A CRITICAL ESTIMATE OF HASTINGS

263

in England, was scarcely available to him; but because his war expenses exceeded the scale of his peace establishment, he was accused of lavish dissipation of the public income.

Hastings was thus inevitably driven to the financial transactions at Benares and Lucknow that were now

UMBRELLA TREE AND GRANITE BOULDER AT BELLARY IN THE
MADRAS PRESIDENCY.

so bitterly stigmatized as crimes by men who made no allowance for a perilous situation in a distant land, or for the weight of enormous national interests committed to the charge of the one man capable of 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 for

h

malities 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 "almost a royal position" in India, who had been recalled with indignity and 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.

CHAPTER XII

THE INTERVAL BETWEEN HASTINGS AND CORNWALLIS

1785-1786

T is an observation of Sir James Mackintosh that

I hit couse at one ont

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 England owes 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 England on behalf of American independence that they were left powerless to interfere with her thenceforward in Asia, or to maintain their rivalry at

sea.

From 1783 begins a kind of pause in Anglo-Indian affairs, varied in India only by a preliminary trial of strength with Mysore, and in England by violent partywarfare over Indian questions. The French Government still continued, according to the reports of British 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, England had a truce that lasted for ten years, to our great advantage in India, 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 Diwani in 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 Ghazipur on the northwest 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 ascendency in India at this time had by no means been conclusively established; for although we were proving ourselves the strongest of the powers

STRENGTH OF ENGLAND'S POSITION IN INDIA 267

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 England from the sea, or wrest from her the command of the great routes across the ocean between Europe and Asia. Secondly, it had become clear by this time 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 undoubtedly still operated 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 northwest 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 the English in India, that toward the end of the eighteenth century, when the Marathas and the Mysore dynasty were strong and threatening, England had little or nothing