Bentinck's attitude towards his responsibilities as Govornor-general was conditioned to an important degree not only by the intellectual outlook he brought with him to India, but also by an emotional factor which originated with his dismissal by the Court of Directors from the Governorship of Madras in 1807. The son of a Whig politician, the third Duke of Portland, Bentinck had been in close touch with the political life of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries. His outlook was moulded, not by his father, but by the more imaginative of the Whigs - in particular by Burke and Charles James Fox, He was acquainted with the modes of thought inspired by Bentham and Adam Smith, both of whom could claim him as a disciple. His political sympathies, therefore, lay with the radicals. He was a doctrinnaire in the sense that he had a philosophical belief in progress, and considered the acceleration or initiation of change to be a primary duty of a statesman Bentinck was not in any way an originator of now ideas. His mind, while receptive to the impuluses of a new age, was not capable of originating or directing any of those impulses, It may be said of him, in fact, that his outlook was based more on scepticism towards conventional or traditional attitudes than on a perception of the spirit of liberalism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:500599 |
| Date | January 1949 |
| Creators | Seed, Geoffrey |
| Publisher | University of St Andrews |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2662 |
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