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lead the older provinces into port. On the 12th May the news of the tragedies at Meerut and Delhi reached him at Rawal Pindi. The position was critical in the last degree, for of 50,000 native soldiers 38,000 were Hindustanis of the very class that had mutinied elsewhere, and the British troops were few and scattered. For five days the fate of the Punjab hung upon a thread, for the question was, Could the 12,000 Punjabis be trusted and the 38,000 Hindustanis be disarmed? Not an hour was lost in beginning the disarming at Lahore; and, as one by one the Hindustani corps succumbed to the epidemic of mutiny, the sepoys were deported or disappeared, or swelled the military rabble in and around the city of Delhi. The remembrance of the ten years' war which had closed only in 1849, a bountiful harvest, the old love of battle, the offer of good pay, but, above all, the personality of Lawrence and his officers, raised the Punjabi force into a new army of 59,000 men, and induced the non-combatant classes to subscribe to a 6 per cent, loan, Delhi was invested, but for three months the rebel city did not fall. Under John Nicholson Lawrence sent on still more men to the siege, till every available European and faithful native soldier was there, while a movable column swept the country, and the border was kept by an improvised militia. At length, when even in the Punjab confidence became doubt, and doubt distrust, and that was passing into disaffection, John Lawrence was ready to consider whether we should not give up the Peshawar valley as a last resource, and send its garrison to recruit the force around Delhi. Another week and that must have been faced. But on the 20th September the city and palace were again in British hands, and the chief commissioner and his officers united in ascribing "to the Lord our God all the praise due for nerving the hearts of our statesmen and the arms of our soldiers." As Sir John Lawrence, Bart., G.C.B., with the thanks of parliament, the gratitude of his country, and a life pension of £2000 a year in addition to his ordinary pension of £1000, the "Saviour of India" returned home in 1859. While guarding the interests of India and its people as a member of the secretary of state's council, he was sent out again in 1864 as viceroy and governor-general on the resignation and death of Lord Elgin. At what appeared to be a critical time on the Punjab frontier Lord Palmerston recommended for the office the first civilian, not a peer, who has filled the governor-general's seat since Warren Hastings. If no great crisis enabled him to increase the lustre of his reputation, his five years' administration of the whole Indian empire was worthy of the ruler of the Punjab. His foreign policy has become a subject of imperial interest; his internal administration was remarkable for financial prudence, a jealous regard for the good of the masses of the people and of the British soldiers, and a generous interest in education, especially in its Christian aspects.
When in 1854 Dost Mohammed Khan, weakened by the antagonism of his brothers in Kandahar, and by the interference of Persia, sent his son to Peshawar to make a treaty, Sir John Lawrence was opposed to any entangling relation with the Afghans after the experience of 1838-42, but he obeyed Lord Dalhousie so far as to sign a treaty of perpetual peace and friendship. His ruling idea, the fruit of long and sad experience, was that de facto powers only should be recognized beyond the frontier. When in 1863 Dost Mohammed's death let loose the factions of Afghanistan he acted on this policy to such an extent that he recognized both the sons, Afzul Khan and Shere Ali, at different times, and the latter fully only when he had made himself master of all his father's kingdom. The steady advance of Russia from the north, notwithstanding the Gortchakoff circular of 1864, led to severe criticism of this cautious "buffer" policy which he justified under the term of "masterly inactivity." But he was ready to receive Shere Ali in conference, and to aid him in consolidating his power after it had been established and maintained for a time, when his term of office came to an end and it fell to Lord Mayo, his successor, to hold the Ambala conference in 1869. When, nine years after, the second Afghan war was precipitated, the retired viceroy gave the last days of his life to an unsparing exposure, in the House of Lords and in the press, of a policy which he had striven to prevent in its inception, and which he did not cease to denounce in its course and consequences.
On his final return to England early in 1869, after forty years' service in and for India, "the great proconsul of our English Christian empire" was created Baron Lawrence of the Punjab, and of Grately, Hants. He assumed the same arms and crest as those of his brother Henry, with a Pathan and a Sikh trooper as supporters, and took as his motto "Be ready," his brother's being "Never give in." For ten years he gave himself to the work of the London school board, of which he was the first chairman, and of the Church Missionary Society. Latterly his eyesight failed, and on the 27th June 1879 he died at the age of sixty-eight. He was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, beside Clyde, Outram, and Livingstone. He married the daughter of the Rev. Richard Hamilton, Harriette-Katherine, C.I., who survived him; and he was succeeded by his eldest son, John Hamilton, born in 1846.
Beyond numerous minutes and reports, written in plain and trenchant English, and occasional letters, Lord Lawrence published nothing. These, the printed Summaries of Affairs during his term of office as viceroy, the Friend of India from 1856 to 1870, the evidence which he gave before the East Indian Finance Committee of the House of Commons in June and July 1873, and the Causes of the Afghan War, edited by Sir Arthur Hobhouse, are the authorities for his life, until the memoir appears which Mr Bosworth Smith is preparing. (G. SM.)
LAWRENCE, Sir Henry Montgomery (1806-1857), one of the greatest military statesmen of India, and provisional governor-general in the mutiny of 1857, was born at Matura, Ceylon, on 28th June 1806 (see last article). He inherited his father's stern devotion to duty and Celtic impulsiveness, tempered by his mother's gentleness and power of organization. Early in 1823 he joined the Bengal Artillery at the Calcutta suburb of Dum Dum where also Havelock was stationed about the same time. The two officers pursued a very similar career, and developed the same Puritan character up to the time that both passed away at Lucknow in 1857. In the first Burmese war Henry Lawrence and his guns formed part of the Chittagong column which General Morrison led over the jungly hills of Arakan, till fever decimated the officers and men, and the lieutenant found himself at home again, wasted by a disease which never left him. On his return to India with his younger brother John in 1829 he was appointed revenue surveyor by Lord William Bentinck. At Gorakhpur the wonderful personal influence which radiated from the young officer formed a school of attached friends and subordinates who were always eager to serve under him. After some years spent in camp, during which he had married his cousin Honoria Marshall, and had surveyed every village in four districts each larger than Yorkshire, he was recalled to a brigade by the outbreak of the first Afghan war towards the close of 1838. As assistant to Sir George Clerk, he now added to his knowledge of the people political experience in the management of the district of Firozpur; and when disaster came he was sent to Peshawar in order to push up supports for the relief of Sale and the garrison of Jalalabad. The war had been begun under the tripartite treaty signed at Lahore on 20th June 1838. But the Sikhs
