as they paid their customary rents, and these rents could no longer be arbitrarily increased.

A beginning was made, on humble lines, with the education of the natives by the establishment of vernacular schools near Calcutta, and the first vernacular newspaper was published by the missionaries of Serampore. The finances of India were prosperous, and the only shadow on the administration was caused by the rather doubtful transactions of the firm of William Palmer & Co. with the government of the Nizam. Their loans to the Nizam had received the sanction of the Governor-General, but there was some question whether they did not infringe an Act of Parliament against the financial dealings of Europeans with native states. The only charge that could with justice be brought against Lord Hastings was that he had failed to exercise due caution in examining the details of the case, and out of excessive good nature had suffered his confidence to be abused. The Directors had already voted him a grant of £60,000 after the completion of the Nepalese war, but henceforward their relations with him were strained, though they admitted the purity of his motives. He resigned office in 1821, but did not actually lay down his functions till January 1, 1823.

Lord Hastings had carried through a great and necessary work. His material achievements challenge comparison with those of Lord Wellesley, but he was of course not so great or commanding a figure. He owed much of the success of his administration to a brilliant band of subordinates, men who had been trained and inspired by his great predecessor. Hastings did not possess Wellesley's dignity, eloquence, or originality; there was an element of vanity in his otherwise estimable character, and signs are not lacking that he would hardly have shown Wellesley's equanimity in the face of reverses or his noble consideration of defeated generals. On the other hand, he conceived

and carried through the grandest strategical operation ever undertaken in India, in the course of which twenty-eight actions were fought and a hundred and twenty fortresses taken without a single reverse. He was less precipitate than Lord Wellesley, less harsh to errant native rulers, and he did not proceed against them till his case was very strong. He was an able administrator, a hard and conscientious worker, a good judge of men, and his name and fame deservedly rank only just below the greatest in the roll of Governors-General.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE FIRST BURMESE WAR. LORD AMHERST

ON Lord Hastings's resignation, the brilliant orator and statesman, George Canning, was appointed GovernorGeneral; but before he could sail for India the suicide of the Marquis of Londonderry (better known as Lord Castlereagh) opened to him the office of Foreign Secretary and the leadership of the House of Commons, whereupon he resigned his Indian appointment. The Directors, after considering the claims of Lord William Bentinck, nominated Lord Amherst, who had shown firmness and restraint on an abortive mission to China. In the seven months' interval which elapsed before Amherst's arrival in India the reins of government were held rather uneasily by John Adam, senior member of Council. A capable official in a subordinate capacity, he was hardly fitted for the head of the government and attempted with unhappy results, as we shall see later, to check the free discussion of political affairs in the press. The fabric of British dominion in India having been completed by Lord Hastings as far north as the Sutlaj River, at last it might seem to those who desired peace and the maintenance of equilibrium that a period of quiescence had arrived. But again such hopes were doomed to disappointment. The frontier to the north-west was to remain unviolated for another twenty years, but to the north-eastward the boundary line was still perilously indefinite.

The vast Bay of Bengal forms a great irregularly shaped horseshoe, starting from Cape Comorin in the south-west to the Malay Peninsula in the south-east. British dominion

now extended continuously all up the western side, round the northern bend, and as the district of Chittagong bounded by the river Naaf formed part of the province of Bengal, it stretched for about a hundred miles down the eastern side of the bay. The eastern boundary line of Bengal, roughly speaking, might have been found by drawing a line from Chittagong northward to the hills; but it was very illdefined and variable. Immediately to the east of this line lay the kingdom of Assam with various little independent or semi-independent states. Neither the Company nor its servants in India had any desire to increase their responsibilities or their territory south and east of their outpost Chittagong, and it may safely be said that not even the most aggressive of the Governors-General had foreseen that, within thirty years from this date, the red line of British dominion would have crept without a break down the eastern side of the bay to a point on the same parallel of latitude as Madura in the extreme south of India. But since there was no natural barrier of mountain or river to the province of Bengal upon the east, the same law of development which had governed British expansion in the past again became operative. The British dominion in India there came into collision with a people of TibetoChinese origin, who spreading outwards from the fertile valley of the mighty Irrawaddy had conquered down the coast southwards to the Malay peninsula and northwards to the confines of Chittagong, and was seeking to extend its sway further inland over Assam and the Brahmaputra valley to the north-eastern bend of the Himalayas. The same decade that saw Clive's victory at Plassey witnessed the first great step taken by the Burman chief Alompra in the founding of his considerable power—the conquest of the province of Pegu from the Talaings in the delta of the Irrawaddy. In 1766 the Burmese wrested Tenasserim from Siam; in 1784 they annexed the hitherto independent