CHAP. IV.]

lasts in Afghanistan, our name will be a mark for hatred and scorn. The men are gone who did this-Burnes, M'Naghten, the military advisers who left their bones in the passes beyond the Punjaub, and Lord Auckland himself. But it does not become those at home who were misled by them-it does not become the most irresponsible of us-to forget this great folly and crime, or to attempt to cover it over with cant about the glory of our arms.

When the British force had evacuated Afghanistan, Lord Ellenborough addressed a proclamation to the rulers and peoples of India, which soon became very celebrated. It is always a mistake to address people of another race, and faith, and language than our own, in what is supposed to be their way-to use big metaphors and fervent exclamations, and make references in a supposed religious tone to things which to the writer are not holy. We all saw the folly and bad taste of this in Napoleon's proclamations, and never believed that they would go down with the Mohammedans and others to whom they were addressed; and now the governor-general of India made the same mistake at a serious crisis of our affairs in India, when earnestness and simplicity were more than ever necessary in our transactions. The horror excited at home by the apparent sanction given to idolatry in this proclamation, might be exaggerated; but it is certain that affectation, in every way pernicious in so high a functionary, is most eminently so in regard to the most serious of all affairs-matters of religious faith. In 1831, when Shah Soojah wanted aid from Runjeet Singh, the aid was promised on three conditions, one of which was that the sandal-wood gates of the great temple of Juggernaut, which had been carried to Ghiznee, should be restored. The shah refused this condition, while agreeing to the others, in a way which shewed the point to be of some importance; but whether political, military, or religious, we know too little of the native mind to be certain. Lord Ellenborough, however, ventured to use, in this proclamation, big words of exultation and congratulation about the gates of the temple of Somnauth being brought back from Ghiznee; and the outcry was great, both on the spot and at home-some fearing that the government would appear to patronise idolatry, and others shewing how the congratulation insulted one part of the inhabitants while coaxing another. The matter was largely discussed in parliament in the session of 1843; and due attention was paid to other acts of coxcombry which seemed to shew at once that Lord Ellenborough, with all his heartiness and good-will, and activity and diligence, had not the sobriety of judgment and dignity of manners indispensable in his position. He fraternised with the military in a way very extraordinary in a civilian, and published his military sympathies, so as to give more offence to one set of men than gratification to another. He made showy progresses; and acted out vehemently his idea of Indian government-a government of coaxing and demonstration, rather than of businesslike gravity and silent energy. The East India directors, who held the opposite idea of government, used their power-a power adverted to so rarely as to have been nearly forgotten-of recalling the

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governor-general, without the acquiescence of the administration. The ministers admitted in parliament that they had remonstrated strongly against this exercise of the directors' privilege; and it was plain that they were extremely annoyed by it. Though the vote was unanimous, they considered it as great an 'indiscretion' as any known in history. It was certainly a serious matter to bring forward the anomaly of the double authority at home; but all anomalies must come into notice sooner or later; and the question was, whether the present occasion was a sufficient justification. The directors thought it was; the government thought not. As for parliament and the people, they dwelt most on the satisfaction of the recall of Lord Ellenborough. The appointment of his successor was admirable. It united all suffrages of opinion. Sir Henry Hardinge was a soldier, whose military qualifications were indisputable. But he was even better known as a man of a calm, earnest, grave disposition, sound sagacity and conscientious thoughtfulness, excellent habits of business, and most genial and benevolent temper. In him the qualifications of the civil and military ruler seemed to be so singularly united that he appeared to have been in training all his life for the office he was now to fill. It was on the 21st of April 1844, that Sir R. Peel announced in parliament the recall of Lord Ellenborough; and Sir Henry Hardinge arrived in India in the following July.

Sinde had been annexed to our dominions during Lord Ellenborough's term of office. The agreements we had made with the Ameers, at the commencement of our Afghan enterprise, were not likely to last; and by 1842 we find the governor-general threatening one of the older generation of the Ameers with deposition if he did not pay up his tribute, and prove himself faithful to the British. There was reason to suspect the Ameers of correspondence with our enemies; and their tribute had fallen into arrear. Sir Charles Napier, who commanded the troops in Sinde, was authorised by the governor-general to make a new treaty with the Ameers, by which the British authorities believed that equivalent advantages were secured to the two parties. The Ameers, however, thought otherwise-estimating the privileges of their hunting-grounds along the Indus more highly than the British ruler conceived of when he stipulated that we should have liberty to cut wood for our steamers along the whole line of the riverbanks. The treaty was forced upon them; they were irritated; their Beloochee followers were furious, and drove out the resident who had negotiated the treaty and his few followers from their fort, compelling them to take refuge on board a steamer in the river. The attack was made on the 15th of February. The next day, Sir C. Napier went after the Ameers, to see what they were about, and found them encamped with 22,000 men-seven times the amount of his own force. Early in the morning, he brought his small force to bear upon their great army, routed it, and captured all the enemy's artillery and ammunition, their standards, and their camp, with all that it contained. The Ameers yielded up their swords; and after another victory, Sinde was ours. Sir C. Napier has never

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concealed the fact, however, that his conquest of Sinde was determined on before the attack on the resident, and would have taken place just the same if that had never happened. The battle of Meanee was a great one, valorously and skilfully conducted; and the thanks of parliament were voted to Sir C.

whether they prefer the government of the Ameers, or the 'mild sway' which we recommend to them as that of the British government. Probably the Beloochees know too much of our invasion of Afghanistan, and of the condition in which we left it, to have much belief in the mildness and justice of our sway. Meantime, a residence in Sinde is a sort of purgatory to Anglo-Indians. The people are manifestly hostile, and the soil and atmosphere most unfavourable to health. Mutiny, the most dreaded of all events in India, was occasioned in 1844, by the mere order to march to Sinde; and a regiment was ignominiously broken up, on account of its refusal.

We have not done yet with these melancholy Indian victories, and the questionable rejoicings over them at home. The people of Gwalior, in the Scindia dominion, in the heart of our north-western possessions, were disturbed and riotous. We were bound by treaty to give aid in such a case, under certain requisitions: we now interfered without such requisition, on the assumption that it would have been made if a young prince had been old enough;

and entered the territory, 'not as an enemy, but as a friend to the Maharajah.' We established 'a strong government,' according to British ideas, and were about to depart; but the Mahrattas were not disposed to let us march off so quietly. They challenged us to two great battles, in which the British were victors; and Lord Ellenborough, who was near or on the spot, taking the interest of a strong partisan in the conflict, issued more highsounding proclamations about the glory of British arms on the plains of Scindia, and the blessings of British intervention within the walls of Gwalior.

One melancholy department of the history of the Russian alarmists in India is the fate of the officers who were employed in anti-Russian missions. Lieutenant Wyburd, a young officer of spirit and enterprise, who was sent on a secret mission to Khiva in 1835, was not heard of again till Colonel Stoddart, as reported by Dr Wolff, learned at Bokhara that he had been early murdered. Colonel Stoddart himself was sent on a government-mission to Bokhara, and Captain Conolly, in the place of Lieutenant Wyburd, to Khiva and Khokan, with instructions to repair to

and John Conolly marched with Sir J. Keane into Afghanistan in 1839. One died of fever, a captive at Cabool, only six weeks before the release of his fellow-prisoners; another was shot through the heart in the storming of a fort in the mountains; and eleven months afterwards, in July 1843, the last remaining one was executed with Colonel Stoddart at Bokhara. These young men were relatives of Sir W. M'Naghten, whose wretched fate has been already before us. The truth was not known, with regard to the Bokhara agents, till 1844, when Dr Wolff offered his services to go in search of them to Bokhara. From thence he wrote, by order and under the inspection of the khan, an account of the execution of these officers, for such reasons as such a potentate would be likely to give. It appeared that Stoddart had made a temporary and

merely verbal profession of Mohammedanism; but that, unable to live under a mask, even in such a place, he had followed it up with an open avowal of his Christian belief. The reports of the miseries of his imprisonment were but too true.

It is a relief to turn from the dreary scenes in the interior of the Asiatic continent to a far brighter one in its Malayan archipelago. In the young days of the existing generation, boys and girls were taught at school that Borneo was the largest island in the world-Australia then being not fully ascertained to be an island. Among the boys so taught might have been James Brooke, whose imagination, as he grew up, dwelt in the Malayan seas. At length, the time came when he found himself sailing in those seas, and thinking what could be done with the piracy there, which so abounds, and is so cruel in its character, as

to put a stop to a commerce of extraordinary promise, and to keep the population of the archipelago in a lamentable state of barbarism. James Brooke saw that Borneo produced material for an unlimited commerce: Within the same given space there are not to be found equal mineral and vegetable riches in any land in the world.' He saw that the people, from being barbarous and in a precarious condition as to life and welfare, might be civilised and Christianised. To this enterprise he devoted his life and all his resources. In 1838, he went forth, in a schooner of his own, on a voyage of preliminary exploration. In August 1839, he was well received by the Rajah of Sarawak-on the north-west point of Borneothis rajah being the uncle and deputy of the Sultan of Borneo. In return for aid against rebels, the rajah offered him the government of Sarawakthus furnishing him with the opportunity he desired on behalf of his scheme. We next see him Rajah of Sarawak, happy in witnessing the striking improvement of the people under his sway in character and fortunes. The great drawback was the pirates, who swarm in all the intricate passages of those seas. The value of Rajah Brooke was by this time seen; and views began to open upon government and everybody who knew the story, of his importance in our national history, as the discloser of a vast new commerce, and the simple-minded regenerator of barbaric populations. At the close of the Chinese war, the Dido, and afterwards the Samarung, were ordered forth against the pirates, and broke up several of their strongholds. Mr Brooke accompanied these expeditions; and in 1845, a further proof in the eyes of the sultan of his credit with the British government was given in his appointment to be the agent of his sovereign in Borneo. The sultan besought our assistance for the further suppression of piracy, and ceded to us the little island of Labuan, not far from the Bornean capital, as a naval station, on the way between India and China. The sultan, however, was as weak and untrustworthy as such potentates are apt to be. He was won over from the British by intrigue, slew those of his relations who were favourable to them, and countenanced the piratical acts of his own subjects. When he was proceeded against with them, in 1846, he fled into the interior of the island, and would not return. The British officers therefore left with the people a statement of the facts of the case, and of the reasons of their conduct, to be shewn to the sultan, whenever he should reappear. In all these proceedings, there has been no pretence of conquest for selfish purposes; and thus far, the presence of the British appears to be a pure blessing to the people of Borneo. Rajah Sir James Brooke has since been in England, receiving honours from queen and people; and he has gone to the east again, unspoiled by homage, and unrelaxing in his energy, to accomplish, as Rajah of Sarawak and governor of Labuan, the objects which he proposed when plain James Brooke, with no other outward resources than his own little schooner, and the means of negotiating for a cargo of antimony. There is more satisfaction in recording an enterprise so innocent in its conduct and so virtuous in its aim, than in making out a long

list of Afghan and Sindian victories, with the thanks of sovereign and parliament for a commentary.

CHAPTER V.

HEN the ministers met parliament in the beginning of 1842, their party strength appeared to be greater than that of any administration for a long course of years. Judging by the numbers in the House of Commons, the invariable preponderance of the Conservative interest in the House of Lords, and the satisfaction throughout the country at the accession of a strong government which understood its work, there was nothing that the minister could not do-no reason why he should not play the dictator-only keeping within the customary forms of ministerial conduct. But there was something at work stronger than party support and national acquiescence. There was something at work inwardly, in the minister's own mind, and outwardly among the elements which create human food, that was about to frustrate all calculations, and break up a state of things which appeared to have just settled into permanence. The disintegration of parties. which some men had foreseen must happen sooner or later, was now presently to begin. The Whig party was gone-never to be revived. There was no general reform section to take its place; but the Anti-Corn-Law League was now so active, and so considerable in the nation's eye, that any one might see that a free-trade party would soon take the lead on the Liberal side. On the other side stood the vast Conservative body-apparently all-powerful, but in fact powerful only precisely so far as it had accepted and assimilated liberal principles. Robert Peel and his immediate coadjutors had accepted and assimilated most of these liberal principles; and in them therefore lay the main strength of the party. When they emerged as Liberals from the Conservative host, the rest had but little force, and scarcely any principle of cohesion. The strongest and most united portion of them came into natural antagonism with the free-trade party, and have struggled on, under perpetual failure, with the title of Protectionists, to this day. The adherents of the minister composed a sort of party, for as long as the discussion of a free-trade policy enabled them to remain separate from the free-traders; but, of course, when the minister had carried his free-trade measures, and taken leave of power, his temporary party could no more maintain an independent existence than a military company, employed on a par ticular service, can constitute a separate body when the achievement is completed, and they have returned to the main body of the army. To be a Peelite was a most significant position for five years; but when the minister had accomplished his work of free-trade, and retired from power for ever, his staff necessarily dispersed, and no vestige of their separate aggregation remained.

Sir

CHAP. V.

It was a serious thing to be the man by whom the disintegration of parties was to be apparently caused. That such a dissolution should take place, sooner or later, was inevitable-whoever might live or die, or rule or retire; and that it should take place within a certain limit of time or circumstance was a necessary consequence of the peace. When peace was concluded, and when, afterwards, Canning was devoting himself to preserve it, preparation was in fact made for that dissolution of parties which was now to be attributed solely to the action of Canning's political heir. It is because war is retardation that parties live as long as it lasts. It is because peace is progress that peace is the death-warrant of parties. In a condition of peace, when new questions and progressive policies arise, and arts and inventions flourish which change the condition and relations of whole classes of men, political interests must be subject to renovation, like everything else; and political representatives will band themselves together in new combinations, and old organisations will dissolve. Seen in advance, this reconstitution of parties for express aims appears a good: looked back upon from a far future time, it is clearly seen to be a great good; but at the time, the preliminary dissolution is a grave evil; and it is a serious thing to be the man by whom it is effected. It is a grave evil that the business of the country is ill done, or remains undone, for want of united action in parliament. It is a graver evil that men think ill of each other, as they almost unavoidably do while each is following his own notions, and therefore appearing to be straying wide of any principle.' Oppositions of opinion are respectable in the eyes of antagonists while the opposition is single, and has a centre, round which men gather; but men lose their liberality when they see their neighbours, late comrades of their own, wandering into this or that field of opinion, or forming new conjunctions with old opponents. imputations fly abroad, not only of intellectual weakness, but of political dishonour. Mutual confidence is gone; and temper and manners follow. Party violence is bad; but it is nothing to the violence which succeeds a dissolution of parties. Grave as are these evils, there is yet a graver. In the interval-usually an interval of years-between the disintegration of old parties and the constitution of new ones, while a tentative or accidental fusion takes place here and there, now and then, which gives way again, and proves that such associations cannot be arbitrarily formed, but must grow out of some living principle-during such an interval, the country is certain to be badly governed. A principled government-a government which had a policy ---would inevitably and instantly create parties. The non-existence of parties is an infallible indication that the government is a desultory and not a principled one; and of all misfortunes that can befall a nation, none can be graver than this. Such a government cannot endure for many years, even in the absence of all organised opposition, and in the enjoyment of that self-confidence and apparent strength which arise from its having all its own way, through the unwillingness of political men to displace it till they are provided with a party and a policy,

Then

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or their inability to displace it by a merely desultory opposition. But, while it lasts, it is a moral curse. During such a term of rule, the political life of the nation languishes-its vital strength oozes away-its able men lose much of their capability-and the ideal of the people sinks from day to day. Their ideal of the statesman sinks to that of the clerk. Instead of principles and enterprises of progress, they learn to look for mere routine, or ingenuity in expedients. They are like the man who has lapsed from his ideal and purpose of self-perfection, and lets himself drift among the chances of life. Such, being the natural order of events, has been our experience. A After the collapse of the Whigs, Sir R. Peel came in, to govern with power, skill, and the wisdom aptest for the time-with realities for his materials, and the faculties within him, the reputation around him, and the fates above him, for his agents. But the most serious part of his work was that which he did not appoint to himself, and which he would no doubt have gladly avoided-that of destroying the power amidst which he dwelt and acted by his own explosive force-scattering his own vast party in fragments which could never reunite. Upon this has followed the remaining disastrous consequence indicated above -the intervention of a ministry which could not have held office under the old existence of parties; and which cannot hold it under any parliamentary organisation yet to succeed. It is necessary to look forward thus far, to understand what Sir R. Peel's position was when he met parliament in February 1842. He then knew no more of his own destiny than others knew. He did not then dream to what an extent he was to be the destroyer of parties by the act of being the achiever of a policy.

The necessity which ordained this destiny for him suspended the utter disintegration of parties, in order to give him all needful provisional supports. There was the free-trade party-strong and conspicuous, but necessarily only provisional, because the free-trade question is exhaustible. When trade is made free in all departments, there is an end. For the same reason the Protectionist party is necessarily a temporary one. It is, from the moment its policy is broken in upon, a mere protesting party, advocating a negation or mere passiveness. The haymaker can protest against a thunder-shower only for a time. When the shower is over, there is no more room for protest. The most clear and serious and significant intimation of a present dissolution and future new constitution of parties arose from that operation of Sir Robert Peel's policy, which must, without leave asked of him or of anybody else, abolish the old antagonism between the landed and commercial interests of our country. From the earliest days, these two interests have been supposed to be antagonistic by their very nature. We have seen how an opportunity was lost, at the time of municipal reform, of reconciling the two interests so far as to bring the rural districts under a government as good and free as that of the towns. We shall see, throughout this final period of our history, how incessantly and completely parliament took it for granted that the landed and commercial interests always must be in opposition, because they always have been. But we shall also