informed the writer, 'that no claims or titles were proved to the satisfaction of the Committee appointed to examine, within six months, the authenticity of all permits or tithes. If I do not mistake, very few claims were brought forward at all. The fact was the Attaran forests had been exhausted, and presented no further interest to the holders. The greater part of the Attaran forests lapsed to Government, and they are now being managed in a proper systematic manner.'
But Mr. Colvin was not only the head of the executive Government in Tenasserim. He was also the chief judicial authority and local Court of Appeal. In this union of judicial and executive functions in one person, Tenasserim was administered on the lines of what came to be known, after the annexation of the Punjab in 1848, as the 'Non-Regulation' system. In attempting to improve the procedure of the Courts subordinate to him, in extending road communications, in problems of land revenue assessment, in regulating the many questions which surrounded the local timber traffic, and in an occasional dispute with neighbouring Burman authorities, Mr. Colvin found his time fully occupied. In the close of 1848, while engaged in these labours, he was summoned by Lord Dalhousie to Calcutta, to take his seat on the Bench of the Company's Chief Court of Appeal. To him the summons was probably not unwelcome; but the Maulmain community, in an address presented to him on his departure, expressed in
