I returned here on the 16th, and have been up to the neck in work ever since, having the whole work, civil, criminal, police, &c. &c., on my shoulders, Saunders, the Deputy Commissioner, my superior, being engaged dancing attendance on the Governor-General, who is here on his annual tour of inspection; and Macleod, my co-assistant, dead. Directly the Governor-General has gone onwards I shall be relieved here, and join my new appointment with Mr. Edmonstone.
I broke up from Umritsur early in December, and came into Lahore to join my new chief. He did not arrive till the 18th, so I had a comparative holiday. I have got into harness, however, again now, and am up to the elbows in work and papers. The work is much more pleasant than that I had at Umritsur, and more free from mere routine.
This is an interesting anniversary to many of us, and an overwhelming one to this country,--that of the day on which "the bright star of the Punjaub" set forever. It has been curiously marked by the announcement, that the net balance of receipts over expenditure for the past year, for the newly acquired provinces, has reached upwards of a million sterling. Lord Dalhousie's star is in the ascendant. His financial measures are apparently all good, when tried by the only standard admissible in the nineteenth century,--their success.
I broke down again most completely as soon as the hot weather began, but my flight to this beautiful climate has wonderfully refreshed me. Talk of Indian luxuries! There are but two, cold water and cool air! I get on very comfortably with my new "Chief." He is a first-rate man, and has a most uncommon appetite for work, of which there is plenty for both of us. We cover a good stretch of country--comprising five British districts and nine sovereign states; and as the whole has been in grievous disorder for many years, and a peculiarly difficult population to deal with, you may imagine that the work is not slight. My principal duty is hearing appeals from orders and decisions by the district officers in these five districts. It is of course not "per se," but as the Commissioner's personal assistant, that I do this. I prepare a short abstract, with my opinion on each case, and he issues his orders accordingly. I was at work a whole day lately over one case, which, after all, involved only a claim to about a quarter of an acre of land! You will give me credit for ingenuity in discovering that the result of some half dozen quires of written evidence was to prove that _neither_ of the contending parties had any right at all! If that's not "justice to Ireland," I don't know what is! I have been staying with Captain Douglas, and I hope I shall see a great deal of him. There is not a better man or more genuine soldier going. This may appear faint praise, but rightly understood, and conscientiously and boldly worked out, I doubt whether any other profession calls forth the higher qualities of our nature more strongly than does that of a soldier in times of war and tumults. Certain it is that it requires the highest order of man to be a good general, and in the lower ranks, (in this country especially,) even with all the frightful drawbacks and evils, I doubt whether the Saxon race is ever so preëminent, or its good points so strongly developed, as in the "European" soldier serving in India, or on service anywhere.