these two measures have been so often described-of the first, in detailing the parliamentary struggle to which it gave rise; of the second, as the actual instrument of Indian government for seventy years-that I need not dwell upon them.1

On one point there exists a misconception which is worth correcting. The historians all seem to have the impression, that the Bill which became law was not much else than a slightly modified copy of the Bill which had been thrown out in the previous year, to the general satisfaction of the public, who hated it as the work of the unpopular Coalition. In matters of immediate administrative detail, indeed, the provisions of the one were substantially those of the other also. As the historian of British India shows, the first measure, in this part of it, aimed at little else than a prohibition for the future of the various specific delinquencies which had been discovered in the past. The author of the second measure, therefore, proposing nothing higher or more comprehensive than this, in forbidding the same offences necessarily introduced similar clauses. But if we look at those portions of the two schemes defining the nature of the systems of

1 See Mill's British India, iv. 381-412. Massey's History of England, iii. 61, and 111. Stanhope's Life of Pitt, i. 138.

government which they respectively propose, we shall perceive a striking distinction in the ideas on which they are founded, and an organic difference of principle. Fox's Bill handed over the government of India to a Board chosen by the House of Commons-to a branch, in fact, of its own executive, and responsible to the legislature, just as the Admiralty or Ordnance Boards were. Pitt's Bill, on the other hand, left the government in the hands of the Directors, a body with the special knowledge and special experience required for the right administration of a remote and peculiar dependency, while he set over them a second body with rights of inspection and prohibition. There is thus just the difference in principle between these two schemes, that there is between our present system and that which, after the Indian Mutiny, it superseded.

In 1858 we found India governed directly by a permanent executive, which did not change with the various ministries of the day, but was only subject to a certain supervision from them. We found a delegated body with every opportunity for knowing India, as only long experience and exclusive attention could enable men to know it, and we found a Board of Control changing its chief with the ministry, and so from time to time giving the real executive the

benefit of a fresh mind and new ideas, from the outside of their own special grooves. This was the system of double government which Pitt and Dundas set up in 1784. Its cardinal distinction is the commission of executive duties to a permanent body, not directly amenable to the votes or the public opinion of the House of Commons. The cardinal distinction of Fox's Bill was the withdrawal of power from the permanent and trained body, and its transfer to the nominees of Parliament.

Burke was so convinced of the incurable iniquity of the Company, so persuaded that it was not only full of abuses, but, as he said, one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever existed in the world, as to be content with nothing short of the absolute deprivation of its power. He avowed himself no lover of names, and that he only contended for good government, from whatever quarter it might come. But the idea of good government coming from the Company he declared to be desperate and untenable. This intense animosity, which, considering his long and close familiarity with the infamies of the rule of the Company's servants, was not unnatural, must be allowed, however, to have blinded him to the grave objections which really existed to his scheme. In the

first place, the Bill was indisputably inconsistent with the spirit of his revered Constitution. For the legislature to assume the power of naming the members of an executive body was an extraordinary and mischievous innovation. Then, to put patronage, which has been estimated by a sober authority at about three hundred thousand pounds a year, into the hands of the House of Commons was an amazing feat. After a certain time, again, the nomination of the Commissioners would fall to the Crown, and this might in certain contingencies increase the ascendancy of the royal authority to a most dangerous extent. But more interesting, to us at least, than these objections from the constitutional point of view, is the consideration of the effect of the measure upon the country most directly and deeply concerned. There are two things to be said against the continuance of power in the hands of the Company. They had shown themselves at once avaricious and incompetent in the past; and there was no reason to believe that they would cease to rule the country by methods of routine and with a view to their own interests, for the future. Two arguments, on the other side, seem still more cogent; first, the danger of entrusting the government of such a continent as India to seven men who knew

nothing special about it; next, the danger of removing from over the subject population the only authority they had been accustomed to obey, and to identify with English superiority. That is, in a word, if we abolished the government by the Directors, there was the danger arising from the inexperience and strangeness of their successors; if we retained it, there was the not inferior danger of routine and traditional corruption.

The chief aim in any system for governing a people, so much behind ourselves as the natives of Hindustan, must certainly be to get the various administrative posts filled by men of trained skill and of the highest character that the governing people can produce. The disposal of patronage, therefore, was the process which needed to be most anxiously watched. If Burke's measure had been carried, the patronage would have been transferred to a body much less competent than the Directors to judge of the qualities required in the fulfilment of this or that administrative charge. Indian promotion would have followed parliamentary and party interest. In the hands of the Directors there was at least a partial security, in their professional knowledge and their personal interest in the success of their government, that places would not be given away