ime
produces. For _him_ he entirely broke and quashed the Council of
Moorshedabad, which had been the settled government for twelve years, (a
long period in the changeful history of India,)--at a time, too, when it
had acquired a great degree of consistency, an official experience, a
knowledge and habit of business, and was making full amends for early
errors.

For now Mr. Hastings, having buried Colonel Monson and General
Clavering, and having shaken off Mr. Francis, who retired half dead from
office, began at length to respire; he found elbow-room once more to
display his genuine nature and disposition, and to make amends in a riot
and debauch of peculation for the forced abstinence to which he was
reduced during the usurped dominion of honor and integrity.

It was not enough that the English were thus sacrificed to the revenge
of Debi Sing. It was necessary to deliver over the natives to his
avarice. By the intervention of bribe-brokerage he united the two great
rivals in iniquity, who before, from an emulation of crimes, were
enemies to each other,--Gunga Govind Sing and Debi Sing. He negotiated
the bribe and the farm of the latter through the former; and Debi Sing
was invested in farm for two years with the three provinces of
Dinagepore, Edrackpore, and Rungpore,--territories making together a
tract of land superior in dimensions to the northern counties of
England, Yorkshire included.

To prevent anything which might prove an obstacle on the full swing of
his genius, he removed all the restraints which had been framed to give
an ostensible credit, to give some show of official order, to the plans
of revenue administration framed from time to time in Bengal. An
officer, called a _dewan_, had been established in the provinces,
expressly as a check on the person who should act as farmer-general.
This office he conferred along with that of farmer-general on Debi Sing,
in order that Debi might become an effectual check upon Sing; and thus
these provinces, without inspection, without control, without law, and
without magistrates, were delivered over by Mr. Hastings, bound hand and
foot, to the discretion of the man whom he had before recorded as the
destroyer of Purneah, and capable of every the most atrocious wickedness
that could be imputed to man.

Fatally for the natives of India, every wild project and every corrupt
sale of Mr. Hastings, and those whose example he followed, is covered
with a pretended increase