it inevitably brought to an end the régime of the Company. The Company's supremacy had long been nominal. But it was something gained that the real relations between the British people and the peoples of India were clearly defined.

With the abolition of the East India Company in 1858 our story comes to an end. It is the story essentially of the establishment of the British dominion over India, of the gradual development of a system of government which enabled that dominion to bring great boons to the Indian peoples, and of the emergence among the rulers of this Empire of new ideas, at once more modest and more noble, of the functions which they were called upon to perform. After 1858 the theme changes. The Empire is complete and scarcely grows; the main threads of interest are now to be found in the steady increase of Indian unity, the steady development of material resources, the steady adoption of modern conceptions and methods, enabling India to play her part among the great states of the world; and above all the gradual substitution for the idea of dominion of the idea of partnership in that great brotherhood of free civilised nations which make up the British Empire. The process is not complete, and will demand yet a long time. But the glorious partnership of India with the other nations of the British Empire in the War of Civilisation has assuredly marked a great step forward in that development.

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CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY

THE theme of this book is the growth and government of the British dominion in India under the direction of the East India Company, which became a territorial power, in an almost accidental way, in the middle of the eighteenth century. No attempt will therefore be made to illustrate the history of the East India Company during its purely commercial period, which occupied the century and a half from 1600. The three passages contained in the present chapter are meant only to afford some illustration of the conditions precedent to the main story, without some understanding of which that story must remain unintelligible.

The first excerpt is from the travels of Dr. Fryer, who went out to India as a surgeon in the service of the Company, and describes the organisation and working of a typical factory of the Company as it was in 1696. The most important point to be noted is the extremely small salaries paid to the servants of the Company. It is obvious that no one would spend the best years of his life so far from home for a salary of £10 or £20 per annum, under a bond for good behaviour of £500 or £1000. These salaries were little more than retaining fees, and from the first the Company's servants looked to make their income from private trade. The terms of their indentures, printed in a later chapter (No. 30), show that this system was fully recognised by the Company itself. It is best to think of the Company's affairs as being administered, not by salaried agents, but by groups of individual traders, who in return for

a small honorarium with board and lodging, and favourable conditions for their own business, undertook to see that the Company's ships were supplied with suitable goods. This system worked well enough while the Company was purely a trading body, under the effective control of the native governments. But it was utterly unsuitable for the management of territorial possessions, and the evils of the first period of the Company's rule in Bengal (see Chapters II. and III.) are mainly to be attributed to the tardiness with which the Company recognised this fact.

The second excerpt describes the defects of the native Indian government as seen by an Englishman who had an intimate knowledge of the country. Written in 1753, Qrme's analysis of Indian government describes the condition of things existing on the eve of the establishment of the British dominion in Bengal. He treats India as a single vast Empire ruled by the Great Mogul at Delhi, the descendant of the house of Timur, which, since the time of the great Akbar in the sixteenth century, had exercised undisputed sway over northern India, and since the time of Aurangzib (1659-1707) had held a more or less nominal supremacy over the southern part of the country, the Deccan. But, when Orme wrote, the mighty Mogul Empire had already fallen into ruin. Its Nawabs, or deputies, had set up as independent princes. Adventurers (like Hyder Ali in Mysore a little later) were carving out principalities from the chaos. The fighting chiefs of the Mahratta race, who had been able, under Sivaji, to hold their own among the fortresses of the western Ghats against even the great Aurangzib, had, during the half-century since Aurangzib's death, established their power over the greater part of western and central India; while their clouds of raiding horsemen were feared in every part of India, from Tanjore to Bengal and Delhi, and collected chauth or blackmail from nearly every ruling prince. The Mahrattas were Hindus in religion; and it seemed as if the supremacy of the Mahomedan conquerors, to which the mass of the Hindus had submitted since the eleventh century, and of which the Mogul Empire

was the last and greatest expression, was about to come to an end, and to be replaced by a Hindu-Mahratta supremacy. Perhaps only the incapacity of the Mahrattas to develop an efficient system of government prevented this consummation. But in the meanwhile the unceasing raids of the Mahratta war-bands intensified the chaos. The existence of this chaos forced the European traders, English, French, and Dutch, to become military powers in self-defence. The genius of the Frenchman, Dupleix, had seen that the small bodies of European-trained native troops which the trading companies maintained could be effectively employed in the constant strife of Indian princes and adventurers; and that by these means a political ascendancy and, as a consequence, commercial monopoly might without much difficulty be secured. The dazzling success which Dupleix achieved between 1748 and 1751 in carrying out this programme, had alarmed the English, and had forced them, in self-defence, to adopt the same methods; with the result that they had succeeded in placing a prince under their protection on the throne of the Carnatic, while a French force under Bussy dominated Hyderabad, the capital of southern India. Thus the European traders had become further elements in the confusion-new claimants for a share in the inheritance of the tottering Mogul Empire.

It was thus an Empire in dissolution and confusion which Orme described. What impressed him most in all this chaos was the absence of any impartial justice, and of any efficient means of protecting the weak against the strong. In Orme's view, the Reign of Law, which is the very basis of Western civilisation, and the condition precedent to all healthy political life, simply did not exist in the India that he knew. And this was to be the one supreme gift of the British power to the peoples of India-the greatest justification of the establishment of that power.

The third excerpt, from a popular English magazine of 1757, has little historical value, except as an illustration of the way in which India appeared to the home-keeping Englishman. It is the land of fabulously rich potentates, sitting on thrones