Peace and law and order British rule had restored to India, and its foremost purpose henceforth, as set forth by Lord William Bentinck, a great Governor-General, imbued with the progressive spirit of the best Englishmen in India, to which Parliament had given a fresh impetus, was to be the diffusion of Western education. "The great object of the British Government," he declared, "ought to be the promotion of English literature and science, and all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone."
India seemed for the next twenty years to respond enthusiastically to the new call. Not only were the new Government schools as well as the older missionary schools thronged with Indian students who displayed no less intelligence than industry in the acquisition of Western learning, but the rapid assimilation of Western ideas amongst the upper classes, especially in Bengal, was reflected in the social and religious reform movements initiated by Western-educated Indians touched with the spirit of the West. Already in 1829 Lord William Bentinck had been supported by a considerable body of Indian public opinion in prohibiting the barbarous custom of _Sati_, _i.e._ the self-immolation of Hindu widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Government, however, rightly felt that, except in regard to practices of which it could not tolerate the continuance without surrendering the principles of humanity for which it stood, it was for the Indians themselves and not for their alien rulers to take the lead in bringing their religious and social customs and beliefs into harmony with Western standards. Nor was there any lack of Indians to give their countrymen that lead--amongst them several high-caste Brahmans, Ram Mohun Roy first and foremost. They were resolved to cleanse Hinduism of the superstitious and idolatrous impurities which, as they believed, were only morbid growths on the pure kernel of Hindu philosophy. The Brahmo Somaj, the most vital of all these reform movements, professed 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.