the restitution of the possessions she had lost to the East India Company, the British Government pleaded the absence of “any right of the Crown of England to interfere in the legal and exclusive property of a body corporate.”  Only eleven years later, the House of Commons passed resolutions to the effect that “all acquisitions made under the influence of military force or by treaty with foreign princes do of right belong to the State,” and the Commons had the country behind them.  From 1773 onward British public opinion never hesitated to support Parliament in claiming and exercising supreme control over Indian affairs.

A very brief survey of the long series of enactments in which Parliament, asserting the right of “eminent dominion over every British subject in every country,” gradually established its authority over Indian administration and moulded it to the shape which it virtually preserved until the Crown assumed direct sovereignty in 1858, shows how steadily the strengthening of Parliamentary control kept pace with the extension of British dominion in India.  The first of these legislative measures was Lord North’s Regulating Act, which was passed in 1773, just eight years after the East India Company had acquired for the first time the right of revenue and civil administration over vast territories in Bengal and in the Madras “Northern Circars,” and thereby taken over the duties of government in respect of a great native population, absolutely alien in race, in religion, and in customs.  Lord North’s Act did not attack directly the problem of Indian government, but it sought to facilitate its solution by the East India Company itself by reforming its constitution at home, where the jealousies and intrigues of rival factions in the Board of Directors had often reached the dimensions of a public scandal, and by centralising the Company’s authority in India, where, as the result of recent developments which had now established the centre of British gravity in Bengal, the post of Governor-General was created for the Bengal Presidency and invested with powers of control over the other Presidencies, Madras and Bombay, which had hitherto enjoyed a status of practical equality.  At the same time an attempt was made to strengthen control from home by enjoining upon the Governor-General to keep the Board of Directors in London fully informed and to abide by its instructions, whilst a check was placed upon the executive authority in Bengal by the creation of a Supreme Court in Calcutta from which the present High Court is descended.

The defect of this legislation—­a defect inherent to the situation in India itself—­was the dualism it created by endeavouring to enforce Parliamentary restraints upon a Company which derived its title to government over the greater part of its possessions from the irresponsible despotism of the Moghul emperors.  The Company was thus made to serve two masters, and at the same time it remained essentially a great trading corporation whose commercial