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The Life of Sir Thomas Munro, With Extracts From His Correspondence and Private Papers
The Life of Sir Thomas Munro With Extracts From His Correspondence and Private Papers Author:George Robert Gleig General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1849 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IX. Removal to the Ceded Districts. A Manner of life, such as the preceding letters describe, of unremitting toil and frequent exposures to weather, might have been expected, even in the course of fifteen months, to make serious inroads on the strongest European constitution ; but it had not this effect in the case of Major Munro. His temperate habits secured him against some maladies which, in India not less than in England, are the results rather of personal imprudence than of climate; while the buoyancy of spirit which accompanies success in all honest endeavours was probably not without its use in guarding him from the attacks of others, for in all to which he put his hand, Major Munro was eminently successful. When he entered Canara, in July, 1799, he found it suffering from the combined effects of recent war and a long series of prior misgovernment. He had reduced it, before the same month in 1800, to a state of as good order as any of the more recently-acquired, and as some of the older provinces of the British empire. The bands of freebooters which used to sweep across the open country were put down ; the ryots, assured of justice in the collection of the taxes, and guarded against oppression from those above them, resumed the habits of patient industry which had long been intermitted ; villages sprang up, and cultivation extended itself slowly, to be sure, but steadily, in the wilderness. Still the entire severance from English society to which he was condemned became after a while intolerable, and he determined to seize the first favourable opportunity of applying for a change. It c...« less