Page:The Earl of Auckland.djvu/23

Rh and many warm friends of all political colours. The two sisters who shared his household life in India loved him fervently — in Greville's words, as 'a husband, a brother, and a friend combined in one .' The weak point in his character as a statesman was a certain diffidence in his own judgement, a diffidence which was soon to lead him, his party, and his country, into disaster.

The new rule, however, began well. Lord Auckland had not been two months in office, when his Government passed what the English in Calcutta were pleased to call the 'Black Act.' It was a measure introduced by Macaulay, then Law Member of Council, for doing away with a fine old anomaly in the administration of civil justice. Until then any European cast in a civil suit before one of the Mufasal or country courts might carry his appeal, not to the Sadr Adálat, or High Court of the Company, but to the Supreme Court of the Crown. The anomaly was of course unjust and invidious; but many of our countrymen in India cherished it as one of their dearest privileges, a kind of bulwark to British ascendency in the East.

There was no valid reason for maintaining a privilege which implied that the Sadr Court, composed of tried and selected members of the Company's Service, might be good enough for the Native millions, but could not be trusted to administer common justice to a few hundred white men. 'If it is not fit for