The Indian Administration of Lord Canning Re-Printed from the Bengal Hurkaru (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Indian Administration of Lord Canning: Re-Printed From the Bengal Hurkaru
After an absence of more than six years, the present Governor General of India returns to his native land, to play it may be expected no undistinguished part on the field of European politics, though he can never expect, or even wish to be involved in affairs of such vast and painful importance as those which have engaged his attention in the East. If he cares for an immortality of remembrance his wish is sure to be realised. His name will survive when his acts have long been forgotten. Erostratus is not more indelibly associated with the destruction of the Temple of Diana, than Lord Canning will be with the massacre of Cawnpore, and the extinction of the House of Timor. We propose to touch upon the salient points of his career, and enter on the task with a desire to do him full justice. The writer in such a case must be like the photographer, and reproduce the faces of things as he finds them without reference to their beauty or deformity. Facts, like features will not bear to be distorted.
History will claim to record no portion of his Lordship's Administration, prior to the outburst of the great Sepoy Revolt, the era at which our review commences.
Lord Canning is not to be blamed for the fact of the Mutiny having occurred, nor for his inability to discern the signs of its near approach in the early months of 1857. The advisers upon whom he had been compelled to rely during the first year of his rule had no fears of impending calamity, and unless he had been gifted with rare sagacity, and an intuitive knowledge of human nature as it is found in the East, he could scarcely be expected to have an inkling of what was in store for himself and the empire. But the evils justly chargeable to his administration, were a total want of power to understand the character of the events as they were developed around him and a disinclination to place reliance in men who had the capacity and the will to do essential service to the State. He could not be made to see with his own eyes and declined to use those of others.
It is true that the individual is often wiser than the multitude, and time may justify all his opposition to the popular wish, but when a ruler is at the same hour isolated and unsuccessful, when he neither comprehends the policy of others nor has the ability to carry out projects of his own, it goes hard with the governed and the governor. To have too much conscience to follow, whilst possessed of too little ability to lead the multitude, is a calamity only to be measured by the area of personal influence, and the greatness of the emergency which demands its exercise.
War, pestilence, or famine, can only effect to a very small extent all classes of the community, and those whose lot it is to suffer and those whose duty it is to succour and guide, may receive but scant appreciation of their ability and good service, but an occurrence like the Sepoy Revolt, came home to the business and bosom of every member of the dominant nation. It was a war of races, a struggle for bare life, in the issue of which each man, woman and child of European parentage were involved. A period of such supreme and universal peril was sure, not merely to strengthen the hands of authority, but to vest it with absolute control over the power and the resources of the community. To fight, as Englishmen are accustomed to fight, when hearths are threatened and wives are in danger, would be nothing. Our people as of old, would want to offer sacrifices to the principle which Nelson deified and Wellington worshipped, under the name of Duty. Believe that landsmen, in imminent danger of shipwreck will refuse to obey the pilot whose skill alone can save them; believe that the patient just hovering on the confines of two worlds, and longing again to get a firm footing on earth will decline the cup that holds the sovereign remedy and still