themselves up in an ill-chosen hasty intrenchment, where they heroically bore a siege for nineteen days under the sun of a tropical June. Every one had courage and endurance to suffer or to die; but the directing mind was again absent. On the 27th June, trusting to a safe-conduct from the Nana, a safe-conduct supposed to hold good as far as Allahabad, they surrendered, and to the number of four hundred and fifty embarked in boats on the Ganges. A murderous fire was opened upon them from the river bank. Only a single boat escaped; and four men, who swam across to the protection of a friendly Raja, survived to tell the tale. The rest of the men were massacred on the spot. The women and children, numbering one hundred and twenty-five, were reserved for the same fate on the 15th July, when the avenging army of Havelock was at hand.

Sir Henry Lawrence, the chief commissioner of Oudh, had foreseen the storm. He fortified and provisioned the residency at Lucknow; and thither he retired, with all the European inhabitants and a weak British regiment, on the 2nd July. Two days later, he was mortally wounded by a shell. But the clear head was here in authority. Sir Henry Lawrence had deliberately chosen his position; and the little garrison held out, under unparalleled hardships and against enormous odds, until relieved by Havelock and Outram on the 25th of September. But the relieving force was itself invested by fresh swarms of rebels, and it was not till November that Sir Colin Campbell (afterwards Lord Clyde) cut his way into Lucknow and effected the final deliverance of the garrison (16th November, 1857). Our troops then withdrew to more urgent work, and did not permanently re-occupy Lucknow till March, 1858.

The siege of Delhi began on the 8th June, a month after the original outbreak at Meerut. Siege in the proper sense of the word it was not; for our army, encamped on the historic "ridge" of Delhi, never exceeded eight thousand men, while the rebels within the walls were more than thirty thousand strong. In the middle of August, Nicholson arrived with a reënforcement from the Punjab; his own inspiring presence was perhaps even more valuable than the reënforcement he brought. On the 14th September the assault was delivered; and, after six days' desperate fighting in the streets, Delhi was again won. Nicholson fell heroically at the head of the storming party. Hodson, the daring but unscrupulous leader of a corps of irregular horse, hunted down next day the old Mughal Emperor, Bahádur

Sháh, and his sons. The Emperor was afterwards sent a state prisoner to Rangoon, where he lived till 1862. As the mob pressed in on the guard around the Emperor's sons, near Delhi, Hodson thought it necessary to shoot down the princes (who had been captured unconditionally) with his own hand.

After the fall of Delhi and the final relief of Lucknow, the war loses its dramatic interest, although fighting still went on in various parts of the country for about eighteen months. The population of Oudh and Rohilkhand, stimulated by the presence of the Begam of Oudh, the Nawab of Bareilly, and Náná Sáhib himself, had joined the mutinous Sepoys en masse. In this quarter of India alone it was the revolt of a people rather than the mutiny of an army that had to be quelled. Sir Colin Campbell conducted the campaign in Oudh, which lasted through two cold seasons. Valuable assistance was lent by Sir Jang Bahadur of Nepal, at the head of his gallant Gurkhas. Town after town was occupied, fort after fort was stormed, until the last gun had been recaptured, and the last fugitive had been chased across the frontier by January, 1859. . . .

3. Settlement in India at the Close of the Mutiny

The Mutiny sealed the fate of the East India Company, after a life of more than two and a half centuries. The original Company received its charter of incorporation from Elizabeth in 1600. Its political powers and the Constitution of the Indian government were derived from the Regulating Act of 1773, passed by the ministry of Lord North. By that statute the governor of Bengal was raised to the rank of governor-general; and, in conjunction with his council of four members, he was intrusted with the duty of controlling the governments of Madras and Bombay, so far as regarded questions of peace and war; a supreme court of judicature was appointed at Calcutta, to which the judges were nominated by the crown; and a power of making rules and regulations was conferred upon the governor-general and his council. Next came the India Bill of Pitt (1784), which founded the board of control in England, strengthened the supremacy of Bengal over the other presidencies, and first authorized the historic phrase, "governor-general-in-council."

The renewed charter of 1813 abolished the Company's monopoly of Indian trade and compelled it to direct its energies to the good government of the people. The Act of 1833, at the next renewal

of the Company's charter for another twenty years, did away with its remaining trade to China. It also introduced successive reforms into the Constitution of the Indian government. It added to the council a new (legal) member, who need not be chosen from among the Company's servants, and who was at first entitled to be present only at the meetings for making laws and regulations; it accorded the authority of acts of Parliament to the laws and regulations so made, subject to the disallowance of the court of directors; it appointed a law commission; and it finally gave to the governor-general-in-council a control over the other presidencies, in all points relating to the civil or military administration. The charter of the Company was renewed for the last time in 1853, not for definite period of years, but only for so long as Parliament should see fit. On this occasion the number of directors was reduced, and their patronage as regards appointments to the civil service was taken away, to make room for the principle of open competition.

The Act for the Better Government of India (1858), which finally transferred the administration from the Company to the crown, was not passed without an eloquent protest from the directors, nor without bitter party discussions in Parliament. It enacted that India shall be governed by, and in the name of, the Queen of England through one of her principal secretaries of state, assisted by a council of fifteen members. The governor-general received the new title of viceroy. The European troops of the company, numbering about 24,000 officers and men, were amalgamated with the royal service, and the Indian navy was abolished. By the Indian Councils Act (1861) the governor-general's council, and also the councils at Madras and Bombay, were augmented by the addition of non-official members, either natives or Europeans, for legislative purposes only; and, by another act passed in the same year, high courts of judicature were constituted out of the old supreme courts at the presidency

towns.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Innes, Lucknow and Oude in the Mutiny. Malleson, The Indian Mutiny of 1857. Kaye and Malleson, History of the Sepoy War and the Indian Mutiny (6 vols.). Shadwell, Life of Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde

CHAPTER III

THE AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION

IN the constitutions of the various English-speaking colonies, which form a part of the British empire, one has an excellent opportunity to study the forms of government which Englishmen work out when free from the trammels of the historical traditions and economic conditions of the mother country. Feudal aristoc1 racy, which originated largely in conquest and confiscation, as De Tocqueville long ago pointed out, has had no opportunity to reproduce itself in the colonies of modern times. As a result, that feature of the British Constitution is absent in the colonies as in the United States. The most interesting, perhaps, of all the constitutions formed under these new conditions is that which recently federated the Australian States into a Commonwealth. It is doubly interesting on account of the various problems of social reform and control which the Australian colonies are working out individually, and will doubtless continue to work out on a larger scale under the new Constitution. Fortunately we have from the pen of Mr. Bryce, whose book on the American Commonwealth has laid all Americans under a great debt, a brief description of the newly erected government.

1. The Land and People of Australia1

Before examining the provisions of the Constitution which is bringing the hitherto independent colonies into one political body, it is well to consider for a moment the territory and the inhabitants that are to be thus united.

1 Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, pp. 403 ff. By permission of the American Branch of the Oxford Press.

The total area of Australia is nearly 3,000,000 square miles, not much less than that of Europe. Of this a comparatively small part is peopled by white men; for the interior, as well as vast tracts stretching inland from the southwestern and northwestern coasts, is almost rainless, and supplies, even in its better districts, nothing more than a scanty growth of shrubs. Much of it is lower than the regions towards the coast, and parts are but little above sea-level. It has been hitherto deemed incapable of supporting human settlement, and unfit even for such ranching as is practised on arid tracts in Western North America and in South Africa. Modern science has brought so many unexpected things to pass, that this conclusion may prove to have been too hasty. Still no growth of population in the interior can be looked for corresponding to that which marked the development of the United States west of the Alleghanies in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Of the six Australian colonies, one, Tasmania, occupies an island of its own, fertile and beautiful, but rather smaller (26,000 square miles) than Scotland or South Carolina. It lies 150 miles from the coast of Victoria. Western Australia covers an enormous area (nearly 1,000,000 square miles, between three and four times the size of Texas), and South Australia, which stretches right across the continent to the Gulf of Carpentaria, is almost as large (a little over 900,000 square miles). Queensland is smaller, with 668,000 square miles; New South Wales, on the other hand, has only 310,000 square miles (i.e. is rather larger than Norway and Sweden, and about the size of California, Oregon, and Washington put together); Victoria only 87,000 (i.e. is as large as Great Britain and a little larger than Idaho). The country (including Tasmania) stretches from north to south over 32° of latitude (11° S. to 43° S.), a wider range than that of the United States (lat. 49° N. to 26° N.). There are thus even greater contrasts of climate than in the last-named country, for though the Tasmanian winters are less cold than those of Montana, the tropical heats of North Queensland and the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria exceed any temperature reached in Louisiana and Texas. Fortunately, Northern Australia is, for its latitude, comparatively free from malarial fevers. But it is too hot for the out-door labor of white men. In these marked physical differences between the extremities of the continent there lie sources whence may spring divergences not only of material interests, but ultimately even of character, divergences comparable to those which made the Gulf States of the American Union