Much was done in his time, more than ever before, for legislation. He took a lively interest in the proceedings of the Legislative Council for India; it consisted of some thirteen members, of whom six belonged to the Executive Council, and seven, partly official and partly non-official, were nominated by the Governor-General; and it was apart from the local legislatures of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. He assiduously presided over its deliberations, which at that time embraced such important matters as civil and criminal procedure, transfer of property, contract, evidence, negotiable securities, and others. During no period of Indian history has legislation of a fundamental, and, so to speak, scientific character been more remarkably advanced than during his incumbency of five years. He was throughout assisted by English Jurists in England, and in India especially. In one legislative measure he was able to take a strong part personally, and that was the Punjab Tenancy Act. It appeared to him that in various ways the rights secured (by the land settlement in that Province as already mentioned) to certain classes of cultivators, as separate from peasant proprietors, were being gravely threatened. So he procured the passing of a law for the preservation of the rights and interests in these numerous tenancies under legal definitions. Cognate to this subject, a question arose in Oude regarding tenant-right, in which he acted with decisive effect. While anxious that the landed aristocracy (styled the Talukdars) in this Province should be maintained in the position ultimately guaranteed to them by Lord Canning in 1859, he was equally resolved that the subordinate rights of occupants and cultivators should be protected. He, in common with others, believed that their rights had been secured simultaneously with those of the Talukdars. But during the subsequent five years this security had, he found, been disturbed, and further measures were needed for protection. He therefore caused these tenant-rights or occupancy tenures to be protected by additional safeguards, which have since been embodied in legislative enactments. These measures of his aroused keen opposition in Northern and North-eastern India, and especially in Calcutta, as the landlord interest in Bengal made common cause with the Talukdars of Oude. Thus much invective was levelled at him by the Anglo-Indian newspaper-press. Then the agitation began to spread from India to England: the influential few could make their cry heard across the seas, the voiceless million could not; that was all the greater reason why he would take care of the million. He held that the question was one of justice or injustice towards a deserving and industrious class of British subjects. His mind, however, was exercised by this controversy in India mainly because he apprehended that the ground of argumentative battle might be shifted to England, and perhaps even to the floor of the House of Commons.