Multán of two British officers was the signal for an insurrection that led to a general rising of the military classes, a reassemblage of the old Khálsa Sikh army, and a second trial of strength with the British troops. At Chilianwala (January 1849) the English general, who displayed very little tactical skill, lost 2,400 men and officers before he won the day; but at Goojerat (February, 1849) the Sikh army, after a stubborn combat, was at last overthrown by so shattering a defeat that the English were left undisputed masters of the whole country.

These transactions followed the natural course of

events and consequences. Contact had produced

collision, and collision had terminated in the overthrow of an unstable and distracted government. We had thus been compelled to break down with our own hands the very serviceable barrier against inroads from central Asia that had been set up for us fifty years earlier in north India by the Sikhs. It was impossible that we should leave the country vacant and exposed to an influx of foreign Mahomedans; and it had become a matter of growing importance that we should have the gates of India in our own custody; for the line of Russian advance toward the Oxus, though distant, was declared; and in the last war the Afghans had joined the Sikhs as auxiliaries. That Lord Dalhousie1, after mature deliberation, determined against renewing the precarious experiment of a protected native rulership in the Punjab, must now be acknowledged to have been fortunate; for if there had been a great independent State across the Sutlej when our own sepoys revolted, eight years later, the Sikhs might have found the opportunity difficult to resist. Before the commencement of hostilities with us in 1845 they had made

1 Governor-General, 1848-56.

several attempts to shake the loyalty of our native army; nor had the spectacle of the Sikh soldiery overawing their government and dictating their own rate of pay been absolutely lost upon all our regiments. The Governor-General's proclamation of 1849, annexing the Punjab to the British crown, carried our territorial frontier across the Indus right up to the base of the Afghan hills, finally extinguished the long rivalship of the native Indian powers, and absorbed under our sovereignty the last kingdom that remained outside the pale of British empire in India.

After this manner, therefore, and with the full concurrence of the English nation as expressed through its Parliament, have successive Governors-General pushed on during the nineteenth century by forced marches to complete dominion in India, fulfilling Lord Clive's prophecy and disproving his forebodings. The long resistance to our universal supremacy culminated and ended in the bloody but decisive campaigns against the Sikh army. Henceforward all our campaigns against Asiatic powers were to be outside and around India; for the consolidation of the British empire as a State of first-class magnitude, extending from the sea to the mountains, disturbed all neighbouring rulerships within the wide orbit of its attraction, and affected the whole political system of Asia.

SECTION V. Lower Burmah.

Lord Dalhousie had scarcely reduced the Punjab and planted the British standard at Peshawar, when he became involved in the disputes with the Burmese kingdom which led to an important annexation of territory in the south-east. The government of Burmah,

which has always been as obstinate and foolhardy in its dealings with foreigners as the Chinese have been far-seeing and comparatively temperate, refused either apology or indemnity for the injurious treatment by its officers of British subjects. Yet the Burmese war of 1826 ought to have convinced less intelligent rulers that they were at the mercy of a strong maritime power in the Bay of Bengal, which could occupy their whole seaboard, blockade their only outlets, and penetrate inland up the Irawádi river. These steps, in fact, the GovernorGeneral found himself compelled to take, with the result that Pegu, a country inhabited by a race that the Burmese had subdued, fell easily into our hands, and was retained when the Burmese armies had been defeated and driven out. This conquest made the British possessions continuous along the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal, and placed the English once more in a position of the kind which seems to have been everywhere peculiarly favourable to the expansion of dominion. The possession of a flat and fertile deltaic province at the outflow of a great river, whether in Asia or in Africa, enables a maritime power to settle itself securely on the land with a base on the sea; it gives control of a great artery of commerce, and provides an easy water-way inland. With these advantages,

and as the people of such a province are usually industrious and unwarlike, an enterprising intruder is easily carried upstream by the course of events, and to this general rule our progress in Burmah certainly affords no exception. As our settlement at Calcutta, upon the Ganges estuary, led to the conquest of Bengal; as our occupation of Kurrachee by the Indus was followed by the taking of Sinde; and as our position at Cairo necessitates a frontier in Upper Egypt-so the planting of

a new British capital at Rangoon, near the mouth of the Irawádi, was a first step toward a march up the river to Mandalay 1.

SECTION VI. Interior Annexations. The Sepoy Mutiny.

Having conquered two provinces on two diametrically opposite frontiers of the empire, Lord Dalhousie turned his attention to the interior. When, in 1818, the power of the Maratha Peshwas was extinguished, the titular Maratha king, Sivaji's descendant, had been released from his state prison and the principality of Satára had been conferred on him by Lord Hastings. On the death, without heirs, of his successor in 1848, Lord Dalhousie refused to sanction the adoption of an heir. He laid down the principle that the British government is bound in duty as well as in policy to take possession of a subordinate State that has clearly and indubitably lapsed to the sovereignty by total failure of heirs natural, unless there should be some strong reason to the contrary. Satára was accordingly absorbed; Jhansi followed in 1853, and in 1854 came the lapse of Nágpore, when Lord Dalhousie emphatically declared that 'unless I believed the prosperity and the happiness of its inhabitants would be promoted by their being placed permanently under British rule, no other advantage which could arise out of the measure would move me to propose it.' There has never been any doubt about the recognized principle of public policy, based on long usage and tradition, that no Indian principality can pass to an adopted heir without the assent and confirmation of the paramount English government. Lord Dalhousie did not deny that succession might pass by adoption, but he

1 Annexation of Pegu proclaimed, December 20, 1852.

claimed and exercised the prerogative of refusing assent, on grounds of political expediency, in the case of States which, either as the virtual creation of the British government, or from their former position, stood to that government in the relation of subordinate or dependent principalities. And if he withheld assent the State underwent incorporation into British territory by lapse. Nothing, thought the Governor-General, could be more fortunate for the subjects of a native dynasty than its extinction by this kind of political euthanasia. It may be worth while to add here that this doctrine of lapse is now practically obsolete, having been superseded by the formal recognition, in Lord Canning's Governor-Generalship, of the right of ruling chiefs, on the failure of heirs natural, to adopt successors according to the laws or customs of their religion, their race, or their family, so long as they are loyal to the crown and faithful to their engagements. The extent to which confidence has been restored by this edict is shown by the curious fact that since its promulgation a childless ruler very rarely adopts in his own life time. An heir presumptive, who knows that he is to succeed and may possibly grow impatient if his inheritance is delayed, is for various obscure reasons not desired by politic princes; so that the duty of nominating a successor is often left to the widows, who know their husband's mind and have every reason for wishing him long life.

The Punjab and Pegu were conquests of war; the States of Satára, Jhansi, and Nágpore had fallen in by lapse. The kingdom of Oudh is the only great Indian State of which its ruler has been dispossessed upon the ground of intolerable misgovernment. At the beginning of this century the Vizier had pledged himself by

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