sed even to reconcile Hinduism with
theism, though without importing into the new creed the belief in any
personal God. British administrators watched and fostered the moral and
intellectual progress of India with increasing confidence in the results
of Western education, and none with more conviction than Lord Dalhousie,
a high-minded and dour Scotsman, who was the last Governor-General to
serve out his time under the East India Company. Other aspects of his
policy may have been less wise. The extension of British rule to the
Punjab became inevitable after a Sikh rising compelled him to complete
what his predecessor, Lord Hardinge, had begun, and break once and for
all the aggressive power of the Sikh Confederacy; but the rigorous
application to the native States of the doctrine of lapse or escheat
whenever the ruler died without a recognised heir, and the forcible
annexation of the kingdom of Oudh as a penalty incurred by the sins,
however gross, of the reigning dynasty have been often condemned as
grave errors of judgment. They were not, in any case, errors that can be
ascribed to the lust of mere dominion. Dalhousie was convinced that
Indian progress would always be hampered by the continuance of native
administration under such rulers as the kings of Oudh. If he was bent on
extending the area of British dominion, it was in order to extend the
area within which Britain was to be free to discharge her civilising
mission without let or hindrance, and not least by the furtherance of
education. If he took a legitimate pride in the introduction into India
under his auspices of the two great discoveries of applied science which
were just beginning to revolutionise the Western world, viz. railways
and telegraphs, together with unified postage, it was because he
regarded them as powerful instruments of education. The impulse given by
him to public instruction even in the new provinces recently brought
under British control prepared the way for the great educational
measures of 1854 which marked a tremendous stride forward on the road
upon which Macaulay's Minute had started India just two decades before.
It was to Dalhousie that Sir Charles Wood addressed his memorable
despatch which contained, as the Governor-General frankly acknowledged,
"a scheme of education for all India far wider and more comprehensive
than the local or Supreme Governments could have ventured to suggest."
Its main features were the establishment of a de