1 CHAPTER VIII.
2 THE LAST YEARS OF RANJIT SINGH.
3 The extent to which, as early as 1835, the fear of
4 Russia dominated British policy in India, may be
5 gathered from Lord William Bentinck's minute of
6 that year on the constitution of the Indian army.
7 In that document, fitness to cope with a Russian
8 invasion is laid down as the main test of military
9 efficiency. The possibility of trouble arising in the
10 Punjab is indeed mentioned ; but that a storm was
11 gathering in that country which was to shake the
12 very foundations of the British Raj, there existed in
13 the mind of the Governor-General not the faintest
14 presentiment. " Of internal dangers," he wrote,
15 "nobody entertains less alarm than myself." But
16 if Chilian wala and Gujrat cast no shadows before,
17 a plentiful supply was provided by a danger which
18 never came at all. The Russians, it was said, already
19 had designs on Herat. In imagination, Lord William
20 Bentinck saw them in actual possession of the city ;
21 and step by step the minute traces out their subse-
22 quent progress, from Herat to Kandahar, from
23 Kandahar to Ghazni, from Ghazni to Kabul, and
24 from Kabul to Attock, whilst warlike tribes, eager