Their allegiance, however, had its sure foundation in their recognition of the fact that Lord Dalhousie owned the truest right to command — the right of personal knowledge gained by personal work. He learned India for himself as no other Governor-General had ever learned it. He deliberately placed the newly conquered Punjab under that most unintelligent of administrative machines, a Board, because he determined that the Board should be his right hand, but that he himself should be its directing intelligence. He succeeded because he laboured by travelling through the Punjab, and by fixing his residence for many months in one of its hill districts, to acquire the personal knowledge which enabled him to control with a well-grounded self-confidence the strong men whom he selected to carry out his views.
The official documents and private papers in which he recorded the results, prove that no detail of administrative importance escaped his keen eye while on his tours through the Punjab : from the constitution, distribution, and commissariat of the troops, in regard to which he showed a more exact knowledge than the fiery old Commander-in-Chief, to the composition of the police, the discipline of the jails, the planting of trees (which led to the true commencement of the Indian Forest Department), the creation of a great system of roads and canals, the provision of schools and hospitals, the
