ABSTRACT
The anarchy of Bengal was plainly intolerable, and Parliament was certain to intervene. But the Company was deeply moved by the facts revealed, and every motive of self-interest drove it to seek to establish order before worse befell. As early as 1769 it had dispatched Vansittart with two other experienced servants of the country to India with power to reform, but their ship was lost without trace, and the opportunity was gone, for when in 1772 the Company proposed to entrust a like mission to six supervisors Parliament definitely forbade the act. 1 What the Company could do was to resolve to end the system of dyarchy and to require the president and council to stand forth as diwan, and by the agency of the Company's servants to take upon themselves the entire care and management of the revenues as laid down in the directors' letter of August 29th 1771. The man to accomplish this mission was Warren Hastings, who in April 1772 succeeded Cartier and who had had much experience in Bengal and from 1769 as second at Madras. While the determination to take over formal charge might easily be justified, the method of action was deplorable. Hastings was required to co-operate with Nandakumar in accusations, which were later proved false, against the deputy diwans of Bengal and Bihar, and Nandakumar after all was denied the succession to the office which he had anticipated. In other matters he had a freer hand, and his work for the two years before the intervention of Parliament became decisive was probably the most creditable of his career, 2 for the difficulties to be faced were enormous, and he was deeply handicapped by the necessity of securing funds whence dividends could be paid, and of avoiding too great offence to the mass of influential people at whose instigation the civil service had grown out of all proportion to the needs of the occasion, numbering in 1781 no less than 252 members, sons of the first families in the kingdom, aspiring to the rapid acquisition of lakhs and to return home in their prime. When he started his work, the supervisors in the districts, the boards of revenue at Murshidabad and Patna, and the governor and council at Calcutta represented in that order the real hierarchy of power, and it was his essential task to restore authority to the hands entitled to wield it.
