THE ADMINISTRATION OF BENTINCK 395

each other, so that what the positive law refuses to tolerate often becomes immoral, and what morality condemns the law has to denounce. It may be guessed that inhuman or scandalous rites are never really pop- ular, while it is certain that whenever a civil ordinance takes its stand upon an indisputable ethical basis, relig- ion has to give way. The crime was prevalent chiefly among the docile and habitually submissive races of Lower Bengal, and the Governor-General rightly in- ferred that its peremptory suppression, far from involv- ing political danger, would be accepted as a welcome liberation. Of Lord William Bentinck's foreign policy there is not much to be said. He was the first indeed, he has been the last Governor-General in whose time un- broken peace has been given to British India, if we exclude the despatch of troops to put down local in- surrections in Mysore and in Coorg. In the manage- ment of some troublesome business with Haidarabad and the Rajput states he could rely on the skill and experience of Sir Charles Metcalfe; and he adjusted with success the much more important question of English diplomatic relations with Ranjit Singh, the ruler of the Panjab. But his commercial treaty with Ranjit Singh and his convention with the Amirs of Sind for opening the Indus River to British commerce were, in point of fact, the preliminary steps that led the British, a few years later, out upon the wide and perilous field of Afghan politics. The possibility of the overland invasion of India and the question of the