man and sometime viceroy of India, was the eldest son of James Bruce, eighth Earl of Elgin [q.v.], by his second wife, Lady Mary Louisa Lambton, daughter of the first Earl of Durham, author of the famous report on Canadian government. He was born 16 May 1849 at Monklands, near Montreal, his father being then governor-general of Canada. He was educated first at Glenalmond—very strenuous and Spartan in its earliest days—and afterwards, like his father, at Eton, in Dr. Warre’s house. While there he succeeded his father, who died at Dharmsala, in the Punjab Hills, on 20 November 1863, after little more than eighteen months’ tenure of the viceroyalty. From Eton he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a second class in literae humaniores in 1873, and was captain of the college cricket eleven. He proceeded M.A. in 1877. For some twenty years after leaving Oxford he lived chiefly at his Fifeshire seat, taking a very active part in county and Scottish affairs, and specially in the promotion of education. He accepted the chairmanship of the Scottish liberal association; and adhering to Mr. Gladstone at the time of the Home Rule split, he was in the short-lived government of 1886, first as treasurer of the household and then as first commissioner of works.
His party returned to power in 1892, and in the following year Elgin was offered the Indian viceroyalty in succession to Lord Lansdowne, when it had been refused by Sir Henry Norman [q.v.]. Lord Rosebery testified publicly (May 1899) to the difficulty he found in overcoming Elgin’s objections, based chiefly on a modest estimate of his own powers. His recognition of his own limitations was so far justified that he cannot be reckoned among the outstanding governors-general of India. His personal influence on affairs was weakened by a retiring disposition and a self-distrust, from which there sprang a subservience to Whitehall that has, perhaps, no parallel in viceregal records. Though his influence on affairs was thus less positive than was fitting, his period of office will live in history as marking a momentous change in the conditions of British rule in India.
An acute observer has well said that when Elgin landed at Bombay in January 1894, there seemed to be no reason why the comfortable system of control then in vogue should not continue upon the same lines for a period measured by decades. But beneath the unruffled surface, new currents of thought were forming and were steadily gaining momentum, Intellectual Indians were ceasing to accept the solid fact of British control without question and without criticism, and Elgin’s quinquennium by no means fulfilled its early promise of placidity [Lovat Fraser, India under Curzon and After, 1911, chap. 1]. The initial trouble was financial. The continued fall of the rupee exchange had caused large deficits; and, as measures already taken to secure stabilization could only mature by degrees, import duties were levied for revenue purposes. In order to meet Lancashire views, cotton goods were excluded, in the first instance, from the schedule. A heated controversy was evoked; in which for the first time the non-official European residents joined the Indian politicians in vehement agitation against government action. The viceroy, with marked failure of imagination, wrote to the secretary of state, Sir Henry Fowler, that the outcry was ‘unreasonable and unreasoning’ [Life of Lord Wolverhampton, 1912]. For a blunt ruling in the legislature (27 December 1894) that all official members must obey the ‘mandate’ of the India Office he was bitterly attacked in both the English-owned and the Indian press. A subsequent compromise on the cotton duties allayed the storm, but failed to satisfy Indian opinion.
Elgin’s tenure was marked also by persistent and costly trouble on the Frontier. The delimitation of the Afghan boundary had made it necessary to establish a political agency in Chitral, and in 1895 a local rising was followed by the destruction of a Sikh detachment, and the British agent, (Sir) George Scott Robertson [q.v.], was besieged in the Chitral fort. After his relief there was a prolonged controversy as to the expediency of retaining control. In 1897 the Waziris rose in revolt, and the Tochi Valley had to be occupied by a British force. Then followed the attack of the Swat tribes upon the Malakand, the raids of the Mohmands upon villages near Peshawar, and the seizure of the Khyber Pass by the Afridis. In a few days the North-West Frontier was aflame from Tochi to Buner, and it took 60,000 troops and a six months’ campaign to extinguish the conflagration. Elgin was charged, on the one hand, with indecision while the fate of the Khyber Pass was in the balance, and, on the other, with exercising little independent judgement in regard to the alleged ‘forward’ policy of the military authorities. The commander-in-chief, Sir George White, described him at this time as ‘straight, clever and considerate’
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