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 CHAPTER IX

a trial as the Mutiny strained every part of the State machinery and detected its weak points. It had brought to light some weak points in the Governor-General's Council, executive and legislative. In 1861 an Act was passed to deal with these defects.

Attention has often been drawn to the cautious and tentative process by which the machinery of Indian Government has been gradually brought into its present form. The history of the Indian Councils is no exception to the rule. Legislation on the subject has been a series of experiments, at first not at all successful. The original object both of the Council and the Supreme Court had been to provide a check upon the Governor-General's power, always tending to become dangerously absolute. An official, who found himself the immediate embodiment of despotic power to many millions of subjects and over vast ranges of territory, and separated by a wide interval of space and time from all superior authority, lapsed, naturally, into the mood which resents and defies extraneous control. Advice from home was