2

structure was raised. This assumption of responsibility was violently attacked, and much of Hastings' work was undone by the hostile majority of his Council backed by the Directors at home. But it was not wholly undone. Its author patiently kept the system going as well as circumstances allowed. And at the end of his rule it was an accepted fact that the Company was the actual responsible governing authority in Bengal, and the machinery through which its government was conducted was of Hastings' devising.

In the second place, he recognised that if responsibility for good government was imposed upon them, the servants of the Company would answer to the call just as readily as their fellow-countrymen in other parts of the world. It had come to be the fashion in England to regard the Company's servants as monsters of corruption, and so far as concerns the twenty years after Plassey, this fashion still prevails. Of course the judgment is merely absurd. The incorruptible officials of the next generation were men of exactly the same type as the monsters of the 'sixties; only in the next generation they had been made responsible, whereas in the 'sixties they had no sense of responsibility, for the state of Bengal-they were traders paid a nominal salary and authorised to make private profits; and they used their chances as any other group of men would have done. To pay them larger salaries and to prohibit private trade was a desirable and indeed necessary reform, as Hastings knew. But prohibitions can be avoided; definite responsibilities not so easily. Even before private trade was abolished, Hastings' challenge to the best in his colleagues produced fine results. And the whole subsequent history of the service was his justification.

In the third place, Hastings saw that even when the Company ruled Bengal, Bengal was an Indian province, and ought to be ruled according to Indian customs. Reformers in England (when the era of reform began) imagined that the greatest boon they could render to India was the introduction of English law and the English land system. They planted a supreme court in Bengal, with all the paraphernalia of Westminster

Hall, and the assumption underlying this was that Indian law had no value. It was an assumption which Hastings vehemently repudiated. He studied and respected both Hindu and Mahomedan law, and was convinced that they formed the only sound basis of a reinvigorated system. He was overridden, but he was right; and the British Government gradually worked back to his point of view. The Act of 1833 authorised a codification of Indian law such as Hastings had begun at his own expense. The Proclamation of 1858 promised respect for and maintenance of Indian customs as a fundamental principle. Hastings, in short, saw what his successors only slowly learnt, that if the British power in India was to be lasting it must become an Indian power.

In the fourth place, Hastings was distinguished by his anxiety to protect the ryots or peasantry, to maintain their customary rights, and to assure them of a full return from their peaceful labour, unperturbed by war or the oppressive exactions of officials. In his first assessment of the land revenue, in 1772, one of the outstanding features was his insistence upon the grant of pottas or definite contracts to all peasant tenants. He was perhaps the first of Indian statesmen to put the welfare of the peasant in the very forefront of his policy. His dream, as he says in his own final review of his government, was to turn Bengal into a place of refuge for the industrious from all parts of India, to guard them against the devastations of war, and to protect them from famine by the institution of great state granaries.

Lastly, Hastings from the first perceived that once the Company assumed the direct control of Bengal, it must, as a consequence of that assumption, take its place among the other powers of India, and enter into frank and clearly defined relations with its neighbours. Absolute loyalty to these relations and fearless determination in enforcing their conditions seemed to him the only possible means of maintaining stable peace and safeguarding the Company's position. There was no part of his work which was so vehemently attacked as the treaties into which he entered in carrying out this policy.

The Company was unwilling enough to accept the responsibility for governing Bengal; it shrank in fear from any meddling in the inter-state politics of India, and both now and for a long time to come it tried to insist that no obligations whatsoever should be undertaken in regard to other Indian powers. But such a policy was impossible. Bengal was a part of India, and the facts of geography could not be disregarded. Because he made treaties of alliance for the protection of the exposed north-eastern and south-eastern frontiers of Bengal, Hastings was branded as an ambitious schemer. Yet his aim was certainly nothing but to secure peace. He hated war. He fought none but defensive wars, and these were caused by the interferences of the hostile majority of his Council, and by the insubordinate rashness of Bombay and Madras. He desired no annexations of territory; the only considerable addition to the Company's dominions made during his rule, Benares, was annexed in defiance of his protest by the very men who charged him with being dominated by the lust of conquest.

IV

The ill consequences of departing from these broad principles of Hastings' policy were very strikingly demonstrated in the next period. Hastings' successor, Lord Cornwallis, was an excellent specimen of the class of English landed magnates to which he belonged. A man of the highest integrity and the most genuine public spirit, he was lacking in imagination, and could never escape from a sort of national and class complacency, which led him to believe that English institutions and customs represented the summit of human achievement, and that the English governing class of large landowners embodied all that was most excellent in English life. His chief panacea for the ills of Bengal was the reproduction, in entirely alien surroundings, of something as nearly approaching to the English landowning aristocracy as could be achieved. Disregarding the traditional rights of village communities and peasant cultivators, which he did not under

stand, he saw in the zemindars, or semi-hereditary district collectors of land-tax, the nearest approach to the English squirearchy; and by the Permanent Settlement gave them an inalienable control over their districts, now regarded as estates,' such as they had never possessed before. It was a disastrous breach with the healthiest traditions of rural Bengal.

Cornwallis came to India with orders, which had the sanction even of an Act of Parliament, to avoid all war and all entangling relations with Indian states. He tried to obey, but it was impossible. Encouraged by the isolation of the Company, Tipu Sahib's aggressions brought on a fierce war, and the man who had come out to reverse Hastings' policy made treaties with Tipu's rivals, and annexed wider territories than Hastings had ever touched. But still the rule held that there must be no entangling relations; and the result was that every state in India had in a few years been convinced that no reliance could be placed on the Company. By 1798, stimulated by French intrigues, the three greatest powers in India were ready to attack the British power. Such was the result of non-intervention in Indian affairs- a result that would never have followed Hastings' policy.

V

But the very danger of the situation which had been produced by abstention from defined relations with Indian states gave an opportunity to the masterful and self-confident spirit of Wellesley, a second man of genius who, like Hastings, appeared at the critical moment. In 1798 non-intervention obviously had to be abandoned if the Company was to survive, but Wellesley was not content to work merely for the security of the existing British dominion. He conceived the grandiose idea of turning the Company from being only one among the Indian powers into the paramount power of all India. By wars, annexations, and subsidiary treaties he brought all southern India and the Ganges valley under British rule, and did it in

five years. Only the loose spreading Mahratta confederacy still remained independent in 1801. The dissensions among the Mahrattas themselves enabled him to bring the Peshwa, the head of the Confederacy, and the Gaekwar, one of the secondary Mahratta princes, into the group of dependent states when the other Mahratta princes combined to resist this, a brilliantly conducted war brought the two most powerful among them, Sindhia and Bhonsla, to their knees; and the programme would certainly have been completed, and the last great independent power in India reduced to subjection, if a check—the only important check he had encounteredhad not provided the Directors with a pretext for recalling this terrible conqueror. They had watched his dazzling achievements with a sort of hypnotised dread. After having clamoured for a generation that they must be kept clear of all entanglements with Indian states, they found themselves faced by the appalling responsibility of being the paramount power of India, with the Great Mogul himself as their pensioner. It was too much for them; and they ran away from their responsibility at the first possible moment; just as they had earlier tried to escape from the responsibility of governing Bengal.

But the thing was done. However much they might dislike it, the Company had suddenly become the supreme power in all India. All that the Directors could do was to prevent the process from being logically completed, to leave three of the five chief Mahratta princes still independent, to order their representatives at all cost to abstain from interfering with these princes, and to refuse absolutely all offers of allegiance from the little vassal-states which begged to exchange Mahratta for British suzerainty.

This was an impossible compromise. It was not to be expected that the Mahrattas, who had themselves so nearly achieved the lordship of all India, should accept a position in which they were neither subjected nor left free to reconstitute and expand their confederacy. The wide expanse of hill and jungle over which their supremacy extended became the