sustaining them. When the storm had blown over in India, and he had piloted his vessel into calm water, he was sacrificed with little or no hesitation to party exigencies in England: the Ministry would have recalled him; they consented to his impeachment; they left him to be baited by the Opposition and to be ruined by the law's delay, by the incredible procrastination and the obsolete formalities of a seven years' trial before the House of Lords. Upon such a career, upon the value of the services rendered by Hastings to his country and the injustice with which he was requited, the English people must by this time have formed a judgment too broadly based to be much affected by any fresh scrutiny of the reckless calumnies flung at him while he stood at bay against false and vindictive accusers like Nuncomar and Francis, or fought at great odds against Hyder Ali and the Maratha league.

It may be added, as a curious proof of the reputation acquired by Hastings in Europe, that in 1785, when he was just leaving Bengal, the French ambassador in London seriously proposed to his government a plan of secretly encouraging Hastings to make himself an independent ruler in India by means of his native army and of French support. The ambassador, having evidently in his mind the success with which France had abetted the revolt of the American colonists, argued confidently that a man who held in India ' almost a royal position,' who had been recalled with indignity, and was threatened with impeachment, would be found easily accessible to such overtures; and the peremptory refusal of the French minister to entertain his ingenious plot was a bitter disappointment to him 1.

1 Dix ans de paix armée, par le Marquis de Barral Montferrat (1894), pp. 51-52.

CHAPTER XII

THE INTERVAL BETWEEN HASTINGS AND CORNWALLIS

(1785-1786)

SECTION I. State of India, 1785.

It is an observation of Sir James Mackintosh that in the course of one generation the English lost one empire in the West and gained another in the East; and it may be added that we owe not only the loss. but its compensation to the policy of the French Government. In the long war that had now ended their navy broke the hold of England on the North American colonies, as repeated blows on a man's arms make him let go his antagonist in a furious struggle. But they had so enfeebled themselves by their exertions to fight us on behalf of American independence that they were left powerless to interfere with us thenceforward in Asia, or to maintain their rivalry at sea. From 1783 begins a kind of pause in our Indian affairs, varied only in India by a preliminary trial of strength with Mysore; and in England by violent party-warfare over Indian questions. The French Government still continued, according to the reports of our diplomatists, to watch for an opportunity of interfering again in India; but their foreign policy was now suffering incipient paralysis from their growing internal complications. With France, therefore, we had a truce that

lasted, to our great advantage in India, for ten years; until in the final decade of the eighteenth century a fresh and furious storm broke over Europe with such violence that it rebounded upon India, and levelled most of the remaining obstacles to the expansion of the English dominion in that country.

If we are to measure the growth of the British power in India by the expansion of its territorial dominion, the interval of twenty years between Clive's acceptance of the Diwáni (1765) and the departure of Warren Hastings from India in 1785, may be reckoned as a stationary period. It is true that from Oudh we acquired Benares and Gházipur on the north-west of Bengal in 1775—although the transfer merely registered our possession of two districts which had long been under our political control-and that we also obtained Bassein and Salsette, small though important points close to Bombay. But during the GovernorGeneralship of Hastings we had been so far from extending our Indian domain, that our hold upon our actual possessions had been severely strained, our territory had been invaded, our arms had suffered some reverses, and the safety of one Presidency capital, Madras, had been gravely endangered. In point of fact the English ascendancy in India at this time had by no means been conclusively established; for although we were proving ourselves the strongest of the powers that were now definitely rising into prominence out of the confusion of the previous half-century, yet we were still confronted by jealous rivals, and our dominions were not large in proportion to those of other States.

Two things, nevertheless, had been demonstrated by the struggle that had been sustained by the English nation. It had been proved in the first place that the

united naval forces of Europe could not drive the English from the sea, or wrest from her the command of the great routes across the ocean between Europe and Asia. Secondly, it had by this time become clear that so long as their transmarine communications with the mother country could be preserved, and so long as their invaluable possession of Bengal remained undisturbed, the English ran no risk of permanent or vital injury either from the Marathas or from Mysore. The position of these two formidable fighting powers in the centre and south of India did undoubtedly still operate as a check upon the English, and they could have diverted our forces to an extent which might have placed us in some jeopardy, if any hostile State of heavy warlike calibre had become established about this time in upper India. This might easily have happened, for the wide and wealthy plains of the north-west had hitherto been always the seat, and the source, of the largest and strongest military rulerships. But it so chanced, by the good luck which has always attended us in India, that toward the end of the eighteenth century, when the Marathas and the Mysore dynasty were strong and threatening, beyond our north-western frontier we had little or nothing to fear. The ghost of the Moghul empire, sitting crowned among the ruins of its ancient splendour, still reigned over Delhi. And although the imperial authority had lost all substance, the shadow of that great name still so far overspread the surrounding districts as to prevent their absorption under a new dominion.

Yet the political vacuum created by the final disintegration of the Moghul empire, and the withdrawal of the Afghans, was already filling up in the Punjab, by the rapid rise and compact organization of the Sikhs.

Under this new Hindu federation, much more closely knit together by ties of race and common faith than the Marathas, the people became animated by a martial spirit and a fiery enthusiasm such as the Hindus had not hitherto displayed. The history of the Sikhs illustrates a phenomenon well known in Asia, where an insurrectionary movement is always particularly dangerous if it takes a religious complexion, and where fanaticism may endure and accumulate under a spiritual leader until it explodes in the world of politics with the force of dynamite. The martyrdom of their first prophet, and their persecution by the later Moghul emperors, had engendered in these hardy peasants a fierce hatred of Islam. They had been repressed and broken by the Afghan armies of Ahmed Shah, who routed them with great slaughter in 1761. But in 1762 they defeated and slew his governor at Sirhind; and in 1764 Ahmed Shah was recalled to his western provinces by a revolt in Kandahar. He died in 1773, after which date the grasp of his successors on the Punjab relaxed, and the Sikh confederation became closer and more vigorous. They were subdivided into misls or military confederacies under different chiefs, who fought among themselves and against the Mahomedans, until by 1785 the Sikhs had mastered the whole country between the Jhelum and the Sutlej rivers in the centre of the Punjab, were threatening the Mahomedan princes about Delhi, and had made pillaging excursions eastward across the Ganges into Rohilcund.

To the English in Bengal this revival of Hindu nationality in upper India was exceedingly serviceable and opportune. For, in the first place, their real danger, the only substantial obstacle to their rising ascendancy,

P