Page:Earl Canning.djvu/21

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
EFFECTS OF THE MUTINY
15

the amity due to a fellow-citizen. Order was indeed restored, but the body politic still quivered with its recent convulsion. Every part of the great administrative machine required change, renovation, adaptation to new times, new wants. The Army, the Courts, the Finances, the very structure of the government had to be recast. The time had arrived for discarding some dignified simulacra, whose life and use had long departed — some fictions which had long ceased to serve a useful end. It was no easy task which confronted Lord Canning, and he had to perform it, throughout, amid a tempest of animadversion. From every quarter came the fierce blasts of disapproval, dissatisfaction, dislike. The tendency to hasty criticism of remote matters — about which it is easy for those who know little to feel strongly — becomes uncontrollable, when national sentiment is profoundly stirred. It was uncontrollable in Lord Canning's time, in high quarters and low. In Calcutta public opinion ran high. In England, in Parliament and in society, its tone was menacing. Lord Ellenborough's ungovernable mood found vent in an onslaught so unmeasured, unreasonable, unjust, that its very extravagance operated to defeat its end: but such onslaughts try the nerve of the strongest. Lord Canning stood unmoved and immovable — just, tenacious of purpose, conscious of its rectitude — not to be driven from it by the vituperation of a minister or the murmurs of an irritated community. It is possible that a man of a more effusive, less self-contained