time, however far distant, when we should have made the people of India
capable of self-government--not yet, of course, on the lines now
contemplated, since even in Great Britain self-government was not
established then on a broad popular basis. As early as 1824 Sir Thomas
Munro, then Governor of Madras, raised in an official minute the "one
great question to which we should look in all our arrangements: What is
to be their final result on the character of the people?" The following
passage in that remarkable document may be commended to our
faint-hearted doubters of to-day:
Liberal treatment has always been found the most effectual way of
elevating the character of any people, and we may be sure that it
will produce a similar effect on that of the people of India. The
change will no doubt be slow, but that is the very reason why no
time should be lost in commencing the work. We should not be
discouraged by difficulties, nor, because little progress may be
made in our own time, abandon the enterprise as hopeless, and
charge upon the obstinacy and bigotry of the nations the failure
occasioned by our own fickleness in not pursuing steadily the only
line of conduct on which any hope of success can be reasonably
founded. We should make the same allowances for the Hindus as for
other nations and consider how slow the progress of improvement has
been among the nations of Europe and through what a long course of
barbarous ages they had to pass before they attained their present
state. When we compare other countries with England, we usually
speak of England as she now is. We scarcely ever think of going
back beyond the Reformation, and we are apt to regard every foreign
nation as ignorant and uncivilised, whose state of government does
not in some degree approximate to our own, even should it be higher
than our own was at no distant date.
We should look upon India not as a temporary possession but as one
to be maintained permanently until the natives shall in some future
age have abandoned most of their superstitions and prejudices and
become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular government for
themselves and to conduct and preserve it. Whenever such a time
shall arrive it will probably be best for both countries that the
British control over India should be gradually withdrawn. That the
desirable change contemplated may in some after age be effected in
India there is no cause to despair. Such a change was at one time
in Britain itself at least as hopeless as it is here. When we
reflect how much the character of nations has always been
influenced by that of governments, and that some, once the most
cultivated, have sunk into barbarism, while others, formerly the
rudest, have attained the highest point of civilisation, we shall
see no reason to doubt that if we pursue steadily the proper
measures, we shall in time so far improve the character of our
Indian subjects as to enable them to govern and protect themselves.
It was a splendid vision for a great British administrator to have
entertained nearly one hundred years ago, though, with no self-governing
Dominions in those days to point a better way, the only possibility that
could occur to Munro's mind in the event of its fulfilment was an
amicable but complete severance of our connection with India; and it is
well to be reminded of the faith that was already in him and not a few
other experienced and broad-minded Englishmen in India as well as at
home, now that many of us are inclined to contemplate only with
scepticism and apprehension an approach to its fulfilment on the new
lines which the evolution of the British Empire and of democratic
government throughout all its component parts, neither of which could
then be foreseen, have in the meantime suggested.
Indians were at that time already employed in large numbers in the
Company's services, but only in subordinate posts, for which in most
cases their educational backwardness alone fitted them, and only as an
act of grace on the part of their British rulers. Parliament had
recognised the right of the Indian people to expect from us the benefits
of good and honest government--perhaps as a duty which we owed to
ourselves as much as to them--but it had not yet risen to a recognition
of their right to any active share in the government of their country.
One of the first questions to come before the new Parliament elected
after the great Reform Bill was that of the renewal of the Company's
charter in 1833. The Parliamentary Committee appointed to inquire and
report on the subject struck a new note when it laid distinct stress on
the Indian point of view. It admitted frankly that "Indians were alive
to the grievance of being excluded from a larger share in the executive
government," and proceeded to state that in its opinion ample evidence
had been given to show "that such exclusion is not warranted on the
score of their own incapacity for business or the want of application or
trustworthiness." Accordingly, when the Charter was renewed, Parliament
laid it down that "no native of the said Indian territories, nor any
natural British-born subject of His Majesty resident therein, shall by
reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, colour, or any of
them be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment under the
Company." This was the first substantial promise given to India that
British rule was not to spell merely the unqualified dominion, however
beneficent, of alien rulers. It invited the co-operation of the subject
race, instead of merely postulating unconditional submission. It
heralded at the same time the introduction of Western education, without
which the promise would have been empty.
The problem of Indian education had occupied the minds of far-sighted
Englishmen from the days of Warren Hastings, who had been the first to
provide out of the Company's funds for the maintenance of indigenous
educational institutions, and it had been definitely provided in the
renewal of the Charter in 1813 that the Company should set aside a
certain portion of its revenues to be spent annually upon education. But
long delays had been caused by an interminable and fierce controversy
over the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more
suitable vehicle for the diffusion of education. The champions of
English were much encouraged by the immediate success which attended the
opening of an English school in Calcutta in 1830 by Dr. Alexander Duff,
a great missionary who was convinced that English education could alone
win over India to Christianity, and Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7,
1835, disfigured as it is by the quite unmerited and ignorant scorn
which he poured out on Oriental learning with his customary
self-confidence, finally turned the scales in favour of the adoption of
English as essential to the spread of Western education. One of the
immediate objects in view--and incidentally as a measure of economy--was
undoubtedly the training of Indians, and in much larger numbers, for the
more efficient performance of the work allotted to them in the
administrative and judicial services of the Company. But if Macaulay was
quite wrong in imagining that Western education would assimilate Indians
to Englishmen in everything but their complexions, he was by no means
blind to the larger implications of the new departure he was advocating.
Like other great Englishmen of his day, he believed that good government
and, still less, mere dominion were not the only ends to which our
efforts should be directed. "It may be," he declared, "that the public
mind of India may expand under our system until it has outgrown that
system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a
capacity for better government; that having become instructed in
European knowledge they may, in some future age, demand European
institutions. Whether such a day will ever come, I know not. But never
will I attempt to avert or retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the
proudest day in English history."
Peace and law and order British rule had restored to India, and its
foremost purpose henceforth, as set forth by Lord William Bentinck, a
great Governor-General, imbued with the progressive spirit of the best
Englishmen in India, to which Parliament had given a fresh impetus, was
to be the diffusion of Western education. "The great object of the
British Government," he declared, "ought to be the promotion of English
literature and science, and all the funds appropriated for the purpose
of education would be best employed in English education alone."
India seemed for the next twenty years to respond enthusiastically to
the new call. Not only were the new Government schools as well as the
older missionary schools thronged with Indian students who displayed no
less intelligence than industry in the acquisition of Western learning,
but the rapid assimilation of Western ideas amongst the upper classes,
especially in Bengal, was reflected in the social and religious reform
movements initiated by Western-educated Indians touched with the spirit
of the West. Already in 1829 Lord William Bentinck had been supported by
a considerable body of Indian public opinion in prohibiting the
barbarous custom of _Sati_, _i.e._ the self-immolation of Hindu widows
on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Government, however, rightly felt
that, except in regard to practices of which it could not tolerate the
continuance without surrendering the principles of humanity for which it
stood, it was for the Indians themselves and not for their alien rulers
to take the lead in bringing their religious and social customs and
beliefs into harmony with Western standards. Nor was there any lack of
Indians to give their countrymen that lead--amongst them several
high-caste Brahmans, Ram Mohun Roy first and foremost. They were
resolved to cleanse Hinduism of the superstitious and idolatrous
impurities which, as they believed, were only morbid growths on the pure
kernel of Hindu philosophy. The Brahmo Somaj, the most vital of all
these reform movements, professed even to reconcile Hinduism with
theism, though without importing into the new creed the belief in any
personal God. British administrators watched and fostered the moral and
intellectual progress of India with increasing confidence in the results
of Western education, and none with more conviction than Lord Dalhousie,
a high-minded and dour Scotsman, who was the last Governor-General to
serve out his time under the East India Company. Other aspects of his
policy may have been less wise. The extension of British rule to the
Punjab became inevitable after a Sikh rising compelled him to complete
what his predecessor, Lord Hardinge, had begun, and break once and for
all the aggressive power of the Sikh Confederacy; but the rigorous
application to the native States of the doctrine of lapse or escheat
whenever the ruler died without a recognised heir, and the forcible
annexation of the kingdom of Oudh as a penalty incurred by the sins,
however gross, of the reigning dynasty have been often condemned as
grave errors of judgment. They were not, in any case, errors that can be
ascribed to the lust of mere dominion. Dalhousie was convinced that
Indian progress would always be hampered by the continuance of native
administration under such rulers as the kings of Oudh. If he was bent on
extending the area of British dominion, it was in order to extend the
area within which Britain was to be free to discharge her civilising
mission without let or hindrance, and not least by the furtherance of
education. If he took a legitimate pride in the introduction into India
under his auspices of the two great discoveries of applied science which
were just beginning to revolutionise the Western world, viz. railways
and telegraphs, together with unified postage, it was because he
regarded them as powerful instruments of education. The impulse given by
him to public instruction even in the new provinces recently brought
under British control prepared the way for the great educational
measures of 1854 which marked a tremendous stride forward on the road
upon which Macaulay's Minute had started India just two decades before.
It was to Dalhousie that Sir Charles Wood addressed his memorable
despatch which contained, as the Governor-General frankly acknowledged,
"a scheme of education for all India far wider and more comprehensive
than the local or Supreme Governments could have ventured to suggest."
Its main features were the establishment of a department of Public
Instruction in every province to emphasise the importance attached by
Government to the educational purpose of British rule; the creation of
Universities in each of the three Presidency cities, and of Government
colleges of a higher grade, and training colleges for teachers, and the
bestowal of grants-in-aid on private educational institutions. The
claims of vernacular education were not forgotten, nor the vital
importance of promoting female education, by which "a far greater
proportional impulse is imported to the educational and moral tone of
the people than by the education of men." The despatch mapped out a
really national system of education worthy of the faith which the
British generation of that day had in the establishment of an
intellectual and spiritual communion between India and the West. The
initial steps immediately taken by Dalhousie to carry the provisions of
that despatch into execution are enumerated in the masterly Report drawn
up by him on his way home in 1856, reviewing every aspect of his
administration during his eight years' tenure of office--an
administration which virtually closed, and not unworthily, perhaps the
noblest period of British rule in India, when men of the intellectual
and moral elevation of Bentinck and Munro and Metcalfe and Elphinstone
and Thomason, and Dalhousie himself, humbly but firmly believed that in
trying to found "British greatness on Indian happiness" they were
carrying out the mission which it had pleased Providence to entrust to
the British people. Dalhousie's parting hope and prayer, when he left
India, broken in health but not in spirit, after eight years of
intensely strenuous service, was that "in all time to come these reports
from the Presidencies and provinces under our rule may form in each
successive year a happy record of peace, prosperity, and progress." His
immediate successor, Lord Canning, was moved to utter some strangely
prophetic words before he left England: "I wish for a peaceful term of
office. But I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a
small cloud may arise, no larger than a man's hand, but which, growing
larger and larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with
ruin." Within less than a year the cloud arose and burst, and he had to
face the outbreak of the Mutiny and see all the foundations of
co-operation between Indians and British rudely shaken, which a broad
and liberal policy of "peace, prosperity, and progress" seemed to have
so well and truly laid.