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180 these intervals, the responsibility as head of the Local Government of Bengal rested, by law, upon the Governor-General of India.

This arrangement had long worked badly. The conquests and annexations of Lord Dalhousie rendered it obsolete. Accordingly, by the Act of Parliament of 1853, the Governor-General was relieved of his functions as Governor of Bengal; a Lieutenant-Governor was appointed for the Lower Provinces; and Lord Dalhousie became the first Governor-General of India, in the strict sense of the term.

Under the previous system great bodies of troops had been massed round Calcutta, and the headquarters of the Bengal Artillery lay at Dum Dum, seven miles off. These arrangements also became obsolete, after the conquest of the Punjab transferred the main military interests of India to the distant North. In 1853, therefore, Lord Dalhousie ordered the headquarters of the Bengal Artillery to be removed from the outskirts of Calcutta to Meerut, a thousand miles inland. A general movement of troops from around Calcutta, and from the Lower Provinces of Bengal, began to