Page:Lord Amherst and the British Advance Eastwards to Burma.djvu/136

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CHAPTER VII
}} We have described in Chapter II the state of things which the conclusion of the operations against the predatory powers had left to the successor of Lord Hastings. Even had it been possible to reserve all the resources of the Government for the necessary organization of reform in police, in civil justice, in revenue settlement, for patient effort to remove by wise and kind administration in the several districts the painful impressions left by the earlier blunders, the task would have been one of extreme difficulty. One result of the effacement of the Pindárís, as a political force, was to scatter the members of these armed bands to their homes or haunts in the new provinces and even in the old. Thus the materials for mischief were diffused everywhere. The strain put upon the authorities by the Burmese War crippled them in the arrangements of internal order and content: while the first failures on the Chittagong frontier and at Rangoon, magnified as they were by bazaar rumour, gave heart to every scoundrel in the