he was new to the task of Empire, upon Lord Dalhousie's successor. There are those who regard Lord Canning as having merely reaped in danger and gloom the harvest which Dalhousie had sown in hope, confidence and joy, and as having confronted the dire reaction which awaits premature projects of reform.
Other, and perhaps more trustworthy, guides hold that such a view is scarcely justified by the facts of the case. Those who saw most of the Mutiny, who studied it with profoundest attention and with the best opportunities for its right understanding, considered that it took its rise in a military panic, was a military outbreak, and was in no material respect dependent on popular support or popular grievances.
Whatever its origin, an unexampled and appalling crisis had to be met. Lord Canning met it in a manner of which every Englishman may be proud — with firmness, confidence, magnanimity, with calm inflexible justice. On a stage, crowded with heroic personages, he stood — an impressive central figure — too unmoved and too undemonstrative, too completely master of himself to suit the excited tempers and unbalanced judgments of an epoch rife with unprecedented catastrophe; but rising above the onset of ephemeral hostility with a dignity, which, as the scene recedes and we are able more justly to appreciate its proportions, places him high on the list of those great officers of State, whose services to their country entitle them to the esteem and gratitude of every loyal Englishman.
