“ The still youthful civilian did for the newly annexed territory what he had long before accomplished in and around Delhi. He restored it to order, without one regular soldier. By the fascination of his personal influence he organized levies of the Sikhs who had just been defeated, led them now against a chief in the upper hills and now to storm the fort of a raja in the lower, till he so welded the people into a loyal mass that he was ready to repeat the service of 1846 when, three years after, the second Sikh War ended in the conversion of the Punjab up to Peshawar into a British province. ”

“ The remembrance of the ten years’ war which had closed only in 1849, a bountiful harvest, the old love of battle, the offer of good pay, but, above all, the personality of Lawrence and his officers, raised the Punjabi force into a new army of 59,000 men, and induced the non-combatant classes to subscribe to a 6% loan. ”

“ In 1833 Merttins Bird and James Thomason introduced the system of thirty years’ leases based on a careful survey of every estate by trained civilians, and on the mapping of every village holding by native subordinates. These two revenue officers created a school of enthusiastic economists who rapidly registered and assessed an area as large as that of Great Britain, with a rural population of twenty-three millions. ”

“ Seven years of such work prepared the lately hostile and always anarchic Punjab under such a pilot as John Lawrence not only to weather the storm of 1857 but to lead the older provinces into port. On the 12th of May the news of the tragedies at Meerut and Delhi reached him at Rawalpindi. The position was critical in the last degree, for of 50,000 native soldiers 38,000 were Hindustanis of the very class that had mutinied elsewhere, and the British troops were few and scattered. ”