In furtherance of the new movement for getting rid of double government in Bengal, he abolished the office of Naib Subah, hitherto held by Mohammad Reza Khan, as Vicegerent for the Nawab himself. The Nawáb's stipend was cut down, under orders from England, to sixteen lakhs of rupees, or about £160,000 a year. The same economy was directed against the pension-list and the expenses of the Nawáb's household. As guardian of the little Prince, who had but lately succeeded to his shadowy throne, Hastings selected the Manni Begam, widow of the unfortunate Mír Jáfar. In compliance with the tenour of his instructions from the Court of Directors, he appointed Rajah Gurdás, son of his old enemy, Nand-Kumár, to the post of Dewán, or Controller of the Household. To Nand-Kumár himself, for very good reasons, he bore no love; and the misdeeds of that wily Brahman, his plots, his treasons, and his forgeries, were well known to the India-house Directors. But they had bidden Hastings make what use he could of the traitor's services, and Hastings saw his way to using them through the son.

"I expect," he wrote to Dupré, "to be much abused for my choice of the Dewan, because his father stands convicted of

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treason against the Company while he was the servant of Meer Jaffier, and I helped to convict him. The man never was a favourite of mine, and was engaged in doing me many ill offices for seven years together. But I found him the only man who could enable me to fulfil the expectations of the Company with respect to Mahommed Reza Cawn; and I had other reasons, which will fully justify me when I can make them known. For these and those I supported his son, who is to benefit by his abilities and influence; but the father is to be allowed no authority, lest people should be suspicious of his misusing it.

What those other reasons were may, perhaps, be gathered from Hastings' official minute of July, 1772, in which the need of employing the vigilance and activity of Nand-Kumár, to counteract the designs of his hated rival, Mohammad Reza Khan, and to eradicate the latter's influence in the government of Bengal and in the Nawab's family, is declared to be the sole motive for the appointment of Gurdás.* Some members of the Calcutta Council at first opposed this measure, as tantamount to appointing Nand-Kumár himself. But further discussion seems to have turned their reluctance into assent, and the young man was duly installed in the post designed for him by his father's foe.

Among the matters to which Hastings set his reforming hand, were the improvement of the Company's trade, and the repression of corrupt

* Mill's "British India," Book 5, Chap. i.

practices among their servants. The Directors had enjoined him to chastise severely all who, in the teeth of their orders, had conspired to set up a monopoly of salt, betel-nut, tobacco, rice and other grains, during the recent famine. These injunctions he obeyed in the spirit rather than the letter, tempering firmness with delicacy in his arrangements for suppressing the unlawful traffic. With regard to matters of mere trade, his letters of this period show his conversance with all kinds of practical details, the keenness of his appetite for fresh knowledge, and the readiness with which he could turn from larger subjects to discuss some new method of preparing silk thread, or to give advice about the purchase of cocoons.

Of the multifarious duties which had devolved upon him, and the heavy labours which he had thus far taken in hand, Hastings himself has left us a lively picture in the following extract from a letter written in October, from Calcutta, to his friend Du Pré :

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Here I now am, with arrears of business of months, and some of years to bring up; with the courts of justice and offices of revenue to set a-going; with the official reformation to resume and complete; with the Lapwing to despatch; with the trials of Mohammad Reza Cawn and Raja Shitabroy to bring

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on, without materials, and without much hope of assistance. and with the current trifles of the day, notes, letters, personal applications, every man's business of more consequence than any other's, complainants from every quarter of the province halloaing me by hundreds for justice as often as I put my head out of window, or venture abroad, and, what is worse than all, a mind discomposed, and a temper almost fermented to vinegar by the weight of affairs to which the former is unequal, and by everlasting teazing. We go on, however, though slowly; and in the hopes of support at home, and of an easier time here when proper channels are cut for the affairs of the province to flow in, I persevere. Neither my health nor spirits, thank God, have yet forsaken me."

He goes on to say that the powers entrusted to him in these matters "tend to destroy every other that I am possesssd of, by arming my hand against every man, and every man's, of course, against me." For that present, however, Fortune smiled upon her future victim; and the praises which the new Governor received from his friends in India were ratified by the terms in which the Secret Committee at home recorded their "entire approbation" of his conduct, and assured him of their "firmest support" in accomplishing the work he had so successfully begun."

Gleig's "Warren Hastings," Vol. 1, Chap. vii.

CHAPTER V.

1773-1774.

Ir was not till the early part of 1773 that Mohammad Reza Khán and the Rajah Shitáb Rai were brought to trial before a committee over which Hastings himself presided. Neither of the prisoners seems to have felt the hardship of a delay which suited the Governor's purposes little less than their own. To them it gave time for the preparation of their defence, while it gave Hastings time to "break their influence," and to push on the great work of administrative reform in the lines marked out for him by the Court of Directors. In the pressure of public business consequent on their avowed decision to "stand forth as Dewán," he had found ample excuse for putting off the trial, until the new policy had been established on a sure foundation. "Do not impute these delays to my inattention," - he writes to Sir George Colebrooke-"my whole