The successive administrations of Lord Auckland and Lord Ellenborough, by the violent contrasts which they presented, and the vital questions which they raised, summoned all Anglo-Indians, official and non-official, to discussion. The civil and the military services were placed, temporarily, in a heated antagonism. The disasters in Afghanistan, followed by the evacuation of the country after a proposal to sacrifice the English ladies and officers in captivity, and by the follies of a public triumph and the Somnath proclamation, had roused Great Britain as well as India.

The annexation of Sindh and the war with Grwalior further stirred the public conscience in a way not again seen till the Mutiny, of which the Auckland-Ellen borough madness was the prelude. And the whole was overshadowed by a new cloud in the north-west, far more real, at that time at least, than the shadow cast by the advance of Russia from the north. The death of Runjeet Singh, who from the Sikh Khalsa, or brotherhood, had raised himself to be Maharaja of the Punjab, from the Sutlej to the Khyber and the glaciers of the Indus, had given the most warlike province of India six years of anarchy. It was time, if India was not to be lost, that one who was at once a soldier and a statesman should sit in the seat of Wellesley and Hastings.