LORD CANNING.*
THIRTY years have elapsed since Lord Canning's death ; but the time for a good biography of him, especially a short bio- graphy, has scarcely yet arrived. His history during the eighteen years, 1837 to 1855, during which he sat in the Peers, defended Liberal measures, and gradually won the confidence of the Court and its principal advisers, is but little known, less known, perhaps, than that of any man of the time who had equal weight with successive Cabinets. Very few of his private letters have been published; he left no record, or at least none has been published, of his intercourse with the great men of his day ; and to this hour it is uncertain why he was selected to succeed Lord Dalhousie as Governor-General of India, or why, with his splendid prospects at home, he accepted that bur- densome office and the exile which is its condition. Of his six years' reign in India, it is true, everything is known as regards his acts; but their motives are still not fully understood, and
• Lord Canning. By Sir H. S. Cunningham, K.C.I.R. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1891.
it is the peculiarity of the great Mutiny that its history, in its rush of dramatic incident, in the imminent danger it involved to the Indian Empire, and in its multitudinous consequences, has swept away every historian, until all personalities except that of Lord Lawrence and three or four soldiers are, so to speak, lost in details. Even now, it is to many who have closely studied the facts, an obscure question what Lord Can- ning really did, how far his friends can claim for him that he suppressed the Mutiny, and how much and how little of the great civil work, the reorganisation of India, which was done so successfully, was traceable to his initiative. The time, too, was one which excited furious controversies, the echo of which has hardly died away. It was Lord Canning's misfortune and fault to have aroused an unusual amount of personal dislike, to have irritated almost to madness the Imperialist party in India, which usually includes all settlers, and to have inspi red the whole Press by one ill-considered Act, of which he himself speedily repented, with a thirst for vengeance, which hardly diminished even when the Act and its author had passed away. Under these circumstances, it is hard to blame Sir H. S. Cunningham for any imperfection in his work. We cannot commend his style, which shows, especially in its use of adjectives like "phenomenal," a straining after effect; nor his method, which frequently merges his hero too completely in the events with which Lord Canning was connected ; but he has written a rapid, and in the main accurate, narrative of events, and on the great subject of controversy, the relation of Lord Canning to the people whom he was set at first to govern and afterwards to subdue, he has compiled from the despatches and some published letters a justificatory paper of decided merit. He should have said more about Lord Canning's rela- tion to his great lieutenant, Sir John Lawrence,—a relation extraordinarily creditable to the Governor-General, who might have been forgiven had he felt what he never did feel, jealousy of a man whom all India tried to turn into his rival; he should not have slurred over so deliberately the second great cata- strophe of his reign, the White Mutiny, which, but for his judgment and more than royal forbearance, would have shattered more than the Indian Empire ; and he should, we think, have summed up in one careful chapter his general impression of the complex character and unusual powers of one of the greatest of the Governors-General. We will endeavour, on the authority of Sir H. S. Cunningham's narra- tive and some other information, to offer a contribution towards the future supply of this last hiatus.
Lord Canning arrived in India at forty-three, apparently an experienced statesman, splendidly handsome, in the fullest vigour of health, and with a grand career before him, which was entirely suited to his temperament and his powers. In reality, he was twenty years older than his years, without a constitution—he had, for example, no teeth, and a permanent liability to indigestion and insomnia—and owing to some failures in his career, private as well as public, had a somewhat embittered mind. He had no son to carry on his name ; he had not, as he thought, been quite fairly treated at home; he was conscious of powers never fully recognised; and he had been for twenty years cut to the bone by a natural yet most painful annoyance, the comparison, and therefore contrast, which every friend and every public writer drew between him and his celebrated father. He was, in truth, in some respects, singularly unlike George Canning. He possessed his statesmanlike imagination, and more than his power of statesmanlike reflection and device ; but he had none of his gift for impressing the public mind, none of his genius for epigram, and above all, none of his quickness. That splendid machine, his mind, was capable of doing any work required of it up to the very greatest effort of organising statesmanship,—Stein hardly did greater work than Lord Canning in Oude,—provided always that you gave it twenty-four hours in which to accumulate momentum. He was perfectly conscious of this himself, and to gain the necessary time, he would conceal grave news, or bury himself in papers, or put off resolutions, until those most close around him suspected him of an indifference inconsistent with decisiveness, or even ability. Such as he was, a man deter- mined to fill or to make a great position, he found himself in India a King ; he accepted the role of monarch, and from that role he never swerved. We do not believe that he ever once showed a trace of jealousy or vindictiveness—and he had terrible provocation to both—or that any paper of his will ever be published showing him less than impartial in his reckoning-up of men. He judged those around him coldly, and often unfavourably, but invariably by their capacity for serving the State. He excited no love, and where Lord Dalhousie had five hundred devotees, he had not five ; but he was always severely just,—too just by half for some of his advisers. He regarded all his subjects as equally near to him and equally far from him ; felt. no irritation at the Mutiny, and no inclination to pardon mutineers ; regarded the idea of a war of races as fatally bad and impolitic ; and looked down on the pretension of the few unofficial Europeans in India to put forward a claim to be a dominant caste, such as English- men had been in Ireland, with a chilly scorn. He would not, he constantly affirmed, descend to a policy of anger. The conse- quence of this attitude of mind when the Mutiny broke out, and whole stations were massacred every week, and the massacred caste was hungry not only for protection but for sympathy, was not only a wild outburst of fury which carried away even officials, but a misreading of the Governor-General's character which, as we look back through the vista of thirty-five years, seems to us almost unintelligible. He was denounced on all sides as a feeble humanitarian, one of those men in whom guilt excites no emotion, except a flaccid pity or sym- pathy for the sufferings of the guilty. In reality, Lord Canning, brave to imbecility, so brave that he did not even understand the fuss made about his personal safety and his health, both of which he, as Sir H. S. Cunning- ham points out, recklessly and unwisely disregarded, was also a haughtily stern man who, on adequate State reason being shown, would have gone forward in any enterprise utterly regardless of human life. Out of 2,500 capital sen- tences which he revised, we believe he pardoned four. It was he who passed the terrible Acts under which almost every offence could be capitally punished, and who created the 4‘ Commissions" which held unrevolted India in a grip of steel that he was at last compelled by humanity to relax. He urged against many of his counsellors the execution for massacre of the King of Delhi, and when convinced that a pledge had hem given guaranteeing his life, sent the heir of Timour as a convict to Rangoon. It was he who sanctioned instructions, when it was thought Calcutta must rebel, which might have ended in sweeping the city from the earth ; and finally, it was he who issued the proclamation which ter- minated all property in Oude. So wisely, so gently, and so vigorously was that proclamation used, and intended by Lord Canning to be used, that it pacified and revived the whole dangerous province ; but its root-idea was one of the haughtiest despotism, and one which nearly, if not quite, transcends the point to which it is a right of any Govern- ment to go in punishing rebellion. There was no feeble clemency in his justice, only a cold scorn of those who could not see that his business on earth was to be Judge, not prosecutor. When the Mutiny was over, he treated it as war, amnestied all but murderers, in spite of frenzied outcries, and set himself calmly to his great tasks of reassuring the Princes, which he did successfully and, as it appears, finally, by issuing what was called "the Golden Bull," which terminated at once their independence and their fears ; of restoring the finances, which he did by coolly supporting Mr. James Wilson and Mr. Laing against every variety of clamour created by new taxation and new economies; and of making the Imperial Government efficient, which he did by turning the cumbrous old Council into a Cabinet on the European plan, a Cabinet, however, controlled and guided by a King whose word in the long-run is final. His reforms have been tested by thirty years' experience, and we do not think one of them has failed. His success, in Oude in particular, woke admiration even among those who detested him ; his character began to be understood before he left India, and though never popular, it was as a man recognised to be great that he returned home in 1862 to die. He had never a sound constitution, fate had fixed him in Bengal, the worst of all places for a frame like his, and he was a little too conscious of the difference between his own statesmanship and that of those about him, and so worked himself to death. No man not made of wire and whipcord, like Frederick the Great, could have borne the labour Lord Canning put upon himself ; and he was made only of flesh and bone. He was a very great man, and though he did not reconquer India—a feat performed by Lord Lawrence, Lord Clyde, and Lord Strathnairn—but for him India would never have been reconquered.
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