be termed normal. Salabut Jung was no exception to the rule. He was taken from confinement to rule over thirty-five millions of his fellow-creatures.

The first act of the new viceroy was to confirm all the concessions which his predecessor had made to the French. His next was to add to them. In gratitude, we may suppose, for his elevation, he adjoined to the French possessions at Masulipatam the lands attached to the villages of Nizampatnam, of Condore, of Alemenava, and of Narsapore in its neighboorhood. He ordered the re-building of all the factories at Yanoon which his brother, Nazir Jung, had destroyed; and finally he presented to Dupleix the territory of Mafoosbundur in the district of Chicacole. A few days later the army resumed its route, stormed on the 18th March the fortress of Kanoul, the residence of the deceased rebel Nawab of that title; bought off the threatened hostilities of the Mahratta Bajee Rao by a present of two lakhs of rupees; reached Hydrabad on the 12th April; remained there a month, and finally made a triumphant entry into Aurungabad on the 29th June. Here Salabut Jung in the presence of Bussy and all the nobles of the province was solemnly invested as Subadar of the Dekkan on the authority of a firman stated to have been received from the imperial court of Delhi, but which, there can be no doubt, was a forgery. Here we must leave him, and with him, for a time, the indefatigable Bussy, revolving, and not only revolving but carrying out, great schemes which, had all gone well in the Carnatic, would, there can be no question, have brought forth abundant fruit in their season.

We can leave them indeed with the greater satisfaction at this conjuncture, because it constitutes the period at which French domination in India may be said to have attained its zenith. A glance at the map of India will shew the enormous extent of territory which, in the spring of 1751, was subject to French influence. The entire country between the Vindya mountains and the Kistna, exceeding the limits of the territory now known as that of the Nizam,was virtually ruled by a French general. A French army occupied the capital; French influence predominated in the viceregal councils. To the north-east of Hydrabad, the coastlands, situated between the river Mahanuddy and the Godavery, known as the Northern Circars, and south of that, the country between the Godavery and the Kistna, were secured to the French by means of the possession of the towns of Masulipatam and Yanoon, and of the provinces of Montfanagar, of Ellore, of Rajahmundry, and of Chicacole. South of the Kistna again, the governor of French India had been constituted by the Mahomedan viceroy of Southern India Nawab of the entire country,

a country comprehending, be it remembered, the entire Carnatic, the whole of Mysore, the kingdoms of Tanjore, Trinchinopoly, Cochin, and the provinces of Madura and Tinivelly. If indeed the French governor did not hold these places under his own sway, it was mainly because it was a part of his settled policy to keep his authority in the background, and to govern through the princes of the country. It was for this reason that he had made over the Carnatic to Chunda Sahib, and contented himself with exercising a moral influence, amounting, in fact, to a real supremacy, over the others. But in the beginning of 1751, his power was so far established that there was nowhere a sign of opposition. Mahomed Ali, the rival of Chunda Sahib, had promised submission and obedience, and had consented to retire from the stronghold of Trinchinopoly. The English, thus deprived of all pretext for interference, were sulking at Madras and Fort St. David. Their presence, it is true, constituted a thorn in the side of the French ruler, but his hands too were withheld from attacking them, and the utmost he could aim at was to bring about such a state of things in Southern India, a condition of such universal acquiescence in French arbitration, as would leave them without consideration and without power. Armed with the promise of Mahomed Ali to agree to the conditions that had been proposed, he seemed almost to have brought matters to that point in the spring of 1751.

Nay

To us, who, after the fall of the French power in India, required forty years of hard fighting to gain a position equal in influence to that which Dupleix had acquired after an administration of less than ten years' duration, these results may well appear marvellous. For a solution of them we must look to the character of the man himself. His mental resources appear perfectly inexhaustible. Difficulties seem to occur merely that he may find means for riding over them. Whether it is a repulse in the field, a mutiny of his troops, the defeat or defection of an ally, he is prepared for all, ready to remedy all. more, a repulse is to him always the prelude for a further advance. Uniting with extreme prudence the readiness to greatly dare, he never fails to trust Fortune, at the same time that he exhausts every effort to make her his ally. Who but he would have sent Paradis to bid defiance to the hitherto unconquered armies of the representative of the Mogul? Who but he would have ordered the attack on the impregnable Gingee? Who but he would have sent Bussy with but three hundred Frenchmen into the heart of Southern India, then a terra incognita to Europeans? A march of a handful of Europeans from Pondichery to Aurungabad was considered in those days as wild and as dangerous a

project, as would in these the despatch of a detachment from Peshawur to Bokhara. His directors condemned it, France cried out against it, but Dupleix insisted upon it. It was, he well knew, the lever by which, Chunda Sahib being master of the Carnatic, he could shake even the throne of the Mogul.

It is very well for those who are wise after the event to declaim against the vastness of his schemes, and to aver that sooner or later they must have broken down. We cannot share that opinion. We believe, on the contrary, that under ordinary circumstances, his success would have been certain. Had he had but ordinary men to deal with, nothing could have stopped him. Had he even had another Bussy to support him, the chances would have been greatly in favour of his ultimate triumph. Had he even, if we may so far anticipate, not been re-placed in his government at a most critical period of his fortunes, the soundness of his policy might even then have been verified. But it was written that India was not to become French. The history of the world abounds with instances in which everything turns on the action of an individual man. Had Ferdinand of Gratz never been born, the Austrian Empire would have been for three hundred years the mainstay of Protestantism. Had Gustavus Adolphus never been born, that same Ferdinand would have brought all Germany under the yoke of the Jesuits. Charles I had his Cromwell, Louis XIV his Marlborough. It was fated too that the high-soaring Dupleix should meet with his Clive.

As yet, however, whilst Bussy is marching on Aurungabad,the dictator of the Dekkan,-everything seems to smile on the daring statesman who, from his palace in Pondichery, directs every movement on the board, and to him thus triumphant, to him who in ten years has made Pondichery the centre point of Southern India, we cannot refuse the expression of our admiration of his soaring genius, his untiring energy, his vast and comprehensive intellect.

358

ART. IV. THE NATIVE PRESS OF BENGAL.

IN N promoting education in India, one and not the least important of the avowed objects of the Government was to form an intermediate class, which would be able to act as the interpreter between the ruling power and the people of the country, and prevent, as far as possible, those lamentable mistakes and misconstructions of our motives which have been only too frequent. One of the first and most obvious consequences of the formation of this class has been the growth of a press, modelled more or less on the European system, and discussing the acts and intentions of Government with a freedom and independence which their elder brethren cannot surpass.

No object of a government has ever been carried out more surely or speedily than that which we have just named. The educated class and its inevitable corollary, the press, have, at any rate in Bengal, carried out the work designed for them with an alacrity as great as their most enthusiastic supporter could have desired. Whether they have done so in the style and tone most congenial to the Government which watched over their infancy might be questioned, but that they have done their part con amore is undeniable; an unfailing class instinct has pointed out to them that the rôle of interpreting the views and wishes of the Government of the country to the people, and by consequence of interpreting the views and wishes of the people to the Government, assigns to them an influence and importance second only to that of the Government itself, and in some respects even superior to it.

Nor has the policy of Government in the preparation and publication of a weekly abstract of the vernacular press, and still more in frequently calling on its officers for reports on subjects commented on by that press, had the tendency to diminish this importance. It might even be questioned whether the effect has not been detrimental in bestowing on private and anonymous critics an influence greater than was expedient; be this as it may, the result is that the native press, as a whole, is now sufficiently powerful and important to justify the attention we propose to bestow on it in this article.

The utility of an institution like the native press is twofold. It is valuable not only as affording the Government an insight into the arguments by which the writers in it are able to support their views, but still more as showing what those views are. Hence in assigning importance to this press, we are by no means forced to extol the ability or integrity of its principal organs, for it equally serves the latter purpose whether its columns are well or ill written, whether they are filled with sound and moderate reasoning or vapid and wordy nonsense.

In many, in fact the greater part, of the subjects which come under discussion, the comments of the native papers are as varied and antagonistic as those of the press in England; with the addition perhaps that it is difficult to trace any definite line or policy in their antagonism, but they take up their line of argument according to the temper of the hour, or the views of the particular writer. In all such cases we may assume with tolerable confidence, that there is no serious grievance to be remedied. When persons begin to form conclusions on argument, they have seldom any pre-conceived opinions strong enough to supersede argument; and where we find the pros and cons stated with tolerable fairness, and opposite conclusions arrived at, it is a sure indication that no great national. interest or prejudice is affected.

There are however, certain questions on which the whole of the native press re-echoes in substance one and the same opinion, subjects to which they are always recurring on every possible occasion with a perfect unanimity of views; in such cases it cannot be doubted that whether right or wrong, justifiable or unjustifiable, the views advocated are those not only of the writers, but even more of the readers of the papers, and the discussion of such points as these must always be the most interesting to those who are desirous to learn how the natives criticise our administration, and in what quarters their real or imaginary grievances are to be found. If this test be accepted, some of the abuses which Europeans are accustomed to regard as the most vulnerable points of our administration, do not appear to deserve the position assigned to them.

Most conspicuous among these is the administration of justice in the Mofussil courts. From the manner in which some persons speak and write on this subject, it would seem as if the incapacity, ignorance, and carelessness of the local courts were a disgrace to our Government, and made our rule almost insufferable. Such, however, appears to be by no means the case, if we adopt the proposed criterion. Among