Transformed into a great agency of government and administration, it had risen not unworthily to its immense responsibilities.  But the time had come for the final step.  The Company disappeared and the Crown assumed full and sole responsibility for the government and administration of India.  The change was in effect more formal than real.  The Governor-General came to be known as the Viceroy, and the Secretary of State in Council took the place of the old President of the Board of Control.  But the system remained as before one of paternal despotism in India, to be tempered still by the control of Parliament at home.

Only in one respect had the reactionary forces at the back of the Mutiny scored some success.  The Proclamation issued by Queen Victoria on her assumption of “the government of the territories in India heretofore administered in trust for us by the Honourable East India Company,” was a solemn and earnest renewal of all the pledges already given to the princes and people of India.  It emphasised the determination of the Crown to abstain from all interference with their religious belief or worship.  It reiterated the assurance that “as far as may be,” her subjects “of whatever race or creed” would be freely and impartially admitted to offices in the service of the Crown, “the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity duly to discharge,” and that, “generally in framing and administering the law, due regard be paid to the ancient rights, usages, and customs of India.”  It promised the wide exercise of her royal clemency to all offenders save those actually guilty of murder during the recent outbreak.  It closed with a fine expression of her confidence and affection towards her Indian subjects.  “In their prosperity will be our strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best reward.”  But no Proclamation, however generous and sincere, could undo the moral harm done by the Mutiny.  The horrors which accompanied the rising and the sternness of the repression left terrible memories behind them on both sides, and this legacy of racial hatred acted as a blight on the growth of the spirit of mutual understanding and co-operation between Indians and Englishmen in India which two generations of broad-minded Englishmen and progressive Indians had sedulously and successfully cultivated.

If we look back upon the half-century after the Mutiny and before the Partition of Bengal, which may be regarded as closing that long period of paternal but autocratic government, it was one of internal peace and of material progress which the large annual output of eloquent statistics may be left to demonstrate.  In 1857 there were not 200 miles of railways in India, in 1905 there was a network of railways amounting to over 28,000 miles, and the telegraph system expanded during the same period from 4500 to 60,000 miles.  The development of a great system of irrigation canals