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70 empowered to demand help from landholders and revenue officers in the discharge of their special duties.

Hastings, indeed, was for holding the Zamíndárs themselves accountable for all gang-robberies on their estates. The fact of their complicity was afterwards proved on the clearest evidence. But his proposals on this point were set aside by the votes of an adverse majority in Council. His letters show how keenly he regretted the lack of all power to overrule his colleagues for the public good. It speaks loudly for his personal influence that he carried his Council with him on most of the questions debated in the first three years of his rule. But on this occasion his opponents were not to be talked over, and the plague which he would have stamped out by timely rigour lived on to vex the greatest of his successors, Dalhousie himself.

Besides the endemic plague of Dakáiti, and other forms of social disorder, Bengal suffered from epidemics of outrage caused by yearly irruptions of Sanyási bandits, as Hastings termed them, from somewhere beyond the Brahmaputra. These naked wandering Fakírs roved in large bands across the country on yearly pilgrimage to the shrine of Jagannáth, 'recruiting their numbers with the healthiest children they can steal,' and plundering the people right and left under religious pretexts. In 1773, a large body of these ruffians, on their march through Rangpur, nearly cut to pieces two small parties of Parganá Sepoys, led