into council over the same desk, about the affairs of the same empire. There had been great changes in less than five years. Lord Elgin had established the new relations between China and our country; and Lord Canning had saved our Indian empire. Their old friend had sunk into his grave, interested to the last in their great achievements when his own were over, and were apparently misjudged and almost rejected.
There were other changes, as both painfully felt.
Lady Canning’s face and voice were absent. She had sunk under the climate, and partly perhaps from the consequences of the suspense and agony of the year of the rebellion. Her husband was not like the same man. His spirit was broken when he lost her; and Lord Elgin saw this in his face at their meeting.
Once more,—knowing that it was for the last time,—the friends exchanged confidence. They spent many hours in discussing the interests of the hundreds of millions of human beings whom the one was turning over to the rule of the other. Lord Elgin’s hope was that his friend would still be, for a time, an effectual aid to India and to him in parliament; and, though they would hardly meet again, they might yet work together at the same great task. Still, he must have had misgivings that all was over when he looked upon the haggard face and wasted form which sanguine people said would be restored by the voyage.
It was a great and memorable administration,—that of Lord Canning. Many of us were fully aware of it; and it was generally appreciated much less imperfectly than that of Lord Dalhousie. Not only was public attention more earnestly directed to India than ever before; but India, having come under parliamentary government, had converted an anomalous and external kind of interest into a national one. No expectations were too high of the honours that would be awarded to the first Viceroy of India, as soon as he should have recruited enough from the fatigues of his return to appear in public. But, while his friend in India was looking for the news of Lord Canning’s reception, and of the beginning of his services to India in parliament; and while we were waiting to see him come out into our streets and parks, he was slipping away. Before he could receive the first instalments of the national acknowledgments, he was dead. When his friend at Calcutta was hoping for some revival of his strength, however temporary, the news came of a funeral in Westminster Abbey, and of the long and noble train of great citizens who were eager to follow the son of George Canning to his grave.
Amidst the overwhelming cares and pressing business of his Indian rule, Lord Canning had lost nothing of the keenness of feeling with which he thought of the Englishwomen and their young daughters who filled the horrible tomb at Cawnpore. He took a deep interest in the plans for laying out the grounds round the well, by which the graves of the soldiers who perished were to be enclosed with the hideous one of the ladies and children, and the whole made a monument of the year of tribulation. It was reserved for the friend who had mourned over the calamity with him to fill his place at the consecration of this monument; and this was done by Lord Elgin on the 11th of February last.
Each friend has always been worthy of the other in the thorough devotedness to duty and the national service which gives heroic composure to the statesman in office, as well as to the general in command. As Lord Elgin stood “like a statue” on the upper pavement of the well, in the sight of all the people, his countenance and bearing were as calm as Lord Canning’s were in his daily rides in 1857, when the people looked in his face for a reflexion of the news from the upper country, and always saw grave composure. But there was sorrow in the heart of the survivor, as there had been in his who was gone. There was sorrow in all hearts, no doubt;—in all within the enclosure, and, we are assured, in those of the natives outside. But Lord and Lady Elgin were mourning others than those who were buried there. They were thinking of the brave-hearted and unselfish woman who lay in her grave at Calcutta, and of her husband under the pavement of Westminster Abbey. To them at such a moment it must have seemed as if they had had more to do with death than with life. Something of this is disclosed in the address of Lord Elgin on the evening of the great day of the opening of the East Indian railway line to Benares, when he remarked on Lord Canning having proposed the health of Lord Dalhousie at the opening of a former portion of the line. He referred briefly, and evidently because he could not help it, to the relations which had existed between the three friends of a lifetime. “It is a singular coincidence,” he said, “that three successive Governors-General should have stood towards each other in this relationship of age and intimacy.” The singular condition of welfare at which India is evidently arriving shows that the circumstance is as happy as it is remarkable.
Amidst the brightest times to come, and the most blessed fortunes that can be in store for India, there will always be,—as there ought always to be,—a strain of melancholy mingled with the rejoicing. The address of the Bishop of Calcutta, delivered from the monument, will probably be the best and longest remembered sermon of the age. Lord Elgin appears to the people now as the survivor of a series of regenerating rulers of India, who have sacrificed themselves to their work: and when his monument is reared (long hence may it be!) it will be remembered how it was that he was in India during the summer of the mutiny, and that he presided at the dedication of the sacred enclosure at Cawnpore. In all time to come the spirit of the inscription on the monument will hang round the statesmanship and the statesmen of the period of the mutiny, as well as round the memory of the sufferers under its agonies. “These are they which came out of great tribulation,” says the monument; and the sentiment of a future day, happier even than the present, may include under the description many more of the contemporaries of the transition stage of India than those whose bones lie there.
