The abuses had probably gone on increasing, and the palliating courtesy most likely diminishing, when a new era was ushered in by the arrival of the first Governor-General of superior rank, in the person of the Marquis Cornwallis.
We must refer our readers to Mr Kaye’s pages for a clear description of the state of the Bengal Presidency at the commencement of this the second of the three periods into which we have assumed that its history may be distributed. Our space will not allow of our entering into the controversy about the merits of the system then introduced by Lord Cornwallis and his coadjutors, but we gladly make room for the following picture of the state of the peasantry in Bengal, sketched as we are assured by an eyewitness, in the course of the year 1853.
“What strikes the eye most in any village, or set of villages, in a Bengal district, is the exuberant fertility of the soil, the sluttish plenty surrounding the Grihasta’s (cultivator’s) abode, the rich foliage, the fruit and timber trees, and the palpable evidence against anything like penury. Did any man ever go through a Bengalee village and find himself assailed by the cry of want or famine? Was he ever told that the Ryot and his family did not know where to turn for a meal, that they had no shade to shelter them, no tank to bathe in, no employment for their active limbs? That villages are not neatly laid out like a model village in an English county; that things seem to go on, year by year, in the same slovenly fashion; that there are no local improvements, and no advances in civilisation, is all very true. But considering the wretched condition of some of the Irish peasantry, or even the Scotch, and the misery experienced by hundreds in the purlieus of our great cities at home, compared with the condition of the Ryots who know neither cold nor hunger, it is high time that the outcry about the extreme unhappiness of the Bengal Ryot should cease.”—(P. 194.)
It is cheering to read in the chapter of Mr Kaye’s work, from which the above extract is taken, the proofs that the labours of Cornwallis and his able coadjutors have not been fruitless, and that the peasantry of the part of India more immediately under their care, are not, as some have asserted, to this hour suffering from their blundering humanity.
It would indeed be most mortifying to think that regulations, pronounced at the time of their promulgation by Sir Wm. Jones and the best English lawyers in India (though, in the true spirit of professional pedantry, they would not allow them to be called laws), to be such as would do credit to any legislator of ancient or modern times, should really in operation have proved productive of little or no good.
The preambles to some of the first of these regulations are worthy of notice, even on the score of literary merit; and it is impossible to peruse them without feeling that they must have proceeded from highly cultivated minds, deeply impressed with the importance of the duty on which they were engaged.
It was the recorded opinion of the late Mr Courtenay Smith, of the Bengal Civil Service (a brother of the celebrated Sidney Smith, and, like him, a man of great wit and general talent, though unfortunately his good things were mostly expressed in Persian or Hindostanee, and are thus lost to the European world), that succeeding governments have always erred as they have departed from the principles of the Cornwallis code; and that it would have been well if they had confined their legislation to such few modifications of the regulations of 1793 as the slowly progressive changes of Oriental life might have really rendered necessary.
For very nearly thirty years the government of Bengal resisted the tempting facility of legislation incident to its position of entire and absolute power, and was content to rule upon the principles, and in general adherence to the forms, prescribed by those early enactments.
The benefits resulting from this system were to be seen in a yearly extending cultivation, a growing respect for rights of property, and the gradual rise in the minds of the people of an habitual reference to certain known laws, instead of to the caprice of a ruler, for their guidance in the more serious affairs of life.
The counterbalancing evils alleged against it were, the monopoly of all high offices by the covenanted servants of the East India Company; the accumulation of suits in the courts of civil justice—a result partly of that monopoly, and partly of the check imposed by our police on all simpler and ruder modes of arbitrement; and its tendency, by humouring the Asiatic aversion to change, to keep things stationary, and discountenance that progress without which there ought, in the opinion of many of our countrymen, to be no content on earth. Indeed, the very fact of the natives of Bengal being satisfied with such a system, would, we apprehend, be advanced as a reason for its abolition—a contented frame of mind, under their circumstances, being held to indicate a moral abasement, only to be corrected by the excitement of a little discontent. But, in truth, there was nothing in the Cornwallis system to preclude the introduction of necessary amendments.