dominance of the Company throughout India was treated as a fact only too completely accomplished. Nor can it be doubted that Burke's survey of the situation was in the main correct; the weakness of all the native States had been ascertained; the groundwork of empire had already been firmly constructed. And subsequent events rapidly verified the judgment of Hastings that 'nothing but attention, protection, and forbearance,' an equal, vigorous, and fixed administration, and free play for its vast natural resources and advantages, was needed to secure the rise of India, under British ascendancy, to a high and permanent level of national prosperity.

For some years the constitution and conduct of the East India Company had been undergoing thorough investigation before Committees of the House of Commons, with the result that the need of many reforms, and the expediency of imposing more control on the management of our Indian possessions, had been agreed upon unanimously. The Reports of the Committees were submitted, and Resolutions proposed, in 1782, at a moment when the old political parties were breaking up and reconstituting themselves into new groups under fresh leaders, when the famous Coalition Ministry was in process of formation, and when the bitter contentions between hostile factions were at their height. In these Resolutions the whole recent administration of the Company was severely condemned, the Directors were required to recall Warren Hastings, and it was further resolved that the powers given to the Governor-General and Council must be more distinctly ascertained. When the Coalition ministry took office Fox introduced a Bill altering the whole of the Company's constitution, which was supported by Burke in a speech loaded with furious

invective against Hastings and the Company, both of whom he charged with the most abominable tyranny and corruption. Against some of the Company's ser vants the true record of misdeeds and errors was sufficiently long; but Hastings was a man of the highest character and capacity, an incorruptible administrator who had done his country great and meritorious services. Yet his integrity was virulently aspersed, and all his public acts wantonly distorted, in speeches that invoked against him the moral indignation of partisans engaged in the ignoble wrangle over places, pensions, and sinecures, among whom none had been exposed to similar trials of a man's courage or constancy, and only a very few would have resisted similar temptations.

In this manner the Report and Resolutions were used as fuel for the engines of party-warfare to drive the Bill through Parliament against some very solid opposition. Nevertheless the essential question before the Commons and the country was not so much whether the Company and their officers were guilty of crimes that were for the most part incredible, as whether the patronage of India should be the prize of politicians, who after furiously denouncing each other's measures and principles had made a very dishonourable coalition to obtain office. On this point the king, with a majority of his people, was against the ministry, that had been formed under the Duke of Portland by Lord North's association with Fox and Burke. It thus came to pass that the pitched battles of the memorable Parliamentary campaigns of 1783-84 were fought upon Indian ground; Fox and Burke were defeated and driven out of office; the East Indian Bill was rejected; the Coalition was upset by George III and by Pitt, who rose at once to the summit of minis

terial power. In 1784 Pitt carried through Parliament his Act which vested full superintendence over all civil, military, and revenue affairs of the Company in six Commissioners appointed by the Crown. The chief government in India was placed in the hands of the Governor-General with three Councillors, whose authority over the minor Presidencies was complete on all matters of diplomacy, of peace and war, and of the application of the revenues; and by a subsequent Act of 1786 the Governor-General was empowered to act on his own responsibility in extraordinary cases, without the concurrence of his Council.

This system of double government, by the Company under the control of a minister directly responsible to Parliament, lasted until 1858, when the Crown assumed the sole and direct administration of India, a project that had been under the consideration of the elder Pitt a hundred years earlier. The immediate effect of Pitt's Act was a great and manifest improvement in the mechanics of Indian government, removing most of the ill-contrived checks and hindrances which had brought Hastings into collision with his Council and the subordinate governments, abolishing the defects that he had pointed out, and applying the remedies that he had proposed. All preceding Governors had been servants of the East India Company; and Hastings, the first and last of the Company's Governors-General, had been the scapegoat of an awkward and unmanageable governing apparatus, hampered by divided authority, and distracted by party feuds in Calcutta and in London. The position and powers of the chief executive authority in India were henceforward very differently constituted, and the increased force of the new machinery became very soon visible in the results.

CHAPTER XIII

THE ADMINISTRATION OF LORD CORNWALLIS

(1786-1793)

SECTION I. The new Governor-Generalship.

BUT the essence of the new governing constitution conferred upon British India did not only lie in the vigour which it infused into the executive by placing power and responsibility upon a plain incontestable basis; it also strengthened the Governor-General immensely by bringing him into close political relations with the ministry at home. Lord Cornwallis, the first of the new dynasty of Parliamentary GovernorsGeneral, went to India with a high reputation as a soldier and a diplomatist, sure of the support of the strongest ministry that had ever governed England, and invested with well-defined supreme authority, military as well as civil, under a full statutory title. He was Governor-General over all three Presidencies, and he was also appointed Commander-in-Chief. Such a concentration of power in one man, his rank, his reputation, his intimacy with Pitt and Dundas, all combined to sweep away the obstacles that had blocked the path of Hastings, and for the first time to clothe the representative of England in India with the attributes of genuine rulership. In the exercise of these ample powers he was materially aided by the political

situation in Europe and Asia. The unfortunate and misconducted wars of Lord North's government had ceased; they had been succeeded, in the East and in the West, by a period of peace for England; it was the interval of cloudy stillness before the explosion of the great revolutionary cyclone in Europe, which was not felt in India until 1793. Such a breathing time was well suited for carrying out in India wide internal reforms, for consolidating the British position by a stroke at our foremost and most intractable Indian antagonist in Mysore, and for inaugurating a scheme of peaceful alliances with the other native princes, which lasted with the fair weather, but collapsed as soon as the storm-wave of European commotions reached the shores of India.

In the year 1786, therefore, we find the English sovereignty openly established in India under a GovernorGeneral entrusted with plenary authority by the representatives of the English nation. The transformation of the chief governorship of a chartered commercial company into a senatorial proconsulship was now virtually accomplished; and with the accession of Cornwallis there sets in a new era of accelerated advance. It was Hastings who first set in order the chaos of Bengal misrule, and who drew the ground-plan of regular systematic procedure in almost all departments of executive government. But the administration of Hastings had been constantly interrupted by quarrels at home and wars abroad. Henceforward internal organization goes on continuously; laws are passed, abuses are firmly repressed, and the settlement of the land revenue of Bengal is the administrative achievement by which the name of Lord Cornwallis is now chiefly remembered in India. In fixing for ever the