Born in 1812, the boy was educated at Harrow, and entered at Christ Church, Oxford, where he gave bright promise of his future career. The two most remarkable of his fellow-students were Lord Canning and Lord Elgin, who both succeeded their college rival in the viceroy’s seat, and more than once in their public career alluded to the friendship that had united the three. When Lord Ramsay, he attempted, as a follower of Sir Robert Peel, to snatch the representation of Edinburgh from Sir John (afterwards Lord Chancellor) Campbell, and James Abercromby, afterwards Speaker and Lord Dunfermline. He was afterwards elected for the county of Haddington, which he represented for a short time till called to the House of Lords on his father’s death. The duke of Wellington was soon attracted by the industry and ability of the young peer, in whom, moreover, he felt an interest for his father’s sake. When the Whigs went out of office under Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel came into power with three colleagues who were successively to be governor-general,—Lord Ellenborough as president of the Board of Control, Sir H. Hardinge as secretary at war, and Lord Dalhousie as vice-president of the Board of Trade under Mr Gladstone, and in 1844 as president. It was in the Board of Trade that he sowed the seeds of that disease which carried him off in the prime of life. The time was that of the corn-law struggle and, still more to him, of the railway mania. Night and day the president had to work. In 1845he organized that railway department of the Board of Trade, through which in one year he passed, after detailed personal study, .332 projects, involving a capital of £271,000,000, besides many foreign schemes which appealed to the English money-market. At the last hour of November for lodging applications no fewer than 600 schemes were deposited on his table. To him, more than any other man, Great Britain owes its railway system, and if the experienced warning of the over-worked president had been heeded, the disasters of 1847-48 would never have taken place. At the same time the duty of leading the com-law debates in the House of Lords fell upon the wearied official. The defeat of Sir Robert Peel at the end of June 1846 gave him no respite, for Lord John Russell asked him to remain in office, and again the Whig premier offered the young Conservative peer the office of governorgeneral of India, from which Lord Hardinge was returning alter the first Sikh war.

Never, since Clive, had any man so young been called to bear such vast responsibilities, and yet, like Clive, he nearly doubled the empire, and adorned his rule with the blessings of peaceful and material reform. Lord Dalhousie was only thirty-five years of age when, on the 12 th January 1848, he assumed at Calcutta that high office which he held for upwards of eight years, or almost as long as the period during which Lord Hastings had been led by troublous times to fill it. Had he remained a cabinet minister, it is not difficult to predict what he might have become in the annals of British statesmanship, but he had even higher work to do in India. Lord Hardinge, guided throughout his policy by the good and great Henry Lawrence, had left the Punjab nominally at peace under a Sikh regency, but really seething with discontent and confusion. To use Lord Dalhousie’s own words in reviewing the situation, the spirit of the whole Sikh people was influenced by the bitterest animosity against us, chief after chief deserted our cause, nearly the whole army and council of regency were openly arrayed against us, the Sikhs courted an Afghan alliance, and the question was no longer one of policy but of national safety. Moolraj, at Mooltan had, in April, murdered the British officers Vans Agnew and Anderson; Herbert Edwardes had in June shown how disaster could be retrieved; by September General Whish was before Mooltan with an avenging force; and on the 5th October the governor-general announced, at a military ball at Barrackpore, a general war against the Sikh Sirdars. Proceeding to the spot like another Clive he conquered, annexed, and reorganized the Punjab in six months. The crowning victory of Gujerat, on the 21st February 1849, followed by the fall of Mooltan, avenged the drawn battle of Chillianwalla, and on the 29th March the Punjab became a British province. Borrowing from administrative experiments on a small scale in Tenasserim and Sind, the governor-general created that non-regulation system, under which military officers and civilians combined have ever since brought up to the ordinary level of our civilized administration the warlike peoples of Northern and the more savage tribes of Central and Eastern India. In the brothers Henry and John Lawrence, assisted by Sir Robert Montgomery and Sir Donald Macleod, Lord Dalhousie found men to work out his plans with such success as to convert the Punjab into the base from which, in 1857, Delhi was taken and the empire was reconquered. He returned to the capital by Bombay, the Straits Settlements, and Burmah, surveying the coast-line of the maguificent dependency which he had thus carried up to its natural boundaries, to the Himalayas from the sea. The experience he thus gained was soon to be used. The king of Upper Burmah violated the treaty of Yandaboo by a gross outrage on certain British traders in the port of Rangoon, and refused atonement. Quoting Lord Wellesley’s maxim, that an insult offered to the British flag at the mouth of the Ganges would be resented as promptly and as fully as at the mouth of the Thames, after every peaceful effort had failed, the Government of India fought the second Burmese war; and, as reparation was still scorned, took possession of the kingdom of Pegu, thus uniting the territories of Arakan and Tenasserim taken in the first war into what is now the compact and prosperous coast province of British Burmah.

From that time, in 1852, the completed empire has been at peace, save for the Mutiny and little frontier campaigns. Its consolidation now became the great work of the young and triumphant governor-general, who showed on as great a scale as history can present, in a few years, that peace has greater victories than those of war. While in the minute review of his 8| years’ administration Lord Dalhousie devotes 177 paragraphs to these, he records in only 3 the conquest of territories and populations as large as those of France. With the foresight and caution that marked all his statesmanship he thus closes the narrative of his wars “Experience—frequent, hard, and recent experience—has taught us that war from without or rebellion from within may at any time be raised against us, in quarters where they were the least to be expected, and by the most feeble and unlikely instruments.” The rising of the tribe of Sonthals, a non-Aryan race of simple and now half-Christianized savages in the Rajmahal hills, due to the oppression of Hindu usurers and landlords, illustrated this. But the mutiny, to which we shall afterwards allude, has still more light thrown on it by this warning.

Lord Dalhousie made additions to those portions of the empire under direct British administration, however, not only by conquest but by annexing native states which lapsed to the suzerain power on the failure of natural and even adopted heirs, or, as in the case of Oudh, for outrageous and hopeless misrule. No part of his policy has been more misrepresented than this. His own narrative of it, written as simple history and long before it was attacked, bears the stamp of the unflinching honesty which was the basis of his nature,—the sympathy with the people and horror of oppression which influenced all his career, and the strict regard for justice which made his Government the strongest India ever had, before or since. He has been charged with the lack of imagination; but he had that as Cromwell had it, where he cared for the many rather than for the self-seeking and self-pleasing few. The question i.? twofold—Is it the duty or the right of the paramount power (1) to escheat states the chiefs of which persist in anarchy that not only ruins their own people but threatens their neighbours, or (2) to allow states to lapse when the chiefs leave no natural heirs and have refused to adopt a successor 1 The first was illustrated in the case of the kingdom of Oudh, which for the crimes of its kings, committed in spite of all warnings, was ordered to be annexed by the British Cabinet contrary to the recommendation of Lord Dalhousie, who would have again tried the policy that failed after the first Sikh war. The second is the real point at issue in his case. Now the despatch of the 30th April 1860, in which Lord Canning urges the concession to the 153 Hindu and Mahometan princes who actually govern their estates of a distinct law of adoption and feudatory right, is based on the fact that no such law or certain usage was in existence before. Lord Dalhousie acted for the good of the natives and for the interests of the British Government, solely as their trustee, when he annexed states according to what has been called the doc trine of lapse. His regard for purely historic claims which could not affect the happiness of the people for evil is shown by his refusal to carry out the consent of the court of directors to extinguish the dynasty of Timur on the death of the king of Delhi. He rather perpetuated the titular sovereignty by recognizing the grandson of the king as heir-apparent, on the two conditions that he should resido at the Kootub palace, outside Delhi, and “should as king receive the governor-general at all times on terms of perfect equality.” To the two kingdoms of the Punjab and Pegu, won by conquest, and to the kingdom of Oudh, annexed for misrule worse than that of the Ottoman Turks, Lord Dalhousie hence added the fourth of Nagpore, “in the absence of all legal heirs,” refusing to bestow the territory in free gift upon a stranger. So also he added the province of Berar, ceded by the Nizam for the permanent maintenance of the Hyderabad contingent. In Nagpore and Berar, one day to be united to Bombay, he gave Lancashire the finest cotton field under the British Crown. So also the principality of Sattara and the chiefship of Jhansi reverted to the Indian Government. Writing in 1856 he showed that these four kingdoms and three provinces had raised the revenue of India from 26 to 30 millions sterling a yeai. In the twenty years since, no revenue-paying addition has been made to the empire as Dalhousie left it, for he reached the boundaries fixed by nature. But the income of the 12 provinces of British India, with the 153 native states, which cost the rest of India far more than the small tribute they pay and spend nothing on the people, has risen to 52 millions sterling a year. It has doubled since Lord Dalhousie landed at Calcutta. But, while caring for the people, he was not indifferent to the welfare and good-will of their chiefs. Himself a sincere Christian, while singularly reticent as to his personal faith, and strictly neutral as the ruler of millions of alien and opposed creeds, he thus wrote of the adoption of Christianity by Maharaja Dhuleep Singh, the last of the rulers of the Punjab :—“The act was voluntary on the part of the boy, and, under the guidance of God’s hands, was the result of his own uninfluenced convictions. It is gratifying to be able to state that his life hitherto has been strictly consistent with the injunctions of the faith he professes.” So he records the baptism of the Queen’s ward, the princess of Coorg, at the desire of her father the ex-raja. And in his time there was passed the Toleration Act,which, completing the good work begun by Lord William Bentinck, removed from the statute book the last traces of the persecution of converts to Christianity, who had suffered the loss of all their goods as a penal consequence.

The catalogue of Lord Dalhcusie’s reforms is as interesting as it is long, but we must be content with a mere statement of those which remind us of Clive’s work in his third visit to India. The Civil Service was opened to the competition of all the natural-born subjects of the Crown, black and white, and at the same time the civil and military services were reorganized in India itself to supply the new territories. In Bengal, the boards which had acted as “screens” for inefficiency were abolished or simplified, and personal government was introduced in a way which made the force of the governor-general’s energy and influence felt throughout the empire. The Public Works Department, separated from the military administration, was organized in a style which has enabled it to grapple with the vast needs of the whole Peninsula. A legislative council was created which, far more effectually than the sham introduced by Lord Halifax afterwards, promised to represent both British and native opinion. Bengal, with its sixty millions, received a lieutenant-governor for itself. In a thousand details life was substituted for apathy or obstructiveness, till among all classes the genius and force of the “boy” governor-general were gratefully eulogized as had never before happened in the history of India. There was not a hostile critic. But these were small matters compared with the introduction of the four potent forces of the railway and the telegraph, cheap postage and the primary school. The triumph of physical and educational progress went hand in hand. The quondam president of the Board of Trade felt himself at his old work, but on a vaster scale, and with far more magnificent results. Every word he spoke or wrote, every act that he ordered or sanctioned, told on the civilization of the country. His it was, too, to push on and open the great Ganges Canal which has since saved Hindustan from famine; his to make roads from Delhi through the Punjab, from Simla and the frontier to Tibet, frum Assam to Pegu. Trade and agriculture were ever before him as if he had no other work to do; cotton and tea, iron and coal, salt and other resources were carefully developed by him; and he created a forest department. When he did not think it politically expedient to make female education a care of the state, any more than even the early missionaries were prepared to attend to it, he supported the Bethune school out of his own pocket. Suttee in native states, and thuggee or strangling in our own, he kept down with an iron hand; female infanticide, and meriah or human sacrifice, he vigilantly suppressed; slavery and the slave-trade he made treaties from the Somalee coast of Africa to the Euphrates and the Irawaddy to put down Finally, his care for the British soldier in a tropical climate was matched only by the improvement which he caused in the physical condition of the sepoys. No less a military than a civil administrator, his last act was to send home a series of minutes pressing for a reorganization and an increase of the army, in language not only unheeded, but deliberately repelled, with consequences which the mutiny soon displayed.

Such work as this, following the still greater strain of the Board of Trade during the railway mania, began to show itself even before Lord Dalhousie had completed the usual five years’ term of service. He recorded, at the time, the bitter pang it was to him to be so ill as not to be able to accompany the first railway train which he officially sent forth in its course Bombay-wards from Howrah, the suburb opposite Calcutta. In 1855 the physicians solemnly warned him to leave, but as Her Majesty’s Government laid on him the duty of annexing Oudh, he deliberately accepted the responsibility. “The ministry have asked me to stay, and I will do my duty,” he replied to all remonstrances. He had, too, lost his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached—a daughter of the marquis of Tweeddale, who had been governor of Madras—and was soothed by the arrival of his eldest daughter. The hot season of 1855 he spent in the Neilgherry hills. It was on the 6th March 1858 that he left Calcutta, amid the tears of many, both natives and Europeans, who accompanied the great proconsul, as he was lovingly called, to the Ghaut. He knew he had no more health to look for. Sadly did he write, in his formal reply to the citizens of Calcutta— “Nearly thirteen years have passed away since first I entered the service of the Crown. Through all those years, with but one short interval, public employment of the heaviest responsibility and labour has been imposed upon me. I am wearied and worn, and have no other thought or wish than to seek the retirement of which I stand in need, and which is all I now am fit for.”

Lord Dalhousie retired not only amid the regrets of the people he had ruled so well, and of the services, civil and military, which he had attached to himself at once by the splendour of his administrative genius and by the kingly fascination of his personal character. He was honoured by Parliament and the Crown, while the press exhausted the terms of eulogy in reviewing the career of one who, like Clive, had proved equally great in peace and in war. The many months spent in Malta before he could brave the rigours of his native climate he devoted to a defence of his whole administration, which, unfortunately, is not now to be found. For already the outburst of the Bengal mutiny had led thoughtless or prejudiced and certainly ignorant persons to demand a victim, and they sought it in the dying governor-general. He could not take his place in the House of Lords and explain his acts and policy to unthinking and excited critics who personally knew nothing of either. In India itself, where the facts were known and he was known, he was defended as, on much less and lower grounds, Warren Hastings had been. So, appealing from his contemporaries to posterity, and moved at the same time by the unauthorized publication of other family papers, he dictated the following addition to his will, which we are permitted to publish for the first time:— “Secondly, It is my wish that on my decease the whole of the letters and private papers of every description, wherever found, belonging to me, and not being legal documents connected with the Dalhousie family, should be delivered to my daughter Susan. 1 enjoin that at her decease, or sooner if she should think fit, all documents, journals, and letters illustrating the history of the Dalhousie family, or the career of those who have been successively its head, shall be delivered to the holder of the title of Dalhousie. —And as...