earnest injunctions to follow carefully in the footsteps of his peaceful and reforming predecessor[1].
By that time the Directors had begun to recant the praises of their former favourite, Sir Charles Metcalfe, who had had the hardihood to carry through his Council, without previous reference to Leadenhall Street, an Act which declared the Press in India as free as the Press at home. Practical freedom the Anglo-Indian Press had enjoyed for some years past, but the harsh laws under which Silk Buckingham had been deported in 1823 had not been repealed before Bentinck resigned his post. Aided and encouraged by his likeminded colleague, the future Lord Macaulay, Metcalfe promptly carried out the reform which his predecessor had deemed inevitable; and the Act of August, 1835, made the Press free of all State-control, within the limits prescribed by the law of England. The question, indeed, as Macaulay put it in one of his trenchant Minutes, was not whether the Press should be free, but whether, being free, it should be called free. 'We are exposed' — he added — 'to all the dangers — dangers, I conceive, greatly exaggerated — of a free Press, and at the same time we contrive to incur all the opprobrium of a censorship[2].'
This measure, which brought the law into close accordance with the facts of his day, brought Metcalfe's Indian career to a premature close. He had accepted the Government of Agra, when that great
