political and military correspondence of that Government
was carried on with swift and perfect
secrecy. There is no plundering the wire of its
message.

It was the crowning service of the Punjab
to give means of victory to those who
represented British power before Delhi. When that
great city of the Mogul first declared against us,
intelligence of the disaster was at once
telegraphed to Lahore, and the Sepoys there were
disarmed before the post had brought them
tidings likely to have caused immediate revolt.
Outbreak was thus checked in the Punjab until
time for counteraction had been gained. Out
of the balance of good counsel against massive
strength in that great region came the sinews of
war for our forces before Delhi. But with the
commander of those forces every step taken for
his aid was freely discussed and concerted through
the telegraph. Frequently, we are told, a
hundred messages in a day would be received and
issued in Sir John Lawrence's office.

Again, it happened that there were steamers
of an Indus flotilla plying from Kurrachee to
Mooltan, which, the report says, " are not well
adapted to existing circumstances."  But, it
goes on to add, disturbing its official quietude
with some emphatic printer's type, " but during
eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, they were,
indeed, essential to the existence of British rule
in the Punjab. When our intercourse with the
rest of India was cut off, they were our sole
means of communication with the seaboard.
They brought up our reinforcements of troops,
our military stores and our treasure. They
conveyed the greater part of three regiments of
European infantry and one of cavalry; some
fifty lakhs of treasure (half a million sterling),
and a vast quantity of baggage and ammunition."
Here, then, is the incident in the grand
story that might already be told, of service done
to us by those two obedient young giants,
Electricity and Steam.

But their good service depends on good direction;
and it needs hardly to be said that good
direction could not have saved India by help of
them alone. The heroic fortitude of British
soldiers and civilians exposed to the utmost
trial and superior to all assault, we ask nobody
to remember; for it is remembered and will
ever be remembered by all people who have
English for their mother tongue. India was not
to be saved only by wise counsel, electricity and
steam, but by wise counsel in direction and by
the best material results of knowledge serving
in aid of a high-hearted race. It is a race
able to be thankful for good counsel by which
it has been helped, and as a mass, frank in the
unstinted recognition of its friends. Some people
like to make the most of the few wrongs they
have suffered. They are wiser who dwell on the
benefits they have received. Therefore, we dwell
upon the tale of Sir John Lawrence's administration
of the Punjab. A district in India lying
between two rivers is described by its name and
called the Do-ab; a district lying between five
rivers is described as such by its name when it
is called the Punj-ab. The five streams of the
Punjab—the Seloum, the Chenaub, the Ravee,
the Bey as, and the Sutlej—flow through the
mouth of the Chenaub into the river Indus. The
Punjab, watered by these rivers, is a region
covering about as much space as England and
Scotland without Wales, and, until ten years ago,
was known as the kingdom of Lahore, in which
the small race of the warlike Sikhs ruled over a
total population of some thirteen millions of
people. It lies in the north-west of India,
bordering the North-Western Provinces, in which the
Delhi territory, now made a part of the Punjab
Administration, was one district. Thus it was
that the army in the Delhi territory, with active
revolt in every other border, looked to the
Punjab, lying north of it, for help.

But why was the Punjab capable of giving
help? Where were its own embarrassments?
When the disasters at Meerut and Delhi were
first telegraphed to its chief commissioner there
were in that province six-and-thirty thousand
native troops, of whom nearly all were of one
blood and of one mind with the revolted army.
To balance them there were no more than ten
or eleven thousand European soldiers, of whom
one-half were stationed far asunder, at extreme
ends of the province. Four of the fortresses
were entirely held by native troops. Eight
hundred miles of frontier bordered upon fierce
and independent tribes. On the east the territory
is intermingled with the lands of chiefs and
princes who might exercise unbounded influence
over the millions of Punjabees. To them many
a waverer looked for his examples of right
policy, and their allegiance to Great Britain had
to be secured. All was secured. At the very
outset of the struggle Sir John Lawrence sent
British troops to Delhi, and he began his work
during the crisis with odds in fighting men of
four or five to one against him. There were
left seven thousand five hundred Europeans and
three thousand three hundred Hindoostanee
soldiers, among whom, on various occasions and
at different places, mutiny broke out. There
were eight such mutinies, conspicuous and
perilous. The safety of the Punjab had been
most especially secured by kindly liberality in
the administration. Nowhere in India had the
British rule been felt so distinctly as a relief
from burdens rather than a burden. But
against actual mutiny the Government of
England in the Punjab was able to show itself
terrible in strength. In five out of the eight
cases the mutineers were captured and either
almost or utterly destroyed. It was a wise
rigour. Officers who helped to save the
country have been, after the peril is all over,
weakly rebuked for the strong hand with which
they smote rebellion down at its first risings.
It was there a rebellion which, had it grown,
would have deprived us in India of that reserve
on which alone seemed to depend the issue of
the conflict.

But it could not be by a brute force that Sir John
Lawrence held the Punjab, and could put forth all
its strength for the decision of our fate in India.