tenced to receive nine hundred lashes a piece. It was a leading principle with his Lordship to make the hope of reward, and not the dread of punishment, the incentive to good conduct, and to substitute moral for physical motives. The abolition of corporal punishment was therefore accompanied with proposals for instituting an Order of Merit among the native soldiery, and for the bestowal of rewards which might operate as a stimulus to meritorious exertions. He was anxious by these means to raise the sepoy in his own estimation, and to impart a higher character to the native army; and all his plans have subsequently been carried into full effect.

We have thus gone through the very meagre notice of Lord William Bentinck's administration which Mr. Thornton has thought it sufficient to give, and have endeavoured to redeem the few measures he has noticed from the unjust obloquy cast upon them. We now enter upon a far more agreeable task. We shall endeavour to supply those omissions for which the History of India, now under review, is even more remarkable than for its prejudices, and to furnish a brief epitome of those measures which have secured for Lord William Bentinck's administration, the applause of the wise and the good among his own countrymen and the gratitude of the natives of India.

The organic changes which were made in the internal economy of the government during his Lordship's incumbency, form the most distinguishing feature of his administration, and his reputation as a statesman will stand or fall as they are found to be adapted to the exigencies of the times, or the reverse. His administration constitutes a new era in the history of our Indian institutions. The modifications which had been previously made, from time to time, on the spur of necessity, in the system established by Lord Cornwallis with one or two exceptions, were altogether insignificant in comparison with the alteration in the whole structure of the Government made under Lord William's auspices. The experience of forty years had revealed many imperfections in the system, which yet did such credit to the talents and benevolence of the former illustrious statesman. In that long period a great change had been silently effected in the character both of the European servants of the State and of the native themselves; and institutions which might appear adapted to the circumstances of 1790, were found unsuited to those of 1830. It became necessary to reconstruct some of the departments of public business in order to give them greater simplicity and greater efficiency. Lord William Bentinck arrived in India in a time of profound tranquility, when there was sufficient leisure for the clam consideration of those changes which

time, the great innovator had rendered imperative. He had the benefit of his former experience in the management of an Indian presidency at Madras. He had also the advantage of his experience in the island of Sicily, where he had introduced a system of government half a century in advance of the stage of civilisation which the community had attained, and which failed from inevitable necessity. He had also the inestimable advice of three of the most eminent men whose services India has ever enjoyed-W. B. Bayley, Sir Charles Metcalfe, and Holt Mackenzie. With the advantage of this double experience and this invaluable aid, Lord William Bentinck sat down to the examination of our local institutions, and introduced reformations the effect of which will long continue to be felt in India. Mr. Thornton touches upon no innovation—the burning of widows excepted-which he cannot find an excuse for censuring, and he passes a sweeping sentence of condemnation on the whole administration :- -"Lord William Bentinck's enemies cannot deny that the amount of change was considerable, or that the seeds of change were so liberally distributed as to ensure an abundant harvest through many succeeding years.......He viewed nothing that existed with satisfaction, and although the short period of service usually enjoyed by the occupants of his high office did not enable him to change every thing, he made abundant use of the time and opportunities of which he was master....... His readiness to pull down, commanded the approbation of those who think destruction the greatest effort of human talent, but his attempts at construction for permanent use entirely failed." These failures we shall now endeavour to trace. One of the earliest objects which attracted his attention was the existence of only one court of final appeal for the whole presidency, planted at the distant extremity of the provinces which composed it. The inhabitants of Delhi, before they could reach the court in which they might obtain redress for the partiality, ignorance, or injustice of the local tribunals, had a thousand miles to traverse, and a climate to encounter as different from their own as the climate of Scandinavia from that of Spain. His Lordship felt that this arrangement was not only calculated to produce disgust with our legal institutions among the high-spirited natives of the North-West Provinces, but that it was tantamount to an absolute denial of justice. He therefore separated the presidency into two divisions, and established a Court of Appeal at Allahabad, by which a more proximate and more efficient control was established over the local judicatories in those provinces which had been previously without any supervision whatever, and eminent facilities of appeal were afforded to the inhabitants of the North

West Provinces, who exceed in number the inhabitants of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Before Mr. Thornton pronounces the administration of Lord William a blank, let him consult the opinion of the natives in the Upper Provinces.

Upon the same principle of public convenience, not less than of benefit to the interests of the State, his Lordship established a Revenue Board at Allahabad; but his deference for the Court of Directors led him to denominate it a Deputation of the Calcutta Board, until it should receive their approbation. And although Mr. Thornton says that his attempts at construction for permanent use entirely failed, yet the new Board was confirmed by the Court, and is in existence at this day; and the abolition of it would be regarded as an act of insanity. The object proposed by the institution of the Board, was to place the controlling authority of the fiscal interests of a vast population in the centre of the provinces, and thus to prevent the inconvenience of a reference on every revenue question to a Board a thousand miles off. But a further object in view, was the establishment of a body on the spot, competent to superintend the settlement in the NorthWest Provinces, which Lord William Bentinck was resolved to put in a train of completion. Mr. Thornton does not condescend to mention this all-important proceeding, in which the welfare of thirty millions of people was intimately bound up. We must supply the blank which his prejudice has created.

When the provinces, which now form the North-West presidency were originally obtained by conquest or cession forty years ago, the Lieutenant-Governor, in a proclamation dated in 1802, engaged that a permanent settlement of the land-revenue should be formed with the landed proprietors at the end of ten years. The Court of Directors who had been sufficiently disgusted with Lord Cornwallis' premature and irreversible settlement, lost no time in disavowing the engagement, and directed that quinquennial leases only should be granted till a complete survey and valuation of the land had been effected. No provision was made for this survey and valuation, and the quinquennial settlements were found to be the bane of the province. They not only prevented any improvement of the land, but made it the interest of the landholders to conceal, if not to retard, the development of its resources, to close rather than to open the wells on which the fertility of the soil depended, and to exhibit their estates in a deteriorated condition. At the end of twenty years it was found that agricultural improvement, if it had not gone back, had at least stood still. The poverty of the landed interest, who had no motive for exertion, produced a reaction on the public revenue. Government was at length

roused from its apathy, and determined on the most energetic efforts to obtain a faithful survey and valuation of the lands, with the view to a more extended settlement; and the celebrated Regulation VII of 1822 sprang into being. But unfortunately it was encumbered with so many details, and demanded such minute accuracy in the survey of the land, that the application of it to any practical purpose was, from its very origin, hopeless. The resolution of Government on this occasion, which ran out to the exorbitant number of three hundred and seventy-eight paragraphs, did not accelerate the execution of the enactment. It was unfortunate in its very cradle. Eighteen months elapsed between the passing of the law and the receipt of the Persian translation in the Territorial Department. When the Regulation came to be acted on, one Collector asked three years to apply it to the survey and assessment of lands yielding a revenue of 15,000 Rupees a year. It was passed in 1822; in 1826 its parent Mr. Holt Mackenzie, reported that the advance of the settlement was inconsiderable. In 1830, when the Board of Revenue was asked what progress had been made, they said they knew nothing at all about the matter. In the meantime the curse of quinquennial settlements continued without abatement. It appeared utterly hopeless that the settlement of the NorthWest Provinces could be completed under this arrangement by the exisiting, or even the succeeding generation. Lord William, contemplating this deplorable state of things, recorded his opinion that the "improvement of the country was thus indefinitely retarded, and the resources of the State materially deteriorated;" and he resolved at once to adopt the most vigorous measures to secure the accomplishment of the object. 1831 he made a progress through the North-West Provinces, chiefly with the view of ascertaining the cause which had retarded the settlement, and the means by which it might be expedited. He considered the scientific survey and valuation of the land of one-half the presidency, with a view to the grant of long leases, to be an object second to none in importance. He brought all the resources of his powerful mind and his rich experience to bear upon the consideration of it: he invited the revenue officers, as he moved up the country, freely to communicate their views on the subject; and having at length collected all the information within his reach, established that arrangement which in the course of eight years brought the settlement to a close. Its early completion is owing to the zeal and energy with which Mr. Robert Mertins Bird carried his Lordship's views into effect. The settlement itself has afforded abundant scope for the cavilling of little minds. It has been attacked both in its prin

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ciple and in its details. It is impossible that a measure of so vast and comprehensive a character should not present some week points for the gratification of the captious. It will be fully conceded that in the determination of rights with which it was accompanied, some individual acts of injustice may have been committed, and that in some instances the assessment may have been fixed too high; but taken as a whole, it is the grandest fiscal achievement of our dynasty. It is a work which, with all its defects, has conferred the most indisputable blessings on thirty millions of people. It has defined their individual rights which were the subject of perpetual collision it has fixed and recorded the boundaries of estates, and cut off one of the most prolific sources of litigation. It has enabled Government to grant long leases, and thus to offer the strongest incentive to the improvement of the land. At the end of two hundred and fifty years, the reign of Akbar is remembered with gratitude, not for the magnificence of his conquests, but for the blessing he conferred on the country by his great settlement of landed tenures. At the end of two hundred and fifty years, the obligation due to Lord William Bentinck as the moving cause, and to Mr. Bird as the instrument of the noble settlement of the North-West Provinces, will not be forgotten.

At the period of his Lordship's arrival in India, the Provincial Courts of appeal and Circuit had subsisted for nearly forty years. To his Lordship belongs the merit of having extinguished them. It would be difficult to imagine a more cumbrous machine for the administration of civil and criminal justice, or one by which the two great objects of a Court, the cheap and the early decision of suits, were more effectually baffled. In the civil department, their decisions furnished no clear precedent for the guidance of the lower Courts. Their judicial reputation was extremely contemptible. They were, in fact as Lord William aptly described them, the "resting place for those members of the service who were deemed unfit for higher responsibilities." But it was chiefly in reference to criminal justice that these Circuit Courts were felt to be a heavy incubus on our judicial institutions. They proceeded once in every six months to hold the Sessions and jail-delivery in each district, and the prosecutor, and the witnesses were detained many months waiting their arrival. The intolerable grievance of thus separating a large body of innocent men for a long period, from their families and the means of subsistence, requires no comment. The prisoner was equally consigned to a prolonged imprisonment before his trial, and in every instance in which he was guiltless, was subjected to a glaring injustice. The very name of justice was made