were fought upon Indian ground; Fox and Burke were defeated and driven out of office; the East Indian Bill was rejected; the Coalition was upset by George III and by Pitt, who rose at once to the summit of ministerial power. In 1784 Pitt carried through Parliament his act which vested full superintendence over all civil, military, and revenue affairs of the Company in six commissioners appointed by the Crown. The chief government in India was placed in the hands of the Governor-General with three councillors, whose authority over the minor Presidencies was complete on all matters of diplomacy, of peace and war, and of the application of the revenues; and by a subsequent act of 1786 the Governor-General was empowered to act on his own responsibility in extraordinary cases, without the concurrence of his Council.
This system of double government, by the Company under the control of a minister directly responsible to Parliament, lasted until 1858, when the Crown assumed the sole and direct administration of India, a project that had been under the consideration of the elder Pitt a hundred years earlier. The immediate effect of Pitt's act was a great and manifest improvement in the mechanics of Indian government, removing most of the ill-contrived checks and hindrances which had brought Hastings into collision with his Council and the subordinate governments, abolishing the defects that he had pointed out, and applying the remedies that he had proposed. All preceding governors had been servants of the East India Company; and Hastings, the first
