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SURRENDER OF THE TÁLUKDÁRS
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attaching to the fiat of restoration such conditions as the new conditions of the Province might appear to necessitate.

Lord Canning was able to clench his argument by reports, showing that large numbers of Tálukdárs were responding to the Proclamation by tendering their allegiance; that many more, who wished to do so, were deterred by the armed bands still at large in the Province; and that, as soon as this terrorism had been arrested, the acceptance of the terms of the Proclamation throughout the Province might be confidently expected.

The hopes thus expressed were fully realised. No sooner had the bands of mutineers, to which the jungles of Oudh afforded so convenient a refuge, been broken up or driven across the Nepál frontier, than the Tálukdárs came freely forward to tender their submission. Within eighteen months Lord Canning, in giving an account of a Darbár which he had held at Lucknow in October for the Oudh Tálukdárs, was able to declare that the tranquillity of the Province was completely established, and that it was his conviction that in no part of India was opposition to the Government less likely to be encountered. These happy results he attributed chiefly to the introduction of a simple system of administration, suited to the usages of the people, to a light assessment of land revenue, and to the measures whereby the Government had been enabled to confer on the Tálukdárs a permanent and hereditary proprietary title in the