A history of the Sikhs, from the origin of the nation to the battles of the Sutlej.

284

HISTORY OF THE SIKHS

CHAP. IX

1845-6. have used needless violence, and perhaps to have committed
other excesses. Nevertheless, the object of the troopers
was evident; and the boundary of the two provinces
between the Indus and the hills is nowhere defined, but the
Sir Charles governor, Sir Charles Napier, immediately ordered the wing
Napier's of a regiment to Kashmor, a few miles below Rojhan, to
acts considered preserve the integrity of his frontier from violation. The
further Lahore authorities were thus indeed put upon their guard,
proof of
hostile but the motives of Sir Charles Napier were not appreciated,
views. and the prompt measures of the conqueror of Sind were mistakenly looked upon as one more proof of a desire to bring
about a war with the Punjab.
The Lahore The Sikh army, and the population generally, were conchiefs make vinced that war was inevitable; but the better informed
persuasion members of the government knew that no interference was
le for likely to be exercised without an overt act of hostility on
their own their part.1 When moved as much byjealousy of one another
ends, as by a common dread of the army, the chiefs of the Punjab
had clung to wealth and ease rather than to honour and
independence, and thus Maharaja Sher Singh, the Sindhianwalas, and others, had been ready to become tributary, and
to lean for support upon foreigners. As the authority of the
army began to predominate, and to derive force from its
system of committees, a new danger threatened the territorial chiefs and the adventurers in the employ of the government. They might successively fall before the cupidity of
the organized body which none could control, or an able
leader might arise who would absorb the power of all others,
and gratify his followers by the sacrifice of the rich, the
selfish, and the feeble. Even the Raja of Jammu, always
so reasonably averse to a close connexion with the English,
began to despair of safety as a feudatory in the hills, or of
1 Cf. Enclosure No. 6 of the Governor-General's letter to the Secret
Committee of the 2nd Dec. 1845. (Parliamentary Papers, 26th Feb.
1846, p. 21.) Major Broadfoot, however, states of Gulab Singh, what
was doubtless true of many others, viz. that he believed the English
had designs on the Punjab. (Major Broadfoot to Government,
5th May 1845.) It is indeed notorious that Sikhs and Afghans
commonly said the English abandoned Kabul because they did not
hold Lahore, and that having once established themselves in the
Punjab, they would soon set about the regular reduction of Khorasan.