Page:The Marquess Cornwallis and the Consolidation of British Rule.djvu/120

114 in the streets. He tells gangs of Coffres, Manilla men and Malays, that as they had been guilty of great ii-regularities, and had committed outrages in Calcutta and its environs, they should ship themselves off, before a certain date, lest a worse thing befall them.

He finds time to witness the artillery practice with mortars and shells at Dum Dum, under the direction of Colonel Pearse. He attends the consecration of the new church, which is now known as the old Cathedral to distinguish it from the edifice built in the episcopate of Bishop Wilson. In the year 1787 he visited Benares, going up the Ganges in the State barge, and it was justly considered a marvellous rate of progress when an editor could record that including stoppages at divers stations on the river, Krishnagar, Bhágalpur, Patná, and others, he arrived at Benares in a month. One result of this visit was that he prohibited not only Europeans generally, but persons in the civil and military services, from proceeding beyond Baksár without an official pass. The tour also brought to his notice the melancholy fact that many of the subalterns in the army had got deeply into debt, owing to dissipation and extravagance. This state of things had been made the subject of complaint by a respectable English merchant stationed at Cawnpur, who had lent divers sums to officers and had no means of recovering his debts except by a tedious journey to Calcutta and an action in the Supreme Court.