LAWRENCE, JOHN LAIRD MAIR LAWRENCE, 1ST BARON (1811-1879), viceroy and governor-general of India, was born at Richmond, Yorkshire, on March 24, 1811, son of Sir Alexander Lawrence and his wife, nee Letitia Knox. Three of the young Lawrences became famous in India, Sir George St. Patrick, Sir Henry (q.v.) and Lord Lawrence. Irish Protestants, the boys were trained at Foyle college, Derry, and at Clifton, and received Indian appointments. John Lawrence landed at Calcutta in 1829; and became assistant-collector at Delhi. The titular court of the pensioner who represented the Great Mogul was the centre of that disaffection and sensuality which found their opportunity in 1857. A Mussulman rabble filled the city. The district around, stretch ing from the desert of Rajputana to the Jumna, was slowly recov ering from the anarchy to which Lord Lake had given the first blow. When not administering justice in the city courts or under the village tree, John Lawrence was scouring the country after the marauding Meos and Mohammedan freebooters. He detected the murderer of his official superior, William Fraser, in 1855, in the person of Shams-uddin Khan, the nawab of Lahore, whose father had been raised to the principality by Lake, and the assassin was executed. The first twenty years, from 1829 to 1849, during which John Lawrence acted as magistrate and land collector of the most turbulent part of India at that time coincided with the period of Lord William Bentinck's reforms. A permanent settlement of the land-tax, similar to that carried out in Bengal, was promised in the North-West.
In 1833 Merttins Bird and James Thomason introduced into the north-western provinces, as they then were, the system of thirty years' land leases based on a careful survey of every estate by trained civilians, and on the mapping of every village holding by native subordinates. These two revenue officers created a school of enthusiastic economists who rapidly registered and assessed an area as large as that of Great Britain, with a rural population of twenty-three millions. Of that school John Lawrence proved the most ardent and the most renowned. Intermitting his work at Delhi, he became land revenue settlement officer in the district of Etawah, and there began, by buying out or getting rid of the talukdars, to realize the ideal which he did much to create through out the rest of his career—a country "thickly cultivated by a fat contented yeomanry, each man riding his own horse, sitting under his own fig-tree, and enjoying his rude family comforts." This
and a quiet persistent hostility to the oppression of the people by their chiefs formed the two features of his administrative policy.
When the first Sikh War broke out, John Lawrence was still collector of Delhi. The critical engagements at Ferozeshah, fol lowing Moodkee, and hardly redeemed by Aliwal, left the British army somewhat exhausted at the gate of the Punjab, in front of the Sikh entrenchments on the Sutlej. During the early months of 1846 Lawrence found men, munitions and supplies. The vic tory of Sobraon was the result, and at thirty-five Lawrence be came commissioner of the Jullundur Doab, the fertile belt of hill and dale stretching from the Sutlej north to the Indus. He accom plished for the newly annexed territory what he had long before accomplished in and around Delhi. He restored it to order, with out one regular soldier. By his personal influence he organized levies of the defeated Sikhs, led them now against a chief in the up per hills and now to storm the fort of a raja in the lower, till he so welded the people into a loyal mass that he was ready to repeat the service of 1846 when, three years after, the second Sikh War ended in the conversion of the Punjab up to Peshawar into a British province.
Lord Dalhousie made John Lawrence chief commissioner of the new province. It was mapped out into districts, now num bering thirty-two, in addition to thirty-six tributary states, small and great. To each the thirty years' leases of the north-west settlement were applied, after a patient survey and assessment by skilled officials. The revenue was raised on principles so fair to the peasantry that Ranjit Singh's exactions were reduced by a fourth, while agricultural improvements were encouraged. A police force was ofganized; roads were cut through every district, and canals were constructed. Commerce followed on increasing cultivation and communications, the courts brought justice to every man's door, and crime hid its head. The adven turous and warlike spirits, Sikh and Mohammedan, found a career in the new force of irregulars directed by the chief commissioner himself, while the Afghan, Dost Mohammed, kept within his own fastnesses, and the long extent of frontier was patrolled.