gressive purposes; that it would be marvellous could he succeed in maintaining his position until reinforcements should arrive.
On the other hand, he had great faith, and I believe at the time every Englishman south-east of Mírath had great faith, in the power of the Commander-in-Chief to retake the Imperial city. Past history afforded good reason for that belief In September 1803 the troops of Sindhiá had not offered the semblance of a resistance to the small army of General Lake. In the wars of the earlier Mughals with the representatives of the dynasties which they supplanted, Dehlí had never offered any but the slightest resistance to the army which had been victorious in the field. Even amongst soldiers who had been stationed at that city the idea that Dehlí could present a prolonged resistance was laughed at. The conviction prevalent at Calcutta,[1] especially in military circles, was that the mutineers had played the British game by rushing into a walled city, where they would be as rats in a trap. It can easily be understood, then, how it was that the hopes of Lord Canning that the Commander-in-Chief would very soon be able to deal a deadly blow to the mutineers, by capturing their stronghold, was shared by every Englishman, or by almost every Englishman, at Calcutta.
As to the Panjáb, though Lord Canning naturally felt anxiety, it was an anxiety tempered by confidence in the resolute man who there represented him, and in that resolute man's subordinates. He had precisely the same feeling regarding Oudh. If Oudh at this crisis could be preserved to the British, Sir Henry Lawrence, who represented there the Government of India, was the man to preserve it. He had, and justly, an equal confidence in the
- ↑ I write from my own knowledge, having at the time been attached to the Government of India, in Calcutta, as Assistant Auditor-General.
