Forty-one years in India | Page 2

trusted that a mere handful of
Englishmen are able to direct the administration of a country with
nearly three hundred millions of inhabitants, differing in race, religion,

and manners of life. Throughout all the changes which India has
undergone, political and social, during the present century, this feeling
has been maintained, and it will last so long as the services are filled by
honourable men who sympathize with the Natives, respect their
prejudices, and do not interfere unnecessarily with their habits and
customs.
My father and I spent between us nearly ninety years in India. The most
wonderful of the many changes that took place during that time may be
said to date from the Mutiny. I have endeavoured in the following
pages to explain the causes which, I believe, brought about that terrible
event--an event which for a while produced a much-to-be-regretted
feeling of racial antagonism. Happily, this feeling did not last long;
even when things looked blackest for us, it was softened by acts of
kindness shown to Europeans in distress, and by the knowledge that,
but for the assistance afforded by the Natives themselves, the
restoration of order, and the suppression of a fierce military
insurrection, would have been a far more arduous task. Delhi could not
have been taken without Sikhs and Gurkhas; Lucknow could not have
been defended without the Hindustani soldiers who so nobly responded
to Sir Henry Lawrence's call; and nothing that Sir John Lawrence might
have done could have prevented our losing, for a time, the whole of the
country north of Calcutta, had not the men of the Punjab and the
Derajat[*] remained true to our cause.
[Note *: Tracts beyond the Indus.]
It has been suggested that all outward signs of the Mutiny should be
obliterated, that the monument on the Ridge at Delhi should be levelled,
and the picturesque Residency at Lucknow allowed to fall into decay.
This view does not commend itself to me. These relics of that
tremendous struggle are memorials of heroic services performed by Her
Majesty's soldiers, Native as well as British; and by the civilians who
shared the duties and dangers of the army. They are valuable as
reminders that we must never again allow ourselves to be lulled into
fancied security; and above all, they stand as warnings that we should
never do anything that can possibly be interpreted by the Natives into

disregard for their various forms of religion.
The Mutiny was not an unmitigated evil, for to it we owe the
consolidation of our power in India, as it hastened on the construction
of the roads, railways, and telegraphs, so wisely and thoughtfully
planned by the Marquis of Dalhousie, and which have done more than
anything to increase the prosperity of the people and preserve order
throughout the country. It was the Mutiny which brought Lord Canning
into closer communication with the Princes of India, and paved the way
for Lord Lytton's brilliant conception of the Imperial Assemblage--a
great political success which laid the foundation of that feeling of
confidence which now, happily, exists between the Ruling Chiefs and
the Queen-Empress. And it was the Mutiny which compelled us to
reorganize our Indian Army and make it the admirable fighting
machine it now is.
In the account I have given of our relations with Afghanistan and the
border tribes, I have endeavoured to bring before my readers the
change of our position in India that has been the inevitable consequence
of the propinquity upon our North-West Frontier of a first-class
European Power. The change has come about so gradually, and has
been so repeatedly pronounced to be chimerical by authorities in whom
the people of Great Britain had every reason to feel confidence, that
until recently it had attracted little public attention, and even now a
great majority of my countrymen may scarcely have realized the
probability of England and Russia ever being near enough to each other
in Asia to come into actual conflict. I impute no blame to the Russians
for their advance towards India. The force of circumstances--the
inevitable result of the contact of civilization with barbarism--impelled
them to cross the Jaxartes and extend their territories to the Khanates of
Turkestan and the banks of the Oxus, just as the same uncontrollable
force carried us across the Sutlej and extended our territories to the
valley of the Indus. The object I have at heart is to make my
fellow-subjects recognize that, under these altered conditions, Great
Britain now occupies in Asia the position of a Continental Power, and
that her interests in that part of the globe must be protected by
Continental means of defence.

The few who have carefully and steadily watched the course of events,
entertained no doubt from the first as to the soundness of these views;
and