times by his juniors and old college companions, the marquis of
Dalhousie and Earl Canning. He succeeded a statesman who had done much
to reorganize the whole administration of India, shattered as it had
been by the mutiny. But, as the first viceroy directly appointed by the
Crown, and as subject to the secretary of state for India, Lord Elgin at
once gave up all Lord Canning had fought for, in the co-ordinate
independence, or rather the stimulating responsibility, of the
governor-general, which had prevailed from the days of Clive and Warren
Hastings. On the other hand, he loyally carried out the wise and
equitable policy of his predecessor towards our feudatories with a
firmness and a dignity that in the case of Holkar and Udaipur had a good
effect. He did his best to check the aggression of the Dutch in Sumatra,
which was contrary to treaty, and he supported Dost Mahommed in Kabul
until that aged warrior entered the then neutral and disputed territory
of Herat. Determined to maintain inviolate the integrity of our own
north-west frontier, Lord Elgin assembled a camp of exercise at Lahore,
and marched a force to the Peshawar border to punish those branches of
the Yusufzai tribe who had violated the engagements of 1858.
It was in the midst of this "little war" that he died. Soon after his
arrival at Calcutta, he had projected the usual tour to Simla, to be
followed by an inspection of the Punjab and its warlike ring-fence of
Pathans. He even contemplated the summoning of the central legislative
council at Lahore. After passing the summer of 1863 in the cool retreat
of Peterhoff, Simla, Lord Elgin began a march across the hills from
Simla to Sialkot by the upper valleys of the Beas, the Ravi and the
Chenab, chiefly to decide the two allied questions of tea cultivation
and trade routes to Kashgar and Tibet. The climbing up to the Rotung
Pass (13,000 ft.) which separates the Beas valley from that of the
Chenab, and the crossing of the frail twig bridge across the Chundra
torrent, prostrated him by the time he had descended into the smiling
English-like Kangra valley. Thence he wrote his last letter to Sir
Charles Wood, still full of hope and not free from anxiety as to the
Sittana expedition. At the lovely hill station of Dharmsala, "the place
of piety," he died of fatty degeneration of heart on the 20th of
November 1863.
For his whole career see _Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of
Elgin_, edited by Walrond, but corrected by his brother-in-law, Dean
Stanley; for the China missions see _Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's
Mission to China and Japan_, by Laurence Oliphant, his private
secretary; for the brief Indian administration see the _Friend of India_
for 1862-1863.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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