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26
JOHN RUSSELL COLVIN

the Englishman had been brought within the jurisdiction of the Company's Civil Appellate Courts. The foundations had been securely laid of an executive and a judicial native civil service. English education had been vigorously introduced. The system of nomination by which he had entered India had been condemned, and the Indian Civil Service had been thrown open to competition.

With the movement which had brought all this to pass he had been from the first connected. He had been always, as Macaulay put it of his brother-in-law, the Indian civilian Trevelyan, on the side of improvement. His sympathies were with progress and enlightenment; his friends were those who looked, like himself, beyond the epoch of internal wars, beyond the India of Wellesley, to a time which lay far ahead of them, to the verge of which Dalhousie conducted them, and which they were enabled by faith to foresee. Elphinstone, Malcolm, and Metcalfe among his seniors, Thomason and Trevelyan among contemporaries, were men after his own heart. They were all of them far in advance of their day; their aims and methods were of the present hour. From Lord Amherst to Lord Canning, though a century seems to divide their several terms of office, is but twenty-eight years. If 1828 and 1856 are a cycle apart, and if the ideas of 1894, though they may differ in extent, are identical in direction with those of 1856, it is largely because of the labours of that group of the Company's servants of whom Mr. Colvin was not the least conspicuous.