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 CHAPTER VII

The Lieutenant-Governor

The Honourable James Thomason, as Lieutenant-Governor, assumed charge of the government of the North- Western Provinces from Mr. (afterwards Sir George) Clerk, in December, 1843. The constitution of these Provinces as a Lieutenant-Governorship in 1835, was the first instance of the kind that had occurred in British India. The territories, being in the Bengal Presidency, were technically under the government of the Governor-General in Council, whose deputy for actual administration was the Lieutenant-Governor. The Governors of the two Presidencies, Madras and Bombay, being appointed by the East India Directors with the assent of the Crown, were indeed under the supreme authority of the Governor-General, but they were not subordinate to him quite in the same way as the Lieutenant-Governor who had been appointed by him. Nevertheless, the position of the Lieutenant-Governor was sufficiently secure to sustain that independence of thought and of opinion which is essential to the conduct of large affairs. In the first place, almost the entire patronage of the civil government was entrusted to him. But