1858-9. PACIFICATION OF INDIA. 113 the city was the head-quarters of the chiefs of the fanatical, warlike Wahabis. Mr. Tayler 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? is the question 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. Tantia Topee, the lieutenant of Nana 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 Cawnpore 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 Burmah. On December 20, 1858, Lord Clyde, who had been Sir Colin Campbell, announced to the GovernorGeneral that the campaign is at an end, there being no longer even the vestige of rebellion in the province of Oudh;' and that 'the last remnant of the mutineers and insurgents have been hopelessly driven across the mountains which form the barrier between the kingdom of Nepaul and Her Majesty's empire of Hindostan.' On May 1, 1859, there was a public thanksgiving in England for the pacification of India. 1858. 115 CHAPTER XXXVI. THE END OF JOHN COMPANY.' 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 counsels. For a long time the condition of Indian affairs had been regarded in England with something like absolute indifference. India was, to the ordinary Englishman, 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 nabobs. 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 favourite way, knew all about the Spanish conquests in the Americas, about Montezuma, and Cortes, and Pizarro, very few even of cultivated English gentlemen knew anything whatever 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 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 languor. 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 Englishmen were found to express alarm at the very sanguinary methods of repression and of punishment that were in favour 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 3, 1858, Lord Canning issued his 1858. LORD CANNING'S PROCLAMATION. 117 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, whither the Governor-General had gone to be nearer to the seat of war. The proclamation was addressed to the Chiefs of Oudh, 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 Oudh 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 Oudh it was promised that their lives should be spared, 'provided that their hands are 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 hereafter 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 Oudh; for even the favoured landowners who were to retain their properties were given to understand that they retained them by the favour 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 every one, Sir James Outram, Chief Commissioner of Oudh. Sir James Outram |