Meanwhile the Governor-General busied himself with the work that lay before him in all branches of public business. His plans for developing the Company's rule and influence by asserting their right to govern in the name of the British nation alone, and by encouraging native rulers to accept as their overlord the king of Great Britain, proved at least the clearness of his mental vision, and the practical spirit of a policy which aimed at making the best of accomplished facts, and clearing off the shadows that concealed their true significance. But the virulence of his enemies led the Director's to mistake the counsels of a true friend for the crafty utterances of a self-convicted traitor.
On the question of revising the land-settlements, as on almost every other, Francis and Hastings took opposite sides. The former, inspired by one school of Indian officers, would have forestalled by many years the Regulation of 1793, under which Lord Cornwallis settled the land-revenues of Bengal for ever at fixed rates with the Zamíndárs. Hastings, on the other hand, sought to develope the principles of his former settlement, by means of a careful enquiry into land-tenures, title-deeds, crop-values, cesses, and all the conflicting claims of Zamíndárs and Rayats. He proposed, with Barwell's sanction, to sweep away all taxes levied on the Rayats since 1765, to farm out the bulk of the lands in Bengal on leases for one or two lives to the highest bidders, with a preference for Zamíndárs, and to fix the charge for land-revenue at
