Page:James Thomason (Temple).djvu/54

46 rites prohibited, barbarous customs abolished, missionary work liberated from all restrictions, national instruction not only in Eastern but in Western knowledge set on foot, the rational freedom of the press secured, transit duties and their impediments upon inland trade removed, property in land recognized and vested in the mass of the rural people, and irrigation begun on a scale grand enough to enable them to cope with drought and famine. This general category exhausts, perhaps, all the principal improvements of his progressive time which may be regarded as the first generation of civil progress in India. Even this category, however, is limited, and those who think of the improvements which have been or are being made in the country, and which find no place in our narrative, can measure the vast advance during the generation immediately after him.

All this while he knew no other master than the East India Company, whose servant he remained to the end: for at the time of his death that imperial corporation, though really approaching an unforeseen termination, was still in the zenith of success and usefulness.

He was destined to see no less than six Governors-General after entering the public service. At his early age he would not be brought much into contact with the first of these, the Earl of Amherst. But he could not fail to notice with admiration the next, namely, Lord William Bentinck, in whose secretariat