.

at least equal; they had probably some local superiority of influence and position. The third war, which was international, finished in 1761 decisively and irremediably against them, as was proved twenty years afterwards. When, in 1781, the French made their last descent upon an Indian coast, the long odds were for the moment against England on the sea, for she was fighting single-handed against all the maritime nations; against France, Spain, Holland, and her own American colonies. She was also entangled within India in a very intricate desultory war against Hyder Ali of Mysore and the Marathas; two powers which both held strips of the Indian seaboard, and were both corresponding with the enemy. The French fleet was under Suffren, the best admiral ever possessed by France, and the military force in the expedition was commanded by Bussy. Suffren was far superior as a naval tactician to the English commander, but the French admiral found on the Indian coast 'no friendly port or roadstead, no base of supplies or repair.' The French settlements had all fallen by 1779; and the invaluable harbour of Trincomalee, in Ceylon, had been taken by the English from the Dutch just a month before. It was retaken in 1782 by Suffren, but not until after we had made peace with the Marathas. And in any event the English power was by that time too firmly consolidated in India by our acquisition of Bengal, with the rich districts north-westward up to Allahabad, to be shaken by the landing on the south-east coast of a small force, which could hardly have produced more than local damage and temporary political confusion in the peninsula. Suffren's real object must have been no more than to create a diversion by harassing our Eastern possessions 1 Mahan's Influence of Sea Power in History, p. 428.

while our forces were employed against the colonial revolt in America; and in 1783 his operations were interrupted by news of the Peace of Versailles.

We are therefore entitled to fix on the Peace of Paris in 1763 as the true date after which the maritime powers of Europe finally withdrew from all serious rivalry, either in commerce or conquest, with England in India. The epoch is one of pre-eminent importance in the history of the rise of our dominion; for thenceforward the contest for ascendancy is between the English and the native Powers only-a contest of which the issue was in reality so far from being doubtful, invisible, or amazing, that it could be and was already foreseen and deliberately foretold.

CHAPTER VII

THE CONQUEST OF BENGAL

SECTION I. Clive's Campaign (1757).

In the foregoing chapter the summary of affairs on the east coast has been carried forward up to the date of Suffren's expedition, in order to present an unbroken view of our relations with the French in India. It is now necessary to go back some years in order to take up the narrative of events in Bengal.

The rise and territorial expansion of the English power may be conveniently divided into two periods, which slightly overlap each other, but on the whole mark two distinct and consecutive stages in the construction of our dominion. The first is the period when the contest lay among the European nations, who began by competing for commercial advantages, and ended by fighting for political superiority on the Indian littoral. The commercial competition was going on throughout the whole of the seventeenth century; but the struggle with the French, which laid the foundation of our dominion, lasted less than twenty years, for it began in 1745 and was virtually decided in 1763. The second period, upon which we are now about to enter, is that during which England was contending with the native Indian Powers, not for commercial preponderance or for strips of territory and spheres of influ

ence along the seaboard, but for supremacy over all India. Reckoning the beginning of this contest from 1756, when Clive and Admiral Watson sailed from Madras to recover Calcutta from the Nawab of Bengal, it may be taken to have been substantially determined. in fifty years; although for another fifty years the expansion of our territory went on by great strides, with long halts intervening, until the natural limits of India were attained by the conquest of Sinde and the Punjab.

The first thing that must strike the ordinary observer, on looking back over the hundred years from 1757 to 1857, during which the acquisition of our Indian dominion has been accomplished, is the magnitude of the exploit; the next is the remarkable ease with which it was achieved. At the present moment, when the English survey from their small island in the West the immense Eastern empire that has grown up out of their petty trading settlements on the Indian seaboard, they are apt to be struck with wonder and a kind of dismay at the prospering of their own handiwork. The thing is, as has been said, so unprecedented in history, and particularly it is so entirely unfamiliar to modern political ideas-we have become so unaccustomed in the western world to build up empires in the high Roman fashionthat even those who have studied the beginnings of our Indian dominion are inclined to treat the outcome and climax as something passing man's understanding. Our magnificent possessions are commonly regarded as a man might look at a great prize he had drawn by luck in a lottery; they are supposed to have been won by incalculable chance. It is surmised that we stumbled forward blindfold on our way to dominion, without any expectation that it would lead us to that end; we are

assumed to have discovered an empire accidentally, and to have obeyed the determination of events with no more foreknowledge than a rolling stone1.

But it may be fairly argued that this view, which embodies the general impression on this subject, can be controverted by known facts. The idea that India might be easily conquered and governed, with a very small force, by a race superior in warlike capacity or in civilization, was no novelty at all. In the first place the thing had actually been done once already. The Emperor Báber, who invaded India from central Asia in the sixteenth century, has left us his authentic memoirs; it is a book of great historical interest, and nothing more amusing has ever been written by an Asiatic. He says: 'When I invaded the country for the fifth time, overthrew Sultan Ibrahim, and subdued the empire of Hindusthan, my servants, the merchants and their servants 2, and the followers of all friends that were in camp along with me, were numbered, and they amounted to 12,000 men. I placed my foot,' he writes, 'in the stirrup of resolution, and my hands on the reins of confidence in God, and I marched against the possessions of the throne of Delhi and the dominions of Hindusthan, whose army was said to amount to 100,000 foot, with more than 1000 elephants. The Most High

1 The author of The Expansion of England, for instance, in that very instructive dissertation on our Indian empire which occupies 'Our two chapters of his book, lends himself to this popular belief. 'was made blindly. Nothing great acquisition of India,' he says, that has ever been done by Englishmen was done so unintentionally or accidentally as the conquest of India.' And again: 'The conquest of India is very wonderful in the sense that nothing similar to it had ever happened before, and that therefore nothing similar could be expected by those who for the first century and a half administered the affairs of the Company of India.'

2 He means the Commissariat.