king of Ava a white elephant, which has been born at Madras, and which should bind him to us for ever.' 'I have had some confidential correspondence with Mr. Hodgson, our Resident in Nepál,' he adds[1]. 'The politics of that State are greatly disturbed, and in a manner not entirely without precedent. The king would gladly change his minister and the minister will not be changed.' (In April, 1835, Lord Melbourne and the Whigs had returned to office.) 'He has now been master of Nepál for thirty years, and will but unwillingly subside into a good subject.' In the Punjab, Mahárájá Ranjít Singh had been casting covetous eyes on territories in the possession of his neighbours, the Amírs of Sind. Within four months of Lord Auckland's arrival, Captain Wade, the Governor-General's agent at Ludhiána on the Sutlej, the frontier of British territory, was instructed to tell the Mahárájá that the Government 'could not but view with regret and disapprobation the prosecution of plans of unprovoked hostility, injurious to native States with whom that Government is connected by close ties of interest and good will.' Captain Wade was to employ, and successfully did employ, his best efforts in dissuading the Mahárájá from embarking on such an enterprise as an hostile advance upon Shikárpur. The control and navigation of the Indus were objects to which the thoughts of Lord William Bentinck had been turned; and before he
- ↑ Mr. Hodgson survived until the present year, a link with that distant past.
