Sir George Arthur received in due course his appointment as provisional governor-general in the event of the death or departure from India of Sir Henyy Hardinge. But he was not destined to assume the office for which he was thus selected, being compelled by ill-health to leave India before Sir Henry (then Lord) Hardinge vacated the governor-generalship.
The principal measures of internal administration which engaged Sir George Arthur's attention at Bombay were the Deccan survey, the object of which was to equalise and lighten the pressure of the land assessment upon the cultivators of the Deccan, and the improvement of the communications and means of irrigation. The first of these measures had been commenced before the arrival of Sir George Arthur at Bombay; but it was during his administration that the plan which has since been carried out was elaborated, and the rules which relieved the cultivators from arbitrary and excessive taxation were fixed.
The hindrances which the want of roads and of means of irrigation offered to the commerce and industiy of Western India had attracted the notice of Sir George Arthur's predecessor. Sir Robert Grant; but little progress had been made when Sir George Arthur arrived and took up the subject with characteristic energy. The project of a line of railway from Bombay to Callian, which was to be extended in the direction of Calcutta and through Central India to Hindustan, was suggested by Mr. G. T. Clark, a trusted assistant of Brunel, and received the cordial support of Sir George Arthur. This line may be regarded as the germ of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway. Other engineering questions, upon which the same engineer was employed by Sir George Arthur, were the improvement of the manufacture of salt by mechanical appliances, and the drainage and sanitary improvement of Bombay, both of which important works have since been carried out. Mr. Clark's report on the conservancy of Bombay was not only the starting point of such improvements in that city and in other cities in India, but was not without its influence on the sanitary improvement of our English towns, which about the same time was first taken up in earnest in this country.
Another material improvement, first projected during Sir George Arthur's administration, was the reclamation of the fore-shore of the island of Bombay. Sir George Arthur also took a great interest in promoting the education of the natives, which at that time, under the impulse given to it some years previously by Mr. Mountstuart Elphinstone, was somewhat more advanced in Bombay than in other parts of India.
Sir George Arthur retired from the Bombay government in 1846, and on his return to England was made a privy councillor and was honoured by the university of Oxford with the honorary degree of D.C.L. He received the colonelcy of the 50th Queen's Own regiment in 1853, and died in the following year. Sir George Arthur married in 1814 Eliza Orde Usher, second daughter of Lieutenant-general Sir John Frederick Sigismund Smith, K.C.B., and had five daughters and seven sons, of whom five survived him.
The career of Sir George Arthur is at once remarkable and instructive. Entering the army as a young man with little or no interest to push him on, he speedily established a reputation for bravery and sound judgment, which led to his being selected at a comparatively early age for civil employment. This he continued to hold until within a few years of his death, rising without solicitation from post to post, and in every position which he filled justifying by his administrative ability and capacity for government the confidence which had been reposed in him. Ultimately he was officially recognised as the fittest man to succeed at a time of difficulty and danger to the high and responsible office of governor-general of India, a post which he only failed to fill in consequence of his failing health. He was an eminently unselfish man, imbued with a deep sense of religion, and as much respected for his unswerving integrity in private as in public life.
[Hart's Army List; Annual Register for 1838 and 1854; United Service Gazette, 30 Sept. 1854; Parliamentary Papers on Afghanistan, Sind, and the Southern Mahratta Country; Family papers.]
ARTHUR, JAMES (d. 1670?), divine, was born at Limerick, and professed himself a Dominican friar in the abbey of St. Stephen, Salamanca. He was professor of divinity at Salamanca University for many years. He went thence to Coimbra, but after the separation of Portugal from Spain in 1640 was expelled for refusing an oath imposed upon all the professors to defend the immaculate conception of the Virgin. In 1642 he retired to the convent of St. Dominic in Lisbon, and there, according to Quetif and Echard, died on 1 Feb. 1644. Ware says that he survived till about 1670, referring to Nicolas Antonio, who,in the ‘Bibliotheca Hispana Nova’ (1672), says that he died ‘non dudum.’ The first volume of a commentary by Arthur upon the first part of Aquinas's ‘Summa’ was printed in 1655; another volume had been completed,
