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he says, though he was very far from being wrong-headed himself, has most value as expressing the general opinion of the men amongst whom he moved. It is to be found under

February 17, 1843 :

Since the Blue Book with all the Indian papers has appeared there has been a considerable reaction in Ellenborough's favour. ... I believe the opinion which I have formed is that which has been generally arrived at by those who have taken the trouble to read the papers in an impartial spirit. I think his case is completely made out (not, of course, including the last Proclamations). His dispatches are very able, and exhibit great caution, industry and discretion; his views seem to have been very sound, and he took a comprehensive survey of the whole state of India, and of the dangers and difficulties by which he was surrounded. . All the charges with which he has been so pertinaciously and violently assailed for many months past, such as cowardice, meanly retiring from the contest, ordering the troops to withdraw against the wishes and advice of the generals, indifference to the fate of prisoners, fall to the ground at once. There is not a shadow of a case against him on any of these points.

That Lord Auckland was not a good judge of men may be gathered from his sending Macnaghten to Cabul, and from his appointing Elphinstone to the command of the army of occupation. We know, too, and it makes his case the worse, that he had misgivings about Afghanistan and was not in favour, as were many about him, of an even wider policy of conquest. Had he listened entirely to expert advice he would have soon been beyond the Hindu-Kush. But he was, nevertheless, essentially a weak man and went where he was led. Now Ellenborough was quite a different type of Governor-General. He resolved to be his own master. He made possibly some trifling mistakes which Macaulay and others seized upon. And, above all, he managed by certain reforms in the administration, for which there was a good deal to be said, to give people the idea that the Civil Service was opposed to him, and that he was of a " military" way of thinking. As the directors, for whom he cared little, gave him no sort of support, and the men at the Board of Control-poor Fitzgerald of the Clare Election and "Goody Goderich," the "transient and embarrassed phantom "--were not particularly strong, it was inevitable that he should come to grief, especially as in many Indian matters, the government of the country by the East India Company for instance, he saw far in advance of his time.

Still it is well-nigh amazing to find on what trivial grounds Ellenborough has been blamed and how completely the very valuable services that he rendered have been suffered to slip out of notice. For example, we may take the well-known instructions of July 4, 1842, to Nott and Pollock, in which Nott was authorised to retire if so minded by way of Ghuzni, Cabul and Jellalabad, and Pollock to meet him at Cabul. Kaye pours contempt on these letters because, as every fair-minded man will see was inevitable under the circumstances, they left the decisions with the men on the spot. In particular he compares the discretion left to Nott to the case of a man coming from Reigate to London and being told that he might go by way of Dover and Canterbury. The parallel is, of course, utterly unfair and absurd, and doubly so when we remember that Ellenborough was not writing from Peshawar as he would be to-day under similar circumstances; this altogether apart from the political question, one of very great importance, of the value of giving a lasting lesson to the Afghans.

Much fun has been made of the bringing back of the gates of Somnath. Here even the Duke of Wellington felt doubtful, on account of the possible offence to Mahomedan prejudices. Macaulay ridiculed the whole business in a speech delivered on March 9, 1843, which, much to the ultimate discredit of its author, is printed amongst his collected works. He also went out of his way to insult Ellenborough in his "Essay on Barère," published a year later. And yet there is much to be said for the GovernorGeneral in the matter. It was not a new project, this bringing of the gates of Somnath back to their home in the temple of Prabhasa Pattana. And if it failed to appeal to the imagination of the people of India, either one way or the other, anyone who knows the East is well aware that such might not have been the case. It is a trivial business after all, at worst a small piece of false ornament upon the very fine and solid structure of achieve

ment.

In regard to Sind, Ellenborough found a state of things existing which he could not alter, a state of things for which Lord Auckland, and the Amirs themselves, were mainly responsible. And here again we are always told much about the ill-treatment of the Amirs by Ellenborough, and very little as to what happened to them in the days of the first Afghan War. Not that anyone who reads the State Papers can find pity for them. On the whole

they were a thoroughly degenerate and unworthy race their government was extremely bad, and their subjects benefited enormously by the change of government. The whole question has been obscured, as is the way in such matters, by the personal controversy as to Outram, in regard to which one can only ask the impartial reader to compare the opinions which Outram expressed in his earlier Sind days with those of his controversial period. Nothing is finer than the way in which Napier brushed Outram out of the way before Meanee, and we may best perhaps forget the Sind troubles in view of Outram's later and more glorious services.

It is in cases like these, however, that Ellenborough shows his true greatness. He at all events never descends to the level of a personal squabble; one feels that he is acting on a principle which it is his business, his duty, to carry out. This is particularly noticeable in the case of Outram, but the same high quality is manifested in that of Lieutenant Hammersley and in the difficulties as to Saugor.

On the whole, when we consider the well nigh hopeless position in which Ellenborough found India on his arrival, and the scanty means at his disposal, we can only marvel at the wonderful change that he wrought. The defence which his actions received at home was none too forcible, and public opinion seemed to have set against him, in spite of what Greville says. But Ellenborough never whined: he was a proud man and he never troubled to defend himself. He betook himself, after his return, like his successor Lord Curzon, to fresh tasks, and it is somewhat curious that Lord Curzon, whose own career somewhat resembles his, should not have found more to praise in his work. The greatest man whom England ever sent to India was rewarded, as we all know, by persecution and misrepresentation, and it is only in our own time that tardy justice has been done to his memory. Ellenborough was not perhaps so great a man as Hastings, but he was a statesman of heroic mould, and his few errors will now, it is safe to say, soon be forgotten by his fellowcountrymen. As one reads the frothy rhetoric of Macaulay's famous speech on the gates of Somnath, one cannot help wishing that the earlier and more terrible incidents of the first Afghan War, for which his party were responsible, had supplied the material for one of his picturesque historical studies. That

would be too much to ask of a political historian. It is better perhaps to turn for relief from Westminster to the East. For it was, in spite of the tragedy of the first Afghan War, a wonderful period in Indian history. It was the age in which the heroes of the Mutiny were trained; it was the age of men like Eldred Pottinger and Burnes, and Durand, and Broadfoot, and Napier. And our regard for Ellenborough will not be lessened by knowing that when he found himself in the open under the fire of a Mahratta battery " he thoroughly enjoyed it." This was the spirit of Gough and Hardinge, men to whom everything was possible, and who made everything seem possible to those under them.

W. A. J. ARCHBOLD

THE GENESIS OF THE PUBLIC RECORD

THE

OFFICE

HE Public Record Office is an institution of high repute among historical scholars the world over. The building in which it is housed is a dignified and extensive piece of architecture between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane, on what was formerly the Liberty of the Rolls. It is a complete organism, yet continually growing, as it is fed from year to year from a variety of sources.

From the time when its most precious nucleus, the Domesday Book, was compiled, two centuries or more elapsed before the mind of authority was impressed with the idea that the growing embryo required some care and attention. It was apparently King Edward II who was first moved to take steps in this direction. His writ to the Treasurer and Barons of his Exchequer set clerks to work to remedy immediately the defects in the preservation of the records in the Treasury and in the Tower of London, then "not well disposed of," and a similar writ to the Treasurer and Chamberlain provided the money for the purpose. Two years later, in July, 1323, two persons named were appointed to arrange the charters and muniments in the Castles of Pontefract, Tutbury and Tunbridge, in the Tower of London and in the House of the Friars Preachers in the City of London. Thus was a beginning made for the proper keeping of the records of the kingdom, and although afterwards there were times of neglect, the object was never wholly or for long forgotten.

In Edward the Third's reign, in the year 1335, records of the latest eyre of the King's Justices in Kent were by the King's command brought into the Exchequer, " to be there kept as is befitting." Three years later an interesting memorandum relates how Chancery records were removed from the dwelling of Sir John de St. Paul, then Keeper of the Rolls of the Chancery, to the Tower, and how these documents in eighteen bags of canvas and a leather sack, with others in a large hamper, and the keys of chests containing similar documents already in the Tower were formally put into the charge of Sir Thomas de Evesham, after

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