For very nearly thirty years the government of Bengal resisted the tempting facility of legislation incident to its position of entire and absolute power, and was content to rule upon the principles, and in general adherence to the forms, prescribed by those early enactments. The benefits resulting from this system were to be seen in a yearly extending cultivation, a growing respect for rights of property, and the gradual rise in the minds of the people of an habitual reference to certain known laws, instead of to the caprice of a ruler, for their guidance in the more serious affairs of life. The counterbalancing evils alleged against it were, the monopoly of all high offices by the covenanted servants of the East India Company; the accumulation of suits in the courts of civil justice—a result partly of that monopoly, and partly of the check imposed by our police on all simpler and ruder modes of arbitrement; and its tendency, by humouring the Asiatic aversion to change, to keep things stationary, and discountenance that progress without which there ought, in the opinion of many of our countrymen, to be no content on earth. Indeed, the very fact of the natives of Bengal being satisfied with such a system, would, we apprehend, be advanced as a reason for its abolition—a contented frame of mind, under their circumstances, being held to indicate a moral abasement, only to be corrected by the excitement of a little discontent. But, in truth, there was nothing in the Cornwallis system to preclude the introduction of necessary amendments. The great reproach attaching to it was the insufficient employment of natives, and the exclusive occupation by the Civil Service of the higher judicial posts. Now, we hope to make it clear, by a brief explanation, that the correction of both of these evils might more easily have been effected under the Cornwallis system, than under that by which it has been superseded. There are, as we have remarked at the outset of this article, questions of difficult solution inseparable from conquest; among which, that of the degree of trust to be reposed in the conquered is perhaps the greatest. Where attachment can hardly be presumed to exist, some reserve in the allotment of power appears to be dictated by prudence; and to fix the amount of influence annexed to an office to be filled by one of the subjugated, so as to render its importance and respectability compatible with the supremacy of the ruling race, is far from being so easy as those imagine who, in their reliance on certain general principles of supposed universal application, leave national feelings and prejudices out of account in making up their own little nostrums for the improvement of mankind.