strongly realised that the public safety in India demanded consolidation, he perceived that financial solvency depended on decentralisation. Up to his time the expenditure of the most distant provinces was regulated from Calcutta. In the greater India handed down by Dalhousie this task had grown beyond the power of any single central bureau. The result was an annual scramble by the Provincial Governments for the Imperial grants, and a chronic inability on the part of the Central Government to estimate its real income and expenditure for either the current or the coming year. In the proper chapter the disastrous consequences of this state of things will be duly set forth. It suffices here to state that the measures devised by Lord Mayo and his counsellors put an end to that state of things for ever.

By those measures he re-organised the finances of India on a broader basis of Provincial independence and Provincial responsibility, subject to a clearly defined central control. He awakened in each Local Government a new and keen incentive to economy—the incentive of self-interest. He found chronic deficit; he left a firmly established surplus. At the same time he reformed relations of the Provincial treasuries with the Central Government so as to secure that the Budget estimates should thenceforth be a trustworthy forecast of the resources of the year. All this he accomplished without impairing the efficiency of the central control, or depriving the Central Government of any power which it could really exercise with advantage.

But great as was the immediate success of his financial measures, he looked forward to still more important results in the future. He felt that the problem of problems in India is to bind together the Provinces in a true and not a fictitious unity; not indeed as homogeneous portions of a nation, but as integral parts of an empire. To accomplish this, he perceived that an ordered freedom must be accorded to the Provincial Governments in matters of local administration, as well as a strict subjection enforced from them in matters of Imperial policy.

Lord Mayo believed that the best training for any large measure of self-government in India was to be found in the management of local resources. He declared, as we shall see, that his financial policy would, 'in its full meaning and integrity, afford opportunities for the development of self-government:' 'the object in view being the instruction of many peoples and races in a good system of administration.' He denied that his policy was a policy of decentralisation in any destructive sense. On the contrary, he regarded it as a powerful impulse towards consolidation on the only basis possible for a vast empire—the basis of Provincial initiative and Provincial responsibility subject to a firm central control.

In narrating the principal measures of this viceroyalty, I have freely used my larger Life of Lord Mayo, published fifteen years ago. But I would express my obligations to the authorities in the India Office for the facilities now afforded me, especially by the Political Department, for tracing the subsequent history of those measures in the official records, and thus enabling me to estimate their permanent results. I would also express my gratitude to members of the family: especially to the Countess Dowager of Mayo, not only for materials originally supplied,³ but also for valuable suggestions during her perusal of the proof-sheets of the present volume, and for the portrait which forms its frontispiece.

³ A Life of the Earl of Mayo, fourth Viceroy of India, 2 vols. 2nd edit. 1876.

CHAPTER II

Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth Earl of Mayo, was born in Dublin on the 21st of February, 1822. He came of a lineage not unknown throughout the seven centuries of unrest, which make up Irish history. Tracing their descent to the ancient Earls of Comyn in Normandy, the de Burghs figured as vigorous instruments in the English conquest of Ireland from the Strongbow invasion downwards. From the William Fitzadelm de Burgh, commissioned to Ireland by Henry II to receive the allegiance of the native kings, sprang a number of warlike families, now most prominently represented, after many mischances of forfeiture and lapse, by the Earls-Marquesses of Clanricarde and the Earls of Mayo.

Like other Norman barons in Ireland, the de Burghs gradually fell into the rough ways of the tribes whom they subdued. One of them married a granddaughter of Red-Hand, the old King of Connaught, and the family name naturalised itself into the Irish forms of Bourke, Burke, or Burgh, which it has since retained. They adopted the conquered country as their own, and each subsequent wave of English invaders found the Bourkes as intensely Irish as the old Celtic families themselves. I trouble the reader with these matters, not from an idle love of genealogy, but because the past history of the family did much to mould the character of the Bourke who forms the subject of this volume. His was a nature into which an ancient descent infused no tincture of any ignoble pride of birth. But its memories lit within him an unquenchable love of the people among whom his ancestors had so long borne a part—a sentiment which, after blazing up once or twice in his youth, shone calmly through his life, and went with him to the grave.

'I come of a family,' he said on one occasion in the House of Commons, 'that cast in their lot with the Irish people.' To that people he devoted his whole English career. The only parliamentary office which he accepted was the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland; and this office he held thrice. He spoke so seldom on any but Irish questions as to be little known to the English public. Amid the splendid cares of India his letters break out into longings for his Irish home. It was an Irish cross that he placed on the plain of Chilianwála over the unnamed dead. In his Will, he begged that his body might be conveyed to Ireland, and laid in a humble little churchyard in the centre of his own estates, with only an Irish cross to mark his grave.

As in the feuds and rebellions of Ireland, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, the Bourkes bore a boisterous part, so, during the eighteenth century they emerge as active prelates and politicians. John Bourke of Kill and Moneycrower, an ambitious and hard-working member of the Irish Parliament, was created Baron Naas in 1776, Viscount Moneycrower in 1781, and finally Earl of Mayo in 1785. The third Earl held the Archbishopric of Tuam and gave a clerical turn to the younger branches of the family, among whom the Bishop of Waterford and the Dean of Ossory left well-remembered names. The fourth Earl has a surer hold on the public memory in Praed's verse. The fifth Earl was the father of Lord Mayo the subject of this memoir.

Hayes, the scene of Lord Mayo's early years, was an unpretending country house in Meath, about twenty-two miles from Dublin. Here, in the earlier part of the century, lived the second son of the fourth Earl of Mayo, the Honourable Richard Bourke, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, with his wife Mary, daughter of Robert Fowler, Archbishop of Dublin. In 1820 their eldest son Robert, afterwards fifth Earl, wedded Anne Charlotte Jocelyn, a granddaughter of the Earl of Roden; and the Bishop, retiring to his see-residence at Waterford, gave up his family house of Hayes to the newly-married pair. Of this marriage Richard Bourke, whose life I am about to relate, was the eldest son.

At Hayes they lived for over forty years, bringing up a family of eight¹ children in a quiet religious fashion, and upon such means as fall to the son of a younger