military association-like the Marathas, the Játs of Bhurtpore, the Sikhs of the Punjab, or the Rohillasunited by the tie, real or assumed, of common race, religion, or country, and drawn together for defence or attack into compact organizations upon a kind of national or territorial basis. Such groups were liable to be weakened by internal feuds and dissensions. But as they had some genuine root in the soil and a true bond of popular union, they have always possessed a higher vitality and much stronger resisting capacity than the forces of even such an able military despot as Hyder Ali of Mysore, with whom we began our new series of wars in the south. A skilful commander of mercenary troops may often be hard to beat in a single battle; but it will be found, speaking broadly, that all the really hard fighting done by the Anglo-Indian army has been against tribal or quasi-national associations,-against Marathas, Sikhs, Játs, or Afghans.

It was with the greatest reluctance that the English East India Company, after their acquisition of Bengal, set out again upon the road of political adventure and military expeditions. In a letter of 1767 to their President at Calcutta the London Directors say—

'The Dewanni of Bengal, Bahár, and Orissa, are the utmost limits of our view on that side of India. On the coast the protection of the Carnatic and the possession of the Sircars. ... and on the Bombay side the dependencies thereon, with Salsette, Bassein, and the Castle of Surat. If we pass these bounds we shall be led from one acquisition to another, till we shall find no security but in the subjection of the whole, which, by dividing your force, would lose us the whole, and end in our extirpation from Hindusthan.'

This letter had been written on receipt of intelligence that had alarmed and displeased the Honourable Court.

The situation of the English on the south-east coast, although the French had been dislodged, was still far from secure. In Bengal the English were recognized masters of a rich inland province, free from any fear of attack by sea, and with their land frontier sheltered on its open side behind the allied kingdom of Oudh. But in Madras our territory ran along the sea-coast, and was only covered landward by an indefinite kind of protectorate over the Carnatic principality, then under the rulership of a not very trustworthy Nawáb. Two warlike and restless neighbours, Hyder Ali and the Marathas, hovered ominously about our borders; while our only ally, the Nizám of Hyderabad, was embarrassed and wavering politically.

Hyder Ali was the son of a soldier who had risen out of the crowd of common mercenaries to a petty command; and he himself had pushed his own fortunes much further by the ordinary method of employing his troops first in the service of a native State and afterwards in the prosecution of his own independent ambition. He had thus gained notoriety as a military leader, and having secured a great treasure at the sack of Bednúr he had made himself master of Mysore, an ancient Hindu principality lying due west of Madras. From Mysore he had pushed his conquest still further westward to the sea-coast of Malabar; and he was now seizing land in South India wherever he could lay hands on it. The superior craft and courage that he displayed began to alarm his neighbours, most of whom were engaged in similar proceedings. His principal enemies were the Marathas, with whom he had some sharp conflicts, and the Nizám of Hyderabad, from whose state he was tearing off large strips of territory; while from Mysore he was

threatening the Carnatic, which the Madras government were seriously concerned to protect.

It was just about this time that Lord Clive, in settling the affairs of Bengal with the emperor Shah Álam, obtained from him a formal grant of the districts to the north of Madras called the Five Sirkars, which had been assigned by the Nizám to the French, and out of which the English had driven Bussy's garrisons in 1759. The grant cost nothing to an emperor whose sovereignty had become purely nominal; but these districts, though under British occupation since they had been taken from the French, had never been formally ceded to us by the Nizám, who not unreasonably took offence at the transaction. However, being in straits for money and in fear of Hyder Ali, the Nizam was soon pacified by a treaty under which the Madras government pledged themselves rather vaguely to support him in case of war. They also entered into a friendly arrangement with a marauding Maratha chief, who had hired out 10,000 horsemen to the Nizám. Scarcely had the treaty been signed, when Hyder Ali poured a large force into the Hyderabad territory; whereupon the Nizám, acting upon the agreement, at once demanded and obtained from Madras a contingent of troops. Meanwhile the Maratha chief plundered the Mysore districts on his own account until Hyder Ali bought him off, when he departed home with his booty to evade the Nizám's claim for a share in it. The Nizám next marched, attended by the Madras contingent, toward Mysore; but instead of fighting he came to a private understanding with Hyder Ali, according to which both turned upon the Company. Some sharp skirmishing followed, in which the Nizám was so roughly handled by the English that he was

glad to make terms separately; and the war was pressed against Hyder Ali alone, who soon proved himself an antagonist much more adroit and active than the ordinary Indian princes of whom the Company had military experience.

The campaign was very ill managed from Madras; the commanding officer was hampered by 'field deputies' to superintend his movements, and by roguish contractors; while the Marathas took the opportunity of making a plundering tour in the Carnatic. Nor was it until the country had been overrun by the Mysore cavalry close up to the outskirts of Madras, and the finances of the Company considerably deranged, that a protracted and inglorious war was ended in 1769 by a treaty with Hyder Ali, who had taken up his quarters at St. Thomas' Mount, five miles from the English capital. The revenues of Madras would have been completely exhausted, if they had not been supplemented liberally, during the campaign, from Bengal; and the London Directors were exceedingly displeased at discovering that the money on which they relied for commercial investments in India, and for accommodating His Majesty's Ministers with treasury loans at home, had been dissipated in these barren operations, with no other profit than a practical lesson in the ways of Oriental statecraft and the value of Eastern allies. Moreover, if the beginning of the war was a political blunder, another and worse one was made in ending it. The treaty described all the contracting parties, of whom the principal were the English, Hyder Ali, and the Marathas, as reciprocally friends and allies of each other, provided that they did not become aggressors against one another; so that each party incurred a loose and vaguely worded

obligation of assisting the others in the event of future hostilities. And as a similar compact had been made with the Nizám, the position of the Madras government was that they had become liable to be called upon to assist any of three turbulent princes whenever the next quarrel should break out among them. Accordingly, when in the following year the Marathas and the Mysore ruler came to blows, each of these two treaty-parties demanded aid from the English, and each of them proved indisputably that his enemy was the aggressor. The Madras government, having been sharply censured by the Directors for the last war, and being in no way anxious to strengthen either of these two very formidable neighbours at the expense of the other, were compelled to offend both of them by refusing to interfere in any manner whatever. The result was that the Marathas inflicted upon Hyder Ali some humiliating defeats, which he attributed to the faithless desertion of him by the English, and that he became thenceforward a vindictive enemy, watching for an occasion, which he soon found, of gratify ing his resentment.