exclusive privileges and a large capital, was destined to acquire for France a substantial share of that rich commerce in Asiatic commodities that has made the fortune of so many maritime States.

In those days of corruption and intolerance, official tutelage was everywhere a sore burden; but the French Companies had something even heavier to bear. The king, the royal princes, and the principal courtiers took active part in floating the concern, and they were good enough to subscribe largely to the investment. High ecclesiastic dignitaries condescended to patronize the East India Company; the prospectus was advertised in the churches and recommended from the pulpits; while royal proclamations exhorted all true Frenchmen to seize this opportunity of making their own fortunes and contributing to their country's prosperity. Strange to say, however, not even these appeals to patriotism and piety roused any widespread enthusiasm among mercantile men. The capital expected from public subscription came in very slowly, in spite of heavy official pressure upon the great towns; for the traders, who had no guarantee for the good faith or consistency of a despotic government, vainly implored the bureaucracy to reduce the crushing tariffs on foreign imports, and to leave the management of the business in private hands. As for the West India Company, it seems to have broken down by 1674, when its charter was revoked. Colbert determined to abandon henceforward, for the purpose of colonization, the agency of Companies, and to substitute direct administration by a minister of the Crown.

For the East Indies, however, Colbert maintained the organization of a chartered Company, although under the close superintendence of the Crown. Yet

the legitimate commercial undertakings of this Company had been hampered at the outset by combining them with an expedition for the colonization of Madagascar, which failed disastrously. The first attempts of the French to gain a footing on the Indian coast were also defeated by the Dutch, so that in six years after its foundation this Company was entangled in very serious embarrassment. Nevertheless, if the most liberal support and encouragement from Louis XIV and his great minister could have secured success to the Companyand if a sharp turn of general policy, adverse to Colbert and his commercial views, had not speedily supervened -it is possible that the French might have made good their position in India before the close of the seventeenth century. Their initial difficulty was that the ground had been preoccupied by Holland, against whom Louis XIV declared war in 1674, partly, it is said, on account of the violent opposition by the Dutch to French interference with their Indian trade. But a few years later, when Louvois had plunged his master into interminable continental wars, the light and guidance of Colbert's pacific influence suffered total eclipse, and projects of colonial or commercial expansion were set aside for plans of campaign.

At the opening of the eighteenth century, therefore, the Portuguese, who had started first by priority of discovery, were at a standstill far in the rear. The Dutch, who followed, had wrested from the Portuguese most of their trade and territory, but the strength of Holland had been already broken by the incessant attacks of France, who had been good enough thus to relieve England of her most capable maritime rival. From the beginning of the eighteenth century the grasp of the Dutch upon points along the

Indian coast becomes gradually relaxed; they relinquish the contest for predominance in that region, and their principal trading stations are shifted south-eastward to Ceylon, Java, Borneo, and the Spice Islands. The Danish East India Company was extinguished in 1728.In 1722 the Emperor of Austria had granted to the merchants of the Austrian Netherlands a charter authorizing the Ostend East India Company to trade, fit outarmed vessels, build forts, and make treaties with Indian princes; but this interference with their trade alarmed the maritime powers. England, France, and Holland united in diplomatic protests and threats of armed resistance to its establishment in the East Indies, until the Emperor finally agreed by treaty to suppress the Ostend Company totally. The French, on the other hand, were gradually gaining ground and strengthening their position in India; for although they had been much enfeebled by the disastrous European wars that ended in 1713, their resources and their enterprising spirit revived during the tranquil interval of the next thirty years.

Under the pacific ministries of Fleury and Walpole trade and navigation now began to gather strength on both sides of the Channel; although the speculative mania that supervened in France at the beginning of this long peace had involved her East India Company in some dangerous vicissitudes. They had been first absorbed (1719) into a gigantic Company of the Indies with exclusive right of trade on the African coast as well as on the shores of the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. The next step was to place this Company, already laden with privileges and monopolies, in charge of the famous Land Bank, with Law as InspectorGeneral over all their business, commercial and finan

cial. The inevitable result was enormous inflation of the shares and operations, followed by a sharp and ruinous collapse; nor did the Company right themselves until a royal decree had cut away autocratically all their liabilities, when they again confined themselves to the East India trade. Their situation in the Indian waters now began rapidly to improve. They had occupied in 1715 the important island of Mauritius (abandoned by the Dutch), and were steadily taking up their ground side by side with the English on the south-eastern or Coromandel coast of India, where Pondicherry, the seat of the Governor-General of all the French settlements, was developing into a fine town with 70,000 inhabitants. This settlement had been established in 1674 by Francois Martin, who built the town, acquired the lands adjoining, and brought Pondicherry to such a high degree of solid prosperity during twenty-five years of wise and courageous administration, that he is regarded by some French writers as the true founder of French India. From 1735 to 1740 the capital and dividends of the Company showed a substantial increase; they held in India five chief stations, and they were trading with China; although it does not appear that they ever established themselves in the Spice Islands or the Malay archipelago. The earlier governors, Lenoir and Dumas, managed their affairs with prudence and sagacity. Dupleix, who followed them, was a man of larger calibre, full of energy and ambition, who had distinguished himself as chief of the French factory at Chandernagore on the Hooghly river. When, in 1741, he was appointed to succeed Dumas in the governorship

1

1 1681-1706. But from 1693 to 1697 the place was in the possession of the Dutch.

V

of Pondicherry, with supreme civil and military authority in the settlement, he lost no time in developing his bold and high-reaching projects for the promotion of his Company's interests.

In this manner it came to pass that, not long after the O great settlement of Europe which was accomplished at the Peace of Utrecht, France and England alone faced each other as serious competitors for the prize of Indian commerce, having distanced or disabled all other candidates. Not only in the West, but in the East, the commercial and colonial rivalry between the foremost maritime States of Europe had reached its climax towards the middle of the eighteenth century. A high spring tide of maritime enterprise, setting strongly and decisively from Europe toward the unguarded coasts of India, was bearing on its rising wave the ships of these two jealous and powerful nations. So early as 1740, when war between England and France, though not declared, was imminently threatening, the French government had been entertaining the plans of Labourdonnais for destroying the English A few years later factories in the East Indies.

At the

Dupleix was actively encouraged in his grand project of expelling us from the Coromandel coast. same time the French were making substantial progress in North America, having already formed the design of pushing down the Ohio, in order to appropriate what would now be called the Hinterland in the rear of the English colonies on the sea-coast. Toward the middle of the century, therefore, the territorial position and prospects of France in America and Asia had decidedly improved; and the growing dissensions caused by discordant political interests in Europe were exasperated by quarrels over trade and colonies beyond sea. The