Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/325

 CHAPTER XIII

THE ADMINISTRATION OF LORD CORNWALLIS

1786-1839

But the essence of the new governing constitution conferred upon British India did not only lie in the vigour which it infused into the executive by placing power and responsibility upon a plain incontestable basis; it also strengthened the Governor-General immensely by bringing him into close political relations with the ministry at home. Lord Cornwallis, the first of the new dynasty of Parliamentary Governors-General, went to India with a high reputation as a soldier and a diplomatist, sure of the support of the strongest ministry that had ever governed England, and invested with well-defined supreme authority, military as well as civil, under a full statutory title. He was Governor-General over all three Presidencies, and he was also appointed Commander-in-Chief.

Such a concentration of power in one man, his rank, his reputation, his intimacy with Pitt and Dundas, all combined to sweep away the obstacles that had blocked the path of Hastings, and for the first time to clothe the representative of England in India with the attri-