Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/514

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456
INDIA UNDER THE CROWN

and in 1860-1861 the enactment of the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure assimilated throughout the country the general system of criminal law. By these measures the executive and judicial administration was systematically re-arranged; so that, when Lord Canning, the first Viceroy of India, left Calcutta in 1862, he made over to his successor a government very different in organization and character from that which had been transmitted to him, six years earlier, by Lord Dalhousie. The royal supremacy, proclaimed in 1858, became the actual and visible sign of substantial incorporation into the British Empire in all parts of the world, at a time when India had received large accretions of territory; while the sense of unity created by the Queen's assumption of direct government restored confidence, and gave a powerful impulse to the moral and material advancement of the Indian people.

The administrative history of India during the next fifty years may be described as a development upon the lines that were laid down by these fundamental executive and legislative reforms. It records the methodical prosecution of the work of adjusting the mechanism of a modern state to the circumstances and customs of a most heterogeneous population. On the one hand, personal laws, precepts of caste and creed, and prescriptive rights had to be respected. On the other hand, the effect upon many of these rules and usages made by the introduction of a strong and systematic administration was to derange and modify them, because the needs and circumstances under which they had grown up were