the strong fortress of Bhurtpore, before which Lord Lake had failed in 1805. Within India there now remained no more than two sovereign powers, the English and the Sikhs; for the Amírs of Sinde scarcely fell within the category of Indian rulers. Ranjit Singh, under whom the Sikh domination in the Punjab reached its climax early in this century, had acquiesced, after some indications of hostility, in the policy of maintaining friendly relations with the British government. He had consequently signed in 1809 a treaty that confined his territory to the north and west of the Sutlej river, with the exception of a strip of country on the south bank, in which he was bound not to place troops. This exception had important consequences later; but the broad line of demarcation between the two States was the river, and this arrangement preserved unbroken for nearly forty years the peace of our northern frontier.

SECTION II. Lord William Bentinck (1828-1835).

The Governor-Generalship of Lord William Bentinck has the distinctive characteristic of representing in Anglo-Indian history a period of brief and rare tran quillity; it was an era of liberal and civilizing administration, of quiet material progress, and of some important moral and educational reforms. Lord Amherst, whom Lord W. Bentinck succeeded, had just closed a costly and troublesome Burmese war; and with Lord Auckland, who followed him, began our disastrous campaigns in Afghanistan. Between Amherst and Auckland came an interval of calm rulership that was well employed in the work of domestic improvements and internal organization, favoured by the current of public opinion

and political discussion in England. The liberal spirit which had accomplished at home the enfranchisement of Roman Catholics, and which was insisting on Parliamentary Reform, had to some extent influenced the views of Englishmen towards India. The expiration of the term of the East India Company's Charter, and the debate over its renewal, had drawn attention to Indian affairs; the Act which was passed in 1833 to prolong the Charter removed the last vestige of the Company's commercial monopoly, and finally completed the transformation of the old trading corporation into a special agency for the government of a vast Asiatic dependency.

It was Lord W. Bentinck who issued, a few months. before his term of office expired, the Resolution which finally decreed that English should be the official language of India. This important State paper is based on Macaulay's famous Minute, in which he utterly routed the party that still held to the system of promoting learning and literature in India through the medium of Oriental languages. The controversy arose out of a question as to the distribution of educational grants from the public purse; and Macaulay argued victoriously in favour of English as the language which gives the key to all true knowledge, and as the only proper means of pursuing the higher studies. Lord W. Bentinck thereupon issued orders, in accordance with Macaulay's view, that were received, on their arrival in England, with some doubt and demur. It seems to have been James Mill, then an influential officer at the India House, who drafted a formidable censure upon Bentinck's proceedings, laying stress upon the impolicy of forcing upon the natives of India, by an abrupt reversal of educational policy, a superficial kind of English culture, that would be used rather as a passport

to public employ than as a channel for the acquisition of solid knowledge. Mill and Macaulay were old antagonists, and Macaulay evidently thought the Orientalists talked insufferable nonsense; nevertheless it can hardly be said, on retrospection, that the weight of argument was altogether on his side. The letter appears never to have been issued; the higher education became almost exclusively English, and as all restrictive press laws were very soon afterwards abolished, the new policy soon produced important and far-reaching consequences.

But the chief title of this Governor-General to posthumous fame rests on the Act which he had the courage to pass for putting an end to the burning of Indian widows. In these days such a measure may appear obviously just and necessary; but in 1829 it was not adopted without much hesitation and many misgivings; for the real nature of public opinion on such subjects among the natives of India was then very imperfectly understood. The point at which law will be supported by natural morality in overruling superstitious sanctions is always difficult to discover; but we know that law and morality have a very complex interaction upon each other, so that what the positive law refuses to tolerate often becomes immoral, and what morality condemns the law has to denounce. It may be guessed that inhuman or scandalous rites are never really popular, while it is certain that whenever a civil ordinance takes its stand upon an indisputable ethical basis, religion has to give way. The crime was chiefly prevalent among the docile and habitually submissive races of lower Bengal, and the Governor-General rightly inferred that its peremptory suppression, far from involving political danger, would be accepted

as liberation from a yoke which the people themselves lacked energy to throw off.

Of Lord William Bentinck's foreign policy there is not much to be said. He was the first-indeed, he has been the last-Governor-General in whose time unbroken peace has been given to British India, if we exclude the despatch of troops to put down local insurrections in Mysore and in Coorg. In the management of some troublesome business with Hyderabad and the Rajpút States he could rely on the skill and experience of Sir Charles Metcalfe; and he adjusted with success the much more important question of our diplomatic relations with Ranjit Singh, the ruler of the Punjab. But his commercial treaty with Ranjit Singh, and his convention with the Amírs of Sinde for opening the Indus river to British commerce, were in point of fact the preliminary steps that led us, a few years later, out upon the wide and perilous field of Afghan politics. The possibility of the overland invasion of India, and the question of the measures necessary for the security of our north-western frontier, were now occupying the minds of India's rulers; and the discussion was beginning that has never since ended.

SECTION III. Afghanistan.

Beyond the Punjab, on the further side of the Afghan mountains, there were movements that were reviving in India the ever sensitive apprehensions of insecurity. The march of Russia across Asia, suspended by the Napoleonic wars, had latterly been resumed; her pressure was felt throughout all the central regions from the Caspian Sea to the Oxus; and by the treaty of Turcomantchai (1828) she had

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established a preponderant influence over Persia. From that time forward our whole policy and all our strategic dispositions upon the north-west frontier have been directed toward anticipating or counteracting the movements or supposed intentions of Russia. To the English diplomatists of that day it seemed as if our original line of confederate defence had been drawn too widely, because Persia's discomfiture had proved that we had no means of upholding her integrity against Russian attack. So we negotiated in 1828 a release from our treaty obligations to aid Persia in resisting aggression, and we fell back upon Afghanistan as our defensible barrier. It followed that as England receded Russia pressed on, occupied the diplomatic ground that we had vacated, and converted the Persian power into an instrument for the furtherance of her own interests, which were not ours. As Persia had just ceded to Russia some districts in the north-west, she was encouraged, by way of compensation, to revive a long-standing claim upon territory belonging to Afghanistan across her north-eastern borders. In 1837, therefore, the Shah of Persia, who claimed western Afghanistan as belonging of right to his crown, was preparing for an attack upon Herat, the chief frontier city of the Afghans on that side, and the key to all routes leading from Persia into India. Some of the leading Afghan Sirdars were in correspondence with the Persian king; and Shah Soojah, the hereditary prince, who had been driven out by a new Afghan dynasty, was an exile in the Punjab, whence he made unsuccessful attempts to recover his throne, soliciting aid both from the Sikhs and the English. Shah Soojah represented the legitimate line of descent from Ahmed Shah Abdallee, who had created the Afghan kingdom,