Note 216 — Chapter XXVII

The following note on Lord Canning was added by Sir Rowland Hill in June, 1876:—“In an able article in the last ‘Edinburgh Review,’ on Lord Mayo’s Indian administration, the writer thus speaks of Lord Canning:—‘And then we come to Earl Canning, who, almost without exception among English statesmen, presents the grandest picture of unswerving firmness, courage and magnanimity in the midst of the most appalling dangers; who, without losing hope and strong resolve, saw the fabric of an empire fading away from his vision like an iceberg in the Gulf Stream; who at the same time had to confront a native rebellion, the panic fear and disaffection of his countrymen, and the opinion at home which was the reverberation of the latter. He met the rebellion, and he put it down. He met the panic fear, and he triumphed over it. When blood and punishment and cruelty were preached, he stepped forward as a grand and magnanimous ruler, as the representative of British humanity and civilization, and with mild but absolute accent proclaimed, “This shall not be,” and it was not. The greatness of the man who could so speak and so act, at such a time as the crisis of the mutiny and rebellion in India in 1857, is not to be measured by the ordinary deeds of war and peace, however grand in execution the former, however wise and beneficent the latter may be.’ That such a man, after acquiring a thorough knowledge of myself, should have selected me for the difficult and responsible post of Secretary to the Post Office, and have continued throughout my attached friend, is to me a source of the highest gratification.”—Ed.