claimed the imperial principle of political supremacy. All his views and measures pointed toward the reconstruction of another empire in India, which he rightly believed to be the natural outcome of the British 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.

BUT

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 ascendency 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

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princes, impairing their independence and retarding the natural development of stronger organizations. Nor did our interests 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 the English protectorate should not extend beyond the actual limits of British possessions -a rule of political fortification that has never been practised in India; for England has always found it necessary to throw forward a kind of glacis in advance of her 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, on October 5, 1805, within three months after his arrival, 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 was fairly tried by the British government in India. Sir George Barlow, whom the death of Cornwallis made Governor-General for a time, 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 the English 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 Sindhia, 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 pressed upon him by the authorities in England at this period, he would have disconnected the British government from the subsidiary treaties which invested it with paramount influence in the affairs of the two great Maratha and Mohammedan states, ruled by the Peshwa at Poona and by the Nizam at Haidarabad. But the result would have been to undo the work of Lord Wellesley, to abdicate the ascendency that the British 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 the English should have abandoned.