of this magnificent career, his rapid apprehension of a complicated political situation, and the vigour and address with which he carried out not only military operations and diplomatic strokes, but also the reforms of internal administration, and the organization of government in the ceded or conquered provinces. No man was ever a better subject for panegyric; nor is it worth while to scan too closely, at this distance of time, the defects of a great public servant by whose strenu ous qualities the nation has very largely profited. It is essential, however, to lay stress, for historical purposes, on the peculiar combination of circumstances which gave scope and encouragement to Lord Wellesley's ardent and masterful statesmanship, and which enabled him to treat those who opposed him or criticized him with the supreme contempt that his home correspondence invariably discloses. He had left England and reached India in the darkest hour of the fierce struggle between the French and English nations, when Buonaparte's star was in the ascendant over Europe, when he was invading Egypt and meditating Asiatic conquests, and when at home a powerful Tory Ministry was governing by measures that would in these days be denounced as the most arbitrary coercion. At such a conjuncture there was little time or inclination to look narrowly into Wellesley's declarations that the intrigues of the French in India and the incapacity or disaffection. of the native rulers reduced him to the necessity of dethroning or disarming them, and that for our rule to be secure it must be paramount. As a matter of fact, he was applauded and supported in measures ten times more high-handed and dictatorial than those for which Hastings had been impeached a dozen years earlier. During that interval the temper of the English Parlia

ment had so entirely changed, that he could afford to ride roughshod over all opposition in India, and to regard the pacific directors of the East India Company as a pack of narrow-minded old women.

The avowed object of Lord Wellesley had been to enforce peace throughout India, and to provide for the permanent security of the British possessions by imposing upon every native State the authoritative superiority of the British government, binding them down forcibly or through friendly engagements to subordinate relations with a paramount power, and effectively forestalling any future attempts to challenge our exercise of arbitration or control. In short, whereas up to his time the British government had usually dealt with all States in India upon a footing of at least nominal political equality, Lord Wellesley revived and proclaimed the imperial principle of political supremacy. All his views and measures pointed towards the reconstruction of another empire in India, which he rightly believed to be the natural outcome of our position in the country, and the only guarantee of its lasting consolidation. It must be acknowledged that Wellesley's trenchant operations only accelerated the sure and irresistible consequences of establishing a strong civilized government among the native States that had risen upon the ruins of the Moghul Empire; for by swift means or slow, by fair means or forcible, the British dominion was certain to expand, and the armed opposition of its rivals could not fail to be beaten down at each successive collision with a growing European power.

CHAPTER XV

THE STATIONARY PERIOD (1806-1814).

SECTION I. Reaction within India.

BUT Lord Wellesley's career of military triumphs and magnificent annexations had alarmed the Court of Directors, who protested against the increase of debt and demurred to the increase of dominion. The Governor-General professed utter contempt for their opinion, and wrote to Lord Castlereagh that no additional outrage or insult 'from the most loathsome den of the India House' should accelerate his departure so long as the public safety required his aid. Nevertheless he discovered, after Monson's disaster, that even the Ministers found reason to apprehend that he was going too fast and too far, that Lord Castlereagh was remonstrating, and that the nation at large was startled by his grandiose reports of Indian wars, conquests, and prodigious accessions of territory. Toward the close of his term of office his measures became much more moderate. In 1805 the return of Lord Cornwallis to India brought about a change of policy which checked and altered the whole movement; for although his second Governor-Generalship was very short he had time to lay down the pacific principles that were acted upon by his successors.

When Lord Cornwallis reached Calcutta, he found an empty treasury, an increasing debt, the export trade

of the Company arrested by the demand of specie for the military chest, and the British ascendancy openly proclaimed and in process of enforcement by ways and means that evidently involved us in a rapidly expanding circle of fresh political liabilities. His own ideas, and the instructions that he had brought out, pointed in a contrary direction. He thought that the subsidiary treaties only entangled us in responsibility for defending and laboriously propping up impotent or unruly princes, impairing their independence and retarding the natural development of stronger organizations. Nor did our interest seem to him to require that we should undertake the preservation of the smaller chiefships adjacent to our frontiers from absorption by the larger predatory States. It seems, on the contrary, to have been his view that our protectorate should not extend beyond the actual limits of our possessions-a rule of political fortification that has never been practised in India. We have always found it necessary to throw forward a kind of glacis in advance of our administrative border-line, so as to interpose a belt of protected States or tribes between British territory proper and the country of some turbulent or formidable neighbour.

Lord Cornwallis lost no time in declaring his intention of removing the 'unfavourable and dangerous impression' that the British government contemplated establishing its control and authority over every State in India. He died, however, within three months after his arrival1, before he could do more than indicate this change of policy. But his views-which represented the reaction in England against Lord Wellesley's costly and masterful operations-so far prevailed, that for the next ten years following his decease the experiment of isolation 1 October 5, 1805.

was fairly tried by the British government in India. Sir George Barlow, whom the death of Cornwallis made for a time Governor-General, laid down the principle that a certain extent of dominion, local power, and revenue, would be cheaply sacrificed for tranquillity and security within a contracted circle; and he withdrew from every kind of relation with the native States to which we were not specifically pledged by treaty. It will be found that whenever the Governor-Generalship has been held by an Anglo-Indian official, annexations have been exceedingly rare and the expanding movement has slackened; but Sir George Barlow even took a step backward. The subsidiary alliance with Sindia, projected by Lord Wellesley, was abandoned; the minor principalities adjacent to or intermixed with the Maratha possessions were left to their fate; the English proclaimed an intention of living apart from broils, of dissociating themselves from the general concerns of India at large, and of improving their own property without taking part in the quarrels or grievances of their neighbours. If, indeed, Sir George Barlow had adopted to their full extent the views that were at this period pressed upon him by the authorities in England, he would have disconnected the British government from the subsidiary treaties which invested us with paramount influence in the affairs of the two great Maratha and Mahomedan States, ruled by the Peshwa at Poona and by the Nizám at Hyderabad. But the result would have been to undo the work of Lord Wellesley-to abdicate the ascendancy that we had attained, and to throw open again the field of central India to the Marathas, who would at once have reoccupied all the ground that we should have abandoned. It was, indeed, so manifest to those actually watching