Robert Merttins Bird, one of the ablest officers in the Indian service, and brought to a completion in nine years, was an enormous improvement on the previous state of things. It limited the public demand upon the land to a fixed sum for a period of thirty years, and provided a complete record of individual rights. Bentinck also established a separate board of revenue for the north-western provinces at Allahabad. In the judicial department the provincial courts of appeal and circuit, which had become proverbial for the dilatoriness and uncertainty of their decisions, were abolished, and there was substituted for them a civil and sessions judge in each district, the whole of the original civil business being transferred to native judicial officers. The north-western provinces were at the same time provided with a separate sudder, or chief court of appeal. An inquiry into the working of the inland transit duties, instituted under Bentinck's orders, resulted in the abolition of those duties after his departure from India.
The education of the natives also engaged Bentinck's attention. Here, acting upon the advice of Macaulay, who joined his council in the last year of his government, he issued a resolution which may be regarded as the first decisive step taken by the government of India towards raising up a class of natives educated in western literature and science. It prescribed that, without peremptorily abolishing the institutions for promoting oriental learning, all other available funds should be employed in imparting a knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language. A closely allied question was that of the employment of natives of India in the public service. Bentinck was the first governor-general who seriously dealt with this question. He treated it in a liberal and comprehensive spirit, and by his measures for the employment of natives upon duties and in positions not previously entrusted to them, he greatly raised the status of the native official hierarchy throughout Bengal. Nor was he less zealous in promoting the settlement of unofficial Europeans in India, and the application of European capital to the development of the resources of the country. The employment of steam communication between England and India, and also on the Ganges and other Indian rivers, was another object which received his cordial support.
Bentinck's views in regard to the Indian press would seem either to have been misunderstood, or to have varied at different periods. The common impression is that, although he left it to his successor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, to pass the law which formally conferred freedom upon the Indian press, he fully shared the opinions upon which that measure was founded, and it is certainly true that during Bentinck's government there was no sort of interference in Bengal with the liberty of the press; but it is nevertheless the fact that in one of his latest minutes, written on 13 March 1836, when he was on the point of leaving India, he described the spread of knowledge and the operations of the press as among the dangers which threatened British rule in India. In the same minute, he put on record for(apparently) the first time the opinion that the advance of Russia in the direction of India was the greatest danger to which India was exposed, and he advocated various changes in the military organisation, some of which ran very much upon the lines of those introduced after the mutiny of 1857. The measure most constantly associated with Bentinck's tenure of the governor-generalship is the abolition of suttee, or widow-burning, which by a regulation passed on 4 Dec. 1829 was declared to be punishable as culpable homicide. In arriving at this decision Bentinck was supported by a strong body of official opinion; but after what had passed in his own case at Madras, it was by no means a light responsibility that he incurred in resolving upon a measure of this nature which none of his predecessors had ventured to carry into effect The suppression of the Thugs, an alteration of the law of inheritance securing to converts from Hinduism and Muhammadanism their rights of property, and the admission of native christians to employment in the public service, were all measures of Bentinck's administration.
The political management of the native feudatory states under Bentinck's government was not satisfactory; but for this he can hardly be held responsible, inasmuch as a policy of strict non-intervention in the internal affairs of those states was strongly inculcated by the home authorities. He, however, assumed the administration of Mysore, which, owing to the misrule and oppression of the rájá, was verging on a condition of anarchy; and in the case of Oudh he intimated that unless matters considerably improved, the administration of the country would be taken over by the company's government. The only diplomatic measures in which he was engaged in relation to foreign states, were a treaty of alliance with Ranjit Singh, the ruler of the Panjab, and a treaty of commerce with the Amirs of Sindh. The negotiation with Ranjit Singh was the occasion of an imposing ceremonial, when the maha-
