travagant system of subsidizing a commercial Company that had plunged into the quicksand of Indian wars. In 1754, the French Company were on the verge of insolvency; their affairs were under official inquiry; they were demanding large subsidies from the treasury; and it was clear that the public credit would suffer seriously if they were allowed to go into liquidation. Dupleix had laid down the principle, which he was endeavouring to impress upon his government, that no Company could subsist in India which had not a fixed revenue from territory to provide for the cost of establishments. But at that time it was an axiom in France, and even in England, that conquest was incompatible with commerce; the opinion of all French authorities, mercantile and administrative, was unanimous against allowing a trading Company to acquire large territory; and these views had for years been impressed sedulously, though in vain, upon Dupleix.

Whether his principle was right or wrong need not be discussed, for the real point is that it was just then impracticable. The exhaustion of the Company's resources, the embarrassments of French finance, and the weakness of the French navy must have furnished the government with irresistible arguments against persisting in his policy. The true state and inevitable tendency of the contest between the two nations in India has been recognized by M. Marion, in his study of the history of French finance between 1749 and 1754. defending Machault d'Arnouville, the controller-general of that period, from the imputation of having sacrificed

In

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an empire in Asia by recalling Dupleix, he shows that if the French government had retained his services and supported his policy, the ultimate event could not have been materially changed. The whole fabric of territorial predominance which Dupleix had been building up so industriously was loosely and hastily cemented; it depended upon the superiority of a few mercenary troops, the perilous friendship of Eastern princes, and the personal qualities of those in command on the spot. It was thus exposed to all the winds of fortune and had no sure foundation.

The first thing needful before any solid dominion could be erected by the French in India was to secure their communications with Europe by breaking the power of the English at sea; but this stroke was beyond the strength of the French in 1754. In the last war the French navy had, according to Voltaire, been entirely destroyed; and though since the peace of 1748 it had recovered to some extent, yet we are told that in 1755 France had only sixty-seven ships of the line and thirty-one frigates to set against one hundred and thirty-one English men-of-war and eighty-one frigates. When the Seven Years' War began in 1756, the French did make a vigorous attempt to regain command of the waterways; and it must be clear that to their failure in that direct trial of naval strength, far more than to their abandonment of the policy of Dupleix, must be attributed the eventual disappearance of their prospects of establishing a permanent ascendency in India.

CHAPTER VI

THE SECOND FRENCH WAR

IN 1756, when a rupture with France over the North

American colonies was imminent, George II, to save Hanover, made a treaty of alliance with Frederick of Prussia, against whom the Austrian empress, Maria Theresa, had prepared an overpowering hostile coalition. Fortunately for England, the French government, then under the sinister influence of Madame de Pompadour, was persuaded into a rash and unwise conjunction with the Austrians; so that during the war France had to meet the Prussian army on land and the English navy at sea, a very formidable amphibious combination. From the beginning of the year 1756 both the English and the French in India had been expecting war, and each side had been protesting against the other's breaches of Godeheu's treaty; so that when, toward the year's end, news arrived of an open rupture in Europe, the effect was merely to substitute formal hostilities for the indirect skirmishings and threatening manœuvres that the two Companies had been carrying on in the Karnatic. But as most of the English troops had been despatched with Clive to Bengal, and as the

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French were expecting strong reinforcements, no immediate collision occurred on the Coromandel coast.

The French government, having resolved to attack the English possessions in the East, laid out their plan of operations, prudently enough, on the principle of a regular military campaign. They committed the charge of a strong expeditionary force to Count Lally, instructing him to abstain from attempting to penetrate inland, to avoid participation in the quarrels of the native princes, and to concentrate his efforts upon seizing the fortified stations of the English on the coast and uprooting their commerce. They warned him, in short, against reverting to the system of Dupleix and Bussy. The directors of the French Company had no wish to set out again on schemes of territorial aggrandizement; they chiefly desired the restoration of their finances and the secure establishment of their commercial monopoly by the total expulsion of the English from the Coromandel coast.

These views are treated somewhat impatiently by M. Tibulle Hamont, the latest French biographer of Lally, who writes that the French directors were better fitted to weigh out pepper than to comprehend the problems of a people's expansion; and who lays very great stress upon Bussy's magniloquent reports of his conquests in the Deccan and of his supreme influence at Haidarabad. It will be recollected that the reigning Nizam (Salabat Jang) had been established on his throne by the French auxiliary troops under Bussy, who from that time forward exercised paramount influence

in the state, being commandant of a small disciplined army under French officers, and in full possession of some rich districts assigned for its payment. After the peace of 1753, Bussy, whose position had not been shaken by the fall of Dupleix, went on strengthening himself in the Deccan; but the military dictatorship of a foreign adventurer inevitably aroused great jealousy

and suspicion; so that not only the ministers and the nobles, but the Nizam himself, were intriguing against him with the Marathas and even with the English. His firmness and ability enabled him to hold his ground, though not without bloodshed, and he had just put down a dangerous attempt to overthrow him in 1758, when he received a letter from Lally ordering him to repair immediately to Pondicherri.