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162 beyond the competence of a servant of the Government, which had ordered the annexation, either to raise or to discuss. But the fact that a Minister of the Crown could speak hesitatingly of the right of the Government to rule the country was calculated to give a stimulus to the spirit of turbulence, and to unite the various factions of disorder — hitherto without concert or cohesion — in the common cause of national resistance to a foreign oppressor.

Coming to the actual merits of the dispute, Lord Canning next traced the course of British administration in the newly-annexed Province, the oppression, fraud, or chicanery, which infected the majority of the Tálukdár titles, the collapse of the endeavour to reinstate the proprietary occupants of the soil in their supposed rights, the consequent impracticability, on the one hand, of recurring to the status quo immediately previous to the Mutiny, and thus renewing an admittedly unsuccessful experiment, or, on the other, of putting a premium on rebellion by re-establishing the Tálukdárs in privileges which, previous to the Mutiny, we had declared to be unjust and inadmissible. The attempt, at such a moment, to adjudicate their rights would have been attended with insurmountable difficulties: nor would 'confiscation' be understood by the landowners as necessarily operating a permanent alienation of their rights, but merely as placing in the hands of Government the means of punishing persistence in rebellion, and, in case of submission, of substituting an undeniable for a doubtful title, and of