If we take the
Hejira calendar, 1757 A.D. corresponds with 1171 Hejira; 1857 A.D. with
1274 Hejira; whereas, by the lunisolar year of the Sumbut, 1757 is 1814
Sumhut, and 1857 is 1914 Sumbut."]
[Footnote 297: It is worthy of remark that, as early as 1829, the Earl
of Ellenborough, then President of the Board of Control, had come to the
conclusion that the Company was no longer competent to govern so vast a
dominion as that of British India had gradually become. In his Diary,
recently published (ii., 131), he expresses his firm conviction that,
"in substituting the King's government for that of the Company, we shall
be conferring a great benefit on India, and effecting the measure which
is most likely to retain for England the possession of India;" and from
the same work (ii., 61) we learn that Mr. Mountstuart Elphinstone, one
of the ablest servants of whom the Company could boast, and who had
recently been Governor of Bombay, even while confessing himself
prejudiced in favor "of the existing system, under which he had been
educated and lived," admitted that "the administration of the government
in the King's name would be agreeable to the civil and military
services, and to people in England. He doubted whether, as regarded the
princes of India, it would signify much, as they now pretty well
understood us.
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