Lord Lawrence and the Reconstruction of India Under the Crown (1905) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: - CHAPTER III Commissioner And Chief Commissioner. This little book is not intended to be a personal biography of John Lawrence. An able pen has written that at length. What I am endeavouring to picture is the Indian environment in which he lived and acted, his relation to the principal events of his time, and his position in the development of the constitutional principles on which the government of India is now conducted. These are of course entwined with the personal events of his life. But it will be convenient, both here and in subsequent chapters, to dismiss purely biographical matters in a very brief summary. John Lawrence spent two years and three months in England and on the Continent in search of health (1840-42). His fever, of which he had a dangerous relapse in Calcutta on his way home, returned with such severity at Naples, towards the end of his leave, that the doctors advised him not to go back to India. But go he must, if it were only to die. And he did not go alone. On 26th August, 1841, he was married to Harriet Catherine Hamilton, daughter of the RevRichard Hamilton, Sector of Culdaff, in county Donegal?' the most important and certainly the happiest step in my life,' he says. Sailing from Southampton on ist October, 1842, they arrived in Bombay by the overland route on I4th November. After a slow and difficult journey to Upper India by way of Nagpur and Allahabad, John Lawrence found himself appointed to the old familiar scenes of Delhi. The Kabul Wai- was just over, and he had the joy of embracing his brother George, recently rescued from captivity. At Delhi he remained, first as Civil and Sessions Judge, and then as Magistrate and Collector, till the spring of 1846, when he was summoned by Lord Hardinge to be Commissioner of the country acquired from...