[23] See the author's History of India from the Earliest Ages, vol. iii., pages 60, 280, etc.
[24] The villages in the Company's Jaghir shared the same fate. They were sold by auction in groups, and were mostly bought up by native servants and dependents of the British officials at Madras. In process of time the ryotwari settlement was introduced, and then a very knotty question was raised. Under the ryotwari settlement a certain portion of the waste lands round a village was given to the villagers in common for grazing and other purposes; but the culturable waste lands were taken over by the British authorities, and valued, and rented out accordingly, to such ryots as were willing to bring them under cultivation. The buyers of the villages in the Company's Jaghir claimed, however, to be proprietors of the whole of the waste lands. For many years the demand was referred by the Board of Revenue to the Supreme Court, and by the Supreme Court back again to the Board of Revenue. By this time the question has perhaps been settled.
[25] The capture of Ghazni was mainly due to the cool intrepidity of the late Sir Henry Durand, then a lieutenant in the Bengal Engineers.
[26] As these pages are passing through the press Upper Burma has been annexed to the British empire. In 1870 the author was sent by the British government on a semi-political mission to Mandalay and Bhamo. In those days the reigning king respected British supremacy, and British representatives were maintained at the capital and the frontier. These political ties were subsequently loosened, and annexation became a state necessity. Like most of the Buddhist kings of Burma, Theebaw was a professed water drinker, but much given to strong liquors, in which state he committed the most revolting cruelties. Similar horrors are related of the old kings of Burma in the author's Short History of India, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Burma, chap. xv.
[27] English and India, by M. E. de Valbezen, late Consul-General at Calcutta, Minister Plenipotentiary.
[28] During the first Cabul war of 1839-42, Hindu sepoys were taken prisoners by the Afghans, and subjected to a similar process in order to convert them to Islam. But times had changed since the establishment of British supremacy. Money would expiate any spiritual crime, or purchase any pardon or privilege from the Brahmans. When the prisoners returned to India they received back pay from the British government for the whole term of their captivity. Accordingly, after a long series of abstruse calculations, the Brahmans discovered that this back pay would exactly meet the cost of expiation. But the sepoys refused the bait. They preferred keeping the back pay in their pockets, and remaining within the fold of Islam. What became of their Hindu wives and families is a mystery to this day.
[29] This last fact was vouched by an English civil servant who was living at the time with the late Mr. Cooper, the magistrate in question. Unfortunately Mr. Cooper subsequently published a description of the execution in a tone of levity which was generally condemned.
[30] Eventually the king and his family were sent to Rangoon, where he died in 1862.
[31] Mr. John Colvin, a distinguished Bengal civilian and Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces, who was shut up in the fortress at Agra, died during the siege. Many old Anglo-Indians still remember his career with interest. He was private secretary to Lord Auckland during the first Cabul war. His son, Sir Auckland Colvin of the Bengal Civil Service, is now Financial Minister to the Government of India under Lord Dufferin.
[32] During the march, the 93d Highlanders suddenly stopped, broke their ranks, and rushed off right and left like madmen. It was thought that they were seized with a panic. It turned out that they were flying from bees, who were swarming at their bare legs and stinging like fury.