Page:John Russell Colvin.djvu/171

with the authorities. The Gujar, the Mewáti, the Rángar, the Ahír, were all elements of unrest, and of upheaval. Shekh, Sayyid, Mughal, Pathán, tracing their origin from every country where the Fátiha is recited, contrasted the daily drudgery of the plough with the fortunes and the fabled successes of their ancestors. These, with their strong right hands, had carved out the patrimony from which their children, in the sweat of their brow, in increasing numbers wrung a dwindling pittance. Remembrance of the past embittered the actual hour. From the gates of the crumbling fort, through which the Pathán now hastened in the chill morning to pay homage in the camp of the young Magistrate, had issued at dawn, within men's memory, fierce horsemen of that race who had swept the country from the Siwáliks to Delhi. Yet these, though in poverty, at least retained their lands. Others, not a few, who, at the commencement of British rule, had owned large estates, now found themselves ousted. The Province was full of dispossessed proprietors; who, in the chances and changes of the first years of the Company's revenue administration, had been sold up in default of payment, or whose titles had been adjudged defective.

The Punjab had been rigorously disarmed, after its great national struggle. No such measure had been adopted in the North-West, which had come piecemeal, by cession or by conquest, at different epochs, under the Company's flag. It teemed with weapons. When, in 1859, after the Mutinies, systematic dis-