coasts, together with the administrative possession of the Berárs at the backbone of India, completely altered the strategic basis of our power, and converted British India from an isolated ocean-washed peninsula into an inland Asiatic realm.
The new territorial problem was not merely how to consolidate the new dominions of nearly a quarter of a million of square miles, but how to consolidate those dominions situated, as they were, at unprecedented distances from our military base on the sea-board. The new race problem was not merely how to govern new peoples, now numbering thirty-eight millions of souls, but how to adapt a system of government which had slowly grown up amid a contented population of British subjects, to warlike tribes and nations, some of them still smarting under recent conquest and defeat. The new political problem was how to extend the supervision of the Governor-General, which had hitherto been largely absorbed in the direct administration of Lower Bengal, so as to enable him to maintain watch and ward over the numerous new provinces as far apart as the Punjab, Burma, and the Berárs. For it must be borne in mind that not one of Lord Dalhousie's conquests and annexations was erected into a separate Local Government. They were all retained as 'Local Administrations' under the immediate control of the Governor-General in Council.
