conceived the idea of placing Bengal under direct British rule; and though the idea appealed to the equally daring and equally ambitious Pitt, it seemed too fantastic to be carried into execution. Clive himself dropped the idea, which was only born of the excitement of victory; and the Company and its agents did their best to persuade themselves that Mir Jafar stood in the same position as Aliverdi Khan had occupied down to 1756. But of course this was not so, and could not be so. Mir Jafar, and every subsequent Nawab of Bengal, held his position by grace of the Company, which could (and did) depose him as it had raised him. Everybody in Bengal knew this, and looked to the Company and its leading servants as the real controlling power, though they exercised no governing functions. The Company's servants themselves knew it, and their Indian agents. All the wealth of Bengal lay at their mercy. And as, by the very terms of their indentures, their chief object in India was to make private fortunes for themselves, they used their opportunities without hesitation. So did their Indian banyans. Here was power without responsibility-the worst imaginable mode of government; and the position of the Company in this stage was nothing but a curse to Bengal; it only accentuated the already great evils of the decaying system of native government. There were only two ways of mending this state of things. One was that the Company should withdraw altogether from Bengal. This was scarcely to be expected; and if they had withdrawn, their place would soon have been taken by the French or the Dutch. The other way was that the Company should recognise that they were now the masters of Bengal, and assume the responsibility for the just government of the country.

But the Directors refused to see this. Government was, in their view, not the function of a body of traders. They scolded their servants for their misbehaviour, though they had only done what any other body of ordinary men would have done under the same circumstances; but they did not attempt to remove the causes of this misbehaviour. Even when Clive

was sent out in 1765 to put things straight, it was no part of his instructions to impose upon the service the responsibility of securing just government for Bengal. Clive took over the diwani, or right of receiving the revenue, which was usually linked with the function of government. But he did not take over the government, which remained in the same hands as before. He did not even take over the actual collection of the revenue. All that happened was that the collections were paid over to the Company, which, after paying a superfluous tribute to the powerless and effete Great Mogul, and a fixed sum to the Nawab of Bengal for the expenses of administration, kept the balance and remitted it in the form of consignments of Indian goods to London. The primary object of this arrangement was to bolster up the finances of the Company, which had suffered from the maintenance of armies. It was a very unsound transaction, not deserving any of the praise that has been bestowed upon it. Naturally it did nothing to improve the condition of Bengal. It did not even enrich the Company, for the yield was very disappointing; within five years the Company was on the verge of bankruptcy. They tried the experiment of appointing English supervisors to see that the native collectors did not appropriate the funds; but the attention of the supervisors was concentrated on their own private trade, and the only result of their appointment was to turn them into tyrants of districts.

At length, in despair, the Company resolved to take over, not the government of Bengal, but the actual collection of the revenues. To carry out this change they appointed (1772) Warren Hastings, one of the few Anglo-Indians who had returned to England without a huge fortune. By good luck rather than by intention, they had appointed a great statesman, a man of genius. Within two years their affairs were once more thriving, and they were full of delight. But then opposition sprang up. It was realised that Hastings had actually assumed direct control of the government of Bengal. Henceforward he was the object of suspicion and acrimonious hostility as an ambitious tyrant. He was

maintained in power because no one else could preserve the Company's existence; but most of his measures were condemned or overridden, and he had to carry on his work, year after year, amid such a storm of obloquy, misrepresentation, and opposition as only a man of real greatness could have withstood. He clung to his post, because he knew that there was work to be done which he alone could do. He came home at last, a comparatively poor man, having purified British India of corruption and given justice to the people of Bengal ; and was impeached as a corrupt tyrant, and, even after his honourable acquittal, flung aside without honour or reward. Yet it was Hastings who had turned the Company's power from a curse to a blessing, and laid the real foundations of the British power in India.

III

There were five clear and broad principles by which Hastings was actuated in all his work. They were sound and true principles, and for that reason his work was lasting. When they have been observed, British India has thriven. When they have been departed from, British India has been endangered.

In the first place, Hastings saw that power cannot be divorced from responsibility without disastrous consequences. The Company was, in fact, the controlling power in Bengal; it was therefore its duty to see that the people of Bengal were honestly and justly governed, and it had no right to shuffle off this responsibility by pretending that the powerless Nawab was alone concerned. At the very outset of his rule, therefore, not content merely to collect revenues for the profit of the Company, he set to work to evolve from the chaos an efficient system of government, with its centre at the English headquarters in Calcutta. His work could not, of course, be final or perfect; he had to make the best of the available materials. But in two years the worst abuses had been banished, and the foundations had been laid upon which the whole later

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.