Page:History of Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century.djvu/42

 18 BENGALI LITERATURE to be “ the most absurd and suicidal measure that could be devised.” It was not until Wellesley’s time thatit was thought “god-like bounty to bestow expansion of intellect”.! But even then no healthy public criticism was allowed or suffered upon the act of the government, although it must be admitted that the Press, which dates its birth in India since 1780, had hardly yet risen from the low level of a vile, scurrilous, and abusive print. The Srirampur Missionaries could not land or settle anywhere in Bengal except under the protection of the Danish flag, and when they had set up there a printing press or planned the first vernacular newspaper, they were afraid of govern- ment interference, and had to obtain special permission from Lord Wellesley. Even later, the cases of William Duane of the Jndian World and of the notorious James Silk Buekingham of the Ca/culta Journal, who were both arrested and deported to England in the most high-handed manner, would be enough to indicate the impatient and un- compromising attitude of the government towards fearless independence and plain-speaking. From time to time, however, attempts were made to liberalise the Company’s rule ; but each measure taken was too slow and too late to save it from the nemesis of 1857 and the extinction in 1858. The effect of these political changes and of this administrative policy on the social and Effect of these poli: economic condition of Bengal was tical changes on the social and economic condition of Bengal. = years had passed in vacillation very deep and far-reaching. Thirty. between the Company as the Dewan and the Nawab as the Nazim during which, as we have seen, the country suffered from endless disorders and 1 Wellesley, Address to the Students of the Fort William College, (in Roebuck’s Annals of Fort William College, p. 498),