Ayrshire > Volume 2

198 HISTORY OF AYRSHIRE
division in Sir Arthur Wellesley's army ; was sent to
Germany to make arrangements for raising a German
contingent, which was subsequently employed under
his command in Sicily and in Spain ; for three years —
1811-1813 — he acted as Governor of Sicily, where he
tried to introduce constitutional government, somewhat
on the British system ; he commanded a mixed force in
Spain, 1813, but without much success ; and, in 1814,
conducted a successful expedition against Genoa,
where he issued two proclamations that anticipated by
nearly half a century the establishment of Italian
unity, and that, being unduly premature in this respect,
caused some embarrassment to his own Government.
For the following thirteen years Bentinck was
unemployed. He was elected M.P. for Nottingham
County in four Parliaments, and for a short period he
represented King's Lynn.
In July, 1827, Bentinck was appointed Governor-
General of Bengal, and took up the duties of his office a
year later. He found the finances of India embarrassed,
the result of war in Burma and of the siege of Bhartpur,
and the expenditure exceeding the income by more than
a million sterling. He instituted commissions of
enquiry, and, as a result of their reports, threw open to
the natives posts that had up till then been filled by
Europeans at much larger salaries, and reduced substan-
tially the special allowances that had been paid to
European officers in addition to their pay. These steps
resulted for a time in a good deal of unpopularity to the
Governor-General, but the deficit gradually disappeared
and gave way to a surplus which, at the time of
Bentinck's retirement in 1835, amounted to two millions
sterling. He placed the land revenue of the north-
western provinces upon a satisfactory footing, and
established a board of revenue for its control, rearranged
the judicature so as to ensure that justice should have
freer and more expeditious course, and transferred the
whole of the original civil business to native judicial
officers. Acting on the advice of Macaulay, he took