Lehal Library

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO 2ND EDITION xxi constantly endeavoured to keep his readers alive to that undercurrent of feeling or principle which moves the Sikh people collectively, and which will usually rise superior to the crimes or follies of individuals. It was the history of Sikhs,^ a new and peculiar nation, which he wished to make known to strangers; and he saw no reason for continually recurring to the duty or destiny of the English in India, because he was addressing himself to his own countrymen who know the merits aid motives of their supremacy in the East, and who can themselves commonly decide whether the particular acts of a viceroy are in accordance with the general policy of his government. The Sikhs, moreover, are so inferior to the English in resources and knowledge that there is no equality of comparison between them. The glory to England is indeed great of her Eastern Dominion, and she may justly feel proud of the increasing excellence of her sway over subject nations; but this general expression of the sense and desire of the English people does not show that every proceeding of her delegates is necessarily fitting and far-seeing. The wisdom of England is not to be measured by the views and acts of any one of her sons, but is rather to be deduced from the characters of many. In India it is to be gathered in part from the high, but not always scrupulous, qualities which distinguished Clive, Hastings, and Wellesley, who acquired and secured the Empire; in part from the generous, but not always discerning, sympathies of Burke, Cornwallis, and Bentinck, who gave to English rule the stamp of moderation and humanity; and also in part from the ignorant well-meaning of the people at large, who justly deprecating ambition in the abstract vainly strive to check the progress of conquest before its necessary limits have been attained, and before the aspiring energies of the conquerors themselves have become exhausted. By conquest, I would be understood to imply the extension of supremacy, and not the extinction of dynasties, for such imperial form of do'mination should be the aim and scope of English sway in the East. England should reign over kings rather than rule over subjects. The Sikhs and the English are each irresistibly urged forward in their different ways and degrees towards remote and perhaps diverse ends the Sikhs, as the leaders of a congenial mental change; the English, as the promoters of rational law and material wealth; and individual chiefs and rulers can merely play their :