Another marched by land through Chittagong into Arakan, for
the Bengal sepoys refused to go by sea. A third, and the
strongest, sailed from Madras direct to the mouth of the Ira-
wadi. The war was protracted over two years. After a loss
to us of about 20,000 lives, chiefly from the pestilential climate,
and an expenditure of £14,000,000, the King of Ava signed,
in 1826, the treaty of Yandabu. By this he abandoned all
claim to Assam, and ceded to us the Provinces of Arakan and
Tenasserim, already in the military occupation of the British.
He retained the whole valley of the Irawadi, down to the sea at
Rangoon.
Bhartpur taken, 1827.—A disputed succession led to the British intervention in Bhartpur, the great Ját State of Central India. The capture of the city by Lord Combermere, in January 1827, wiped out the repulse which Lord Lake had received in January 1805. Artillery could make little impression upon the massive walls of mud. But at last a breach was effected by mining, and Bhartpur was taken by storm, thus removing the popular notion throughout India, that it was impregnable—a notion which had threatened to become a political danger.
Lord William Bentinck, 1828-1835.—The next Governor-General was Lord William Bentinck, who had been Governor of Madras twenty years earlier, at the time of the mutiny of Vellore (1806). His seven years' rule is not signalized by any of those victories or extensions of territory by which chroniclers measure the growth of an empire. But it forms an epoch in administrative reform, and in the slow process by which a subject population is won over to venerate as well as to obey its foreign rulers. The modern history of the British in India, as benevolent administrators, ruling the country with a single eye to the good of the natives, may almost be said to begin with Lord William Bentinck. According to the inscription upon his statue at Calcutta, from the pen of Macaulay: 'He abolished cruel rites; he effaced humiliating distinctions ; he gave liberty to the expression of public opinion; his constant study was to elevate the intellectual and moral character of the nations committed to his charge.'
