He accepted this great office with a full sense of the arduous responsibilities which it entailed upon him, and said good-bye to his friends with words which showed that he had a foreboding that he might never see them again—­words which proved unhappily to be too true.  He went to the discharge of his duties in India in that spirit of modesty which was always characteristic of him.  “I succeeded,” he said, “to a great man (Lord Canning) and a great war, with a humble task to be humbly discharged.”  His task was indeed humble compared with that which had to be performed by his eminent predecessors, notably by Earl Canning, who had established important reforms in the land tenure, won the confidence of the feudatories of the Crown, and reorganized the whole administration of India after the tremendous upheaval caused by the mutiny.  Lord Elgin, on the other hand, was the first governor-general appointed directly by the Queen, and was now subject to the authority of the secretary of state for India.  He could consequently exercise relatively little of the powers and responsibilities which made previous imperial representatives so potent in the conduct of Indian affairs.  Indeed he had not been long in India before he was forced by the Indian secretary to reverse Lord Canning’s wise measure for the sale of a fee-simple tenure with all its political as well as economic advantages.  He was able, however, to carry out loyally the wise and equitable policy of his predecessor towards the feudatories of England with firmness and dignity and with good effect for the British government.[24]

In 1863 he decided on making a tour of the northern parts of India with the object of making himself personally acquainted with the people and affairs of the empire under his government.  It was during this tour that he held a Durbar or Royal Court at Agra, which was remarkable even in India for the display of barbaric wealth and the assemblage of princes of royal descent.  After reaching Simla his peaceful administration of Indian affairs was at last disturbed by the necessity—­one quite clear to him—­of repressing an outburst of certain Nahabee fanatics who dwelt in the upper valley of the Indus.  He came to the conclusion that “the interests both of prudence and humanity would be best consulted by levelling a speedy and decisive blow at this embryo conspiracy.”  Having accordingly made the requisite arrangements for putting down promptly the trouble on the frontier and preventing the combination of the Mahommedan inhabitants in those regions against the government, he left Simla and traversed the upper valleys of the Beas, the Ravee, and the Chenali with the object of inspecting the tea plantations of that district and making inquiries as to the possibility of trade with Ladak and China.  Eventually, after a wearisome journey through a most picturesque region, he reached Dhurmsala—­“the place of piety”—­in the Kangra valley, where appeared the unmistakable symptoms of the fatal malady which soon caused his death.