The great adventure of the Coalition Ministry, the deed by which it hoped to justify its existence, and by which indeed it has earned its only honorable title to remembrance, was the bill which is known to the world as Fox's India Bill. If the extending influence of England in India was a source of pride to the English people, it was also a source of grave responsibility. The conditions under which that influence was exercised, the weaknesses and inadequacies of the system by which the East India Company exercised its semi-regal authority, were becoming more apparent with every succeeding year to the small but steadily increasing number of persons who took a serious and intelligent interest in Indian affairs. A series of events, to be referred to later, had served to force into a special prominence the difficulties and the dangers of the existing state of affairs and to fasten the attention of thinkers upon the evils that had resulted, and the evils that must yet result from its continuance. To mitigate those evils in the present, and to minimize them in the future, Fox, inspired and aided by Burke's splendid knowledge of Indian affairs, worked out a measure which was confidently expected to substitute order for disorder and reason for unreason. In the November of 1783, Pitt addressed a challenge to the Ministry calling upon them to bring forward some measure securing and improving the advantages to be derived from England's Eastern possessions, some measure not of temporary palliation and timorous expedients, but vigorous and effectual, suited to the magnitude, the importance, and the alarming exigencies of the case. Fox answered this challenge by asking leave to bring in a bill "for vesting the affairs of the East India Company in the hands of certain commissioners for the benefit of the proprietors and the public." At the same time Fox asked leave to bring in another bill "for the better government of the territorial possessions and dependencies in India." These two bills, supplementing each other, formed, in the opinion of those who framed and who advocated them, a simple, efficient, and responsible plan for the better administration of England's Indian {231} dependencies. However tentative and incomplete they may now appear as a means of dealing with a problem of such vast importance and such far-reaching consequences, they certainly were measures the adoption of which must have proved a gain to the country governing and to the country governed. [Sidenote: 1783--Fox and the affairs of India]