ABSTRACT
The British Government in England have often been criticized because that successor was a man who had already served in India and was old and ailing. But the Governor-Generalship had become a problem. Richard Wellesley himself had made it at last a first-rate position, not lightly to be filled by anyone who could push his claims on the Directors and the Board of Control. Lord Cornwallis was appointed accordingly, almost as an acknowledged stopgap. 'He agrees that the wisdom or necessity of a particular course of policy, which he is pleased deliberately to term a frenzy, is strongly impressed upon those heads which he had believed to be the soundest.' Respect for their judgment 'would have led common characters' to look into the reasons for such a prevailing conviction, from a suspicion that 'such a universal effect might have some good cause which it would be right to search for.
