Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/40

 16 BENGALI LITERATURE treasures from India, to take to the desperate course of declaring from time to time impossible dividends, which had to be kept up by corrupt means and severe exactions but which involved the affairs of the Company in further financial difficulties. This had the effect of subordinating the Court of Proprietors more and more to the influence of the stock-brokers. The extraordinary disclosure of mis- government, the difficieney of the Company’s funds, 15 actual state of indebtedness, and the violent allegations of corrupt conduct which the Directors and their agents mutually threw upon one another raised some ferment in England and ultimately led to legislative interference. From 1774, the affairs of the Company frequently received the attentions of the Parliament, and the efforts of Sir Philip Francis succeeded in carrying the judg- ment of the Company’s internal administration from the Court of the Directors to the bar of publie opinion in England. But this intervention of the Parliament was due more to partisan animosity than to “ any statesman-like desire to provide India with a better form of government.” From Cornwallis’s time, however, the administration of India was placed not, as hitherto had been done, in the hands of one of the Company’s servants on the ground of local experience but in those of an English nobleman of elevated rank, unfettered by all local ties: yet it must be admitted that there was hardly existing any definite rule of administration except that which descended to it from itscommercial institutions, nor any rule of policy but that which the accident of the day supplied. The administration yet remained to be organised and the poli- tical power to be consolidated. Verelst,? at the end of 1769, had already called attention to the feebleness and ‘ Marshman, History of India, vol, ii p. 4. .* Verelst, op. cit. App. p. 124.