The sum of what I have laid before you up to this point is that in India a result has been produced by causes less wonderful than is commonly supposed, which result is in magnitude more wonderful, and in the consequences which may possibly flow from it far more wonderful and great, than is imagined. But in showing how such a result could be produced without a miracle I have laid stress upon another peculiarity of this Empire, which is of fundamental importance, namely the slightness of the machinery which con- nects it with England. Let us now remark that in this respect our Indian Empire resembles our colonies. There is of course this vast difference, that our chief colonies determine in most matters their own policy through Governments which spring up by a constitu tional process out of the colonial assembly, and that India has no such independent initiative, the Viceroy himself being liable to be overruled by the Indian Secretary at home. But at the same time there isLECT. VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 295 this great resemblance, that India, like the colonies, has been held at arm’s length, that its Government has never been suffered to approach the Home Government so closely as to blend with it, or to modify its character, or to hamper its independent development. India is both constitutionally and financially an independent Empire. If the Empire of the Great Mogul had continued in its original vigour up to the present time, no doubt in foreign affairs the history of England would differ consider- ably from what it is. Several of our wars with France would have taken a different turn, especially that war of which the Egyptian expedition of Bona parte was a main incident. We can imagine too that the Crimean War would not have happened, and that we should not have taken the interest we did in the recent Eusso-Turkish war. But the con stitution of the English state would have been precisely what it is, and our domestic history would have run almost exactly the same course. Only once, I think, namely in 1783, has India come quite into the foreground of parliamentary debate and absorbed the attention of the political world. Even in the Mutiny of 1857, deeply as our feelings were stirred, the course of home politics was not aflFectcd by the affairs of India.
Accordingly if the Indian Empire were lost, the immediate and purely political effects of the change would not be great. A Secretaryship of State avouUI disappear ; the work of Parliament would be lightened. Our foreign policy would be relieved of a great 296 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
burden of anxiety. Otherwise little would immedi ately be changed. In this respect I say the Indian Empire resembles the colonies, and we are led to perceive a universal characteristic of that expansion of England which is the subject of these lectures. I have remarked before that this expansion does not seem at first sight to be of the nature of organic growth. When the boy expands into the man, the boy disappears. He does not increase hy an accretion visibly different from the original boy and attached to him so as to be easily peeled off. But it is in such a way that England seems to have increased. For the original England remains distinctly visible at the heart of Greater Britain, she still forms a distinct organism complete in herself, and she has not even formed the habit of thinking of her colonies and her Indian Empire along with herself.
Turgot compared colonies to fruit which hangs on the tree only till it is ripe. And indeed it might seem natural to picture the aggregate of English communities rather as a family than as an individual. We may say that the England of Queen Elizabeth’s time has now a large family scattered over distant seas, that this family consists for the most part of thriving colonies, but that it includes also a corpor- ation which had the good luck in the course of its trade to become ruler of a vast country. There is no objection to such an image, provided it is regarded only as an image, and is not converted by sleight of hand into an argument. But we know that a family, at least in the present state of society, is always VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 297 tending towards practical dissolution. It is a close union so long as the children are young ; it becomes a federation, and at last a loose federation, as they grow up ; finally, in the present state of society, as the grown-up sons disperse or emigrate in quest of a livelihood and the daughters are married, it often ceases practically to be a federation or even a perma nent alliance. Now we may call our Empire a family, but we must not without further investi- gation assume that it will have the fate which cannot even be said generally to attend literal families, but which attends them in the very peculiar form of society in which we happen to live. The dissolving causes which act upon families do not act in an equal degree upon states, and, what is especially to be observed, they do not act upon them nearly so much as they used to do. In the time of Turgot and of the American Revolution there was much force in the comparison between a distant dependency and a son who had left home and so practically passed out of the family. But there is much less force in it at the present day, when inventions have drawn the whole globe close together, and a new form of state on a larger scale than was known in former ages has appeared in Russia and the United States.
This consideration should make us hesitate in drawing the obvious coiiclusion from the great fact that the connection of. England with her colonies and her Indian Empire has been all along so remarkably slight. Above I pointed out with respect to the colonies that, though their connection with the 298 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LECT.
mother-country was loose at the outset, so that the secession of the American colonies was a natural effect of the causes then in operation, yet the connec tion does not steadily grow slighter and slighter, but on the contrary increases and becomes closer. The colonies have practically approached much nearer to us, all that was invidious in the old colonial system has been repealed, and they have now become a natural outlet for a superfluous popula tion, whereas in the old time, when there was as yet no surplus population, they were peopled principally by discontented refugees, who bore a grudge against the country they had left. A similar law governs our connection with India, The machinery by which the connection is main tained is slight. England has not allowed herself to be hampered by her relation to India. Enormous as the dominion is, England remains Avhat she was before she acquired it, so that, as I have said, the connection could be broken any day, though it has lasted a hundred years, without any violent wrench or any dislocation in our domestic system. But if it be inferred from this that a connection so slight must sooner or later snap, before we can admit such an inference we must consider another question. In which direction is the tendency? Does the slight connection grow looser and looser, or does it on the other hand tighten with time 1 And here again, as- in the case of the colonies, we shall find that the general tendency of our age, which brings together what is remote and which favours large political VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 299 unions, operates to strengthen rather than to weaken the connection between England and India. Macculloch, in the Note on India in his edition of Adam Smith, speaks of the trade between England and India about 1811—that is, in the days of the monopoly—as being utterly insignificant, of little more importance than that between England and Jersey or the Isle of Man. Now if trade be one of the principal bonds which unite communities together, we shall have some criterion of the tendency, and of the strength of the tendency, whether towards union or towards separation, between England and India, by comparing the present with the former state of the trade between the two countries. It was supposed in old times that the Hindus had unaltetable habits, and therefore that they would never become consumers of European produce. But now instead of Jersey or the Isle of Man we compare our trade with India to that with the United States and France—that is, with the greatest commercial communities—and we find that though indeed we receive from India much less than from them (thirty-two millions, as against thirty-nine from France and not less than a hundred and three from America in 1881), yet India comes next to them as an exporting country, and on the other hand India heads Franco and all other nations except the United States as an importer from England, for she took in the same year twenty-nine millions, whereas the countries which came next—that is, Australia and Germany—took twenty -one and seventeen re- spectively.
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Now here is a prodigious advance which has been made in the present century, and it measures, you will observe, the gradual approach of the two popula tions towards each other, not their gradual separation from each other. And thus, though politically the direct effects of disruption would not be great, economically they would be enormous. For we are to remember that it is owing to the political connection between the two countries that this commercial inter- course has been allowed to exist, and that it would cease perhaps if India became independent, and certainly if she passed into the hands of another European Power such as Russia. At the beginning of the century indeed we might have severed our- selves from India with little anxiety, and those struggles with France about our commercial factories at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta may seem to have had no sufficient motive, since the trade carried on at those stations was but insignificant. It is no longer so; the commercial stake we have in India is now very large—that is, we are more closely bound to India than we were. Look again at the moral approach that England has made towards India during the same time. Originally we had no sort of interest in the affairs of the Hindus among whom we had stationed commercial agencies. The Mogul Empire or the dissolution of the Mogul Empire did not concern us. It was no affair of ours whether the Hindus had a bad Government, or had no Govern- ment at all and were merely the prey of armed plunderers. Even when we began to conquer them, VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 301 it was not on their account but partly to resist the French, partly to protect our factories from sudden attack. For a long time after the Company had become a sovereign Power, this indifference on our part to the welfare of the natives continued. Adam Smith, writing in the eighties or about the end of the reign of Warren Hastings, says that there never was a Government so wholly indifferent to the wel fare of its subjects. This was only the natural conse- quence of the false position in which a trading company suddenly turned into a Government found itself. The anomaly and the effect of it could not but last as long as the Company. But since 1858 it has been removed. The very appearance of a selfish object is gone. The Government is now as sincerely paternal as any Government can be, and, as I ex- plained, it has abandoned the affectation of not impart ing the superior enlightenment we know ourselves to possess on the ground that the Hindus do not want it.
At the same time the introduction of the tele- graph and the shortening of the voyage to India, first by the overland route and since by the Suez Canal, has brought India much more within reach of England. It has often been contended that the effect of this change is bad, that the constant inter- ference of Downing Street and still more of English public opinion is mischievous. Let this be granted for argument’s sake. Whether it be desirable or undesirable that India should be more closely united with England, is not now the question. What con- cerns us at present is the fact that, for good or for 302 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
evil, the connection of England with India does not diminish but increases.
Once more, let us remark the speed with which our intercourse with India increases. Mr. Cunning ham in his volume lately published, entitled British India and its Rulers, compares the increase of the foreign trade of India between 1820 and 1880 with that of the foreign trade of Great Britain itself in the same period. This last increase has often excited astonishment : English foreign trade rose from about 80 to about 650 millions sterling. But Mr. Cunning ham points out that the increase of Indian trade in the same period has been even greater, and, as of course the foreign trade of India is principally with England, it follows that the tendency to commercial union between the two countries is prodigiously strong, so that fifty years hence, if no catastrophe takes place, the union will be infinitely closer than it is now.
If we combine all the facts I have hitherto ad- duced in order to form a conception of our Indian Empire the result is very singular. An Empire similar to that of Rome, in which we hold the position not merely of a ruling but of an educating and civilising race (and thus, as in the marriage of Faust with Helen of Greece, one age is married to another, the modern European to the medieval Asiatic spirit) ; this Empire held at arm’s length, paying no tribute to us, yet costing nothing except through the burden it imposes on our foreign policy, and neither modifying nor perceptibly influencing our busy domestic politics ; this Empire nevertheless TI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 303 held firmly and with a grasp which does not slacken but visibly tightens ; the union of England and India, ill-assorted and unnatural as it might seem to be, nevertheless groAving closer and closer with great rapidity under the influence of the modern condi- tions of the world, which seem favourable to vaot political unions ; all this makes up the strangest, most curious, and perhaps most instructive chapter of English history. It has been made the subject of much empty boasting, while those who have looked deeper have often been disposed to regard the whole enterprise with despondency, as a kind of romantic adventure which can lead to nothing permanent. But, as time passes, it rather appears that we are in the hands of a Providence which is greater that all statesmanship, that this fabric so blindly piled up has a chance of becoming a part of the permanent edifice of civilisation, and that the Indian achieve- ment of England as it is the strangest, may after all turn out to be the greatest, of all her achievements. At this point again we are led to turn our eyes from the present to the past, and to inquire how it could happen to us to undertake such an enterprise. I devoted a lecture to the historical question by what force we were able to subdue the people of India to our government; but this question is different. That was the question, how 1 this is the question, why 1 We see that without any supernatural force or genius it was possible to raise such an Empire, but what was the motive which impelled us to do it? How many lives, some of them noble and heroic, 304 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
many of them most laborious, have been spent in piling up this structure of empire ! Why did they do it ? Or if they themselves looked no further than their instructions, what was the motive of the authority that gave them their instructions ? If this was the Company, why did the Company desire to conquer India, and what could they gain by doing so 1 If it was the English Government, what could be its object, and how could it justify such an undertaking to Parliament 1 We may have been at times too war like, but the principal wars we have waged have borne the appearance at least of being defensive. Naked conquest for its own sake has never had attractions for us. What then did we propose to ourselves 1 The English Government assuredly has gained nothing through this acquisition, for if it has not hampered their budgets by the expense of con quest, on the other band it has not lightened them by any tribute. If we hope to discover the guilty party by the old plan of asking Cui bono 1 that is, Who profited by it? the answer must be, English commerce has profited by it. We have here a great foreign trade, which may grow to be enormous, and this trade is secured to us so long as we are masters of the Government of India. Here no doubt is a substantial acquisition, which stands us in good stead now that we find by experience how tenacious of pro tection foreign Governments are. May it then be assumed that this trade has been our sole object all along ? The hypothesis is plausible, and it is made moreVI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 305 plausible still when we remark that our Empire began evidently in commerce. To defend our factories and for no other purpose we took arms in the first instance. Our first wars in India, as they belong to the same time, so belong evidently to the same class, as our colonial wars with France. They were pro- duced by the same great cause on which I have insisted so much, the competition of the Western states for the wealth of the regions discovered in the fifteenth century. We had trade-settlements in India as we had trade-settlements in America. In both countries we encountered the same rivals, the French. In both countries English and French traders shook their fists at each other from rival commercial stations.
In America our New England and Virginia stood opposed to their Acadie and Canada ; and similarly our Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay stood opposed in India to their Pondicherry, Chandernagore, and Mahee.
The crisis came in America and India at once between 1740 and 1760, when in two wars divided by a very hollow and imperfect peace these two states struggled for supremacy, and in both quarters England was victorious. From victory over France in India we proceeded without a pause to empire over the Hindus. This fact, combined with the other fact, equally striking, of the great trade which now exists between England and India, leads very naturally to a theory that our Indian Empire has grown up from first to last out of the spirit of trade. We may imagine that after having estabhshed our X 306 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.
settlements on the coast and defended these settle- ments both from the native Powers and from the envy of the French, we then conceived the ambition of extending our commerce further inland ; that perhaps we met with new states, such as Mysore or the Mahratta Confederacy, which at first were un willing to trade with us, but that in our eager avarice we had recourse to force, let loose our armies upon them, broke down their custom-houses and flooded their territories in turn with our commodities ; that in this way we gradually advanced our Indian trade, which at first was insignificant, until it became con siderable, and at last, when we had not only intimi- dated but actually overthrown every great nativa Government, when there was no longer any Great Mogul, or any Sultan of Mysore, or any Peishwa of the Mahrattas, or any Nawab Vizir of Oude, or any Maharajah and Khalsa of the Sikhs, then, all restraints having been removed, our trade became enormous.
But it will be found on closer examination that the facts do not answer to this theory. True it is that our Empire began in trade, and that lately there has been an enormous development of trade. But the course of affairs in history is not necessarily a straight line, so that when any two points in it are determined its whole course is known. The truth is that if the spirit of English trade had been thus irrepressible and bent upon overcoming all the obstacles which lay in its path, it would not have raised wars in India, for the main obstacle was not there. The main obstacle
VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 307 to English trade was not the jealousy of native Princes, but the jealousy of the East India Company itself. Accordingly there has been no correspondence in time between the increase of trade and the advance of conquest.
Our trade on the contrary continued to be in- significant in spite of all our conquests until about 1813, and it began to advance with great rapidity soon after 1830. These dates point to the true cause of progress in trade, and they show that it is wholly independent of progress in conquest, for they are the dates of the successive Acts of Parliament by which the Company was deprived of its monopoly. Thus it appears that, while it was by the East India Company that India was conquered, it was not by the East India Company, but rather by the de- struction of the East India Company, that the great trade with India was brought into existence. Our conquests in India were made by an exclusive chartered Company, but our Indian trade did not greatly prosper until that Company ceased practically to exist.
In order to make this clearer, it will be convenient here to give such an outline of the history of the East India Company as may mark the principal stages of its progress and those alone. The East India Com pany then came into existence in the year 1600 that is, near the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. In the view we are now taking of the expansion of England it deserves note that this occurrence took place just at that time and at no time either earlier 308 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
or later. England, we have seen, assumed its modern—that is, its maritime and oceanic—character about the time of the Spanish Armada, since it was then that its first race of naval heroes appeared, and then too that it made its first attempts to colonise America. If this general statement be true, we ought to look in this period also for our first settle- ments in India. Just in this period we find them, for the creation of the East India Company took place twelve years after the defeat of the Armada.
It was created for trade, and it remained devoted to trade for a hundred and forty-eight years. During this period several important occurrences in its history took place, but none so important as to deserve our attention here. It was in 1748 that the disturbances occurred in the Deccan which forced the Company to undertake on a considerable scale the functions of government and war. Then began its second and memorable period, which is nearly as long as the first ; it embraces a hundred and ten years and ends with the abolition of the Company by Act of Parliament in 1858. It is this second period alone with which we are concerned at present. In order to understand the course of development, we must endeavour to subdivide it.
It happens accidentally that there is a certain regularity in the course of events over a great part of this period, which rarely occurs in history and which is very helpful to the memory. The Company being dependent on Parliament for a renewal of its Charter, and its affairs having since 1748 taken such VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 309 a strange turn, it was natural that Parliament should grant the renewal only for a definite term, and at the end of the term should reconsider the condition of the Company and make alterations in its organisa tion. In this way the Company became subject to a transformation, which was strictly periodic and re- curred at absolutely equal intervals. These intervals were of the length of twenty years, beginning with Lord North’s Regulating Act in 1773. If then we bear this date in mind, we acquire at the same time four other dates which of necessity are of primary importance in the history of the Company. These are 1793, 1813, 1833, and 1853.
We shall find these five dates quite as important as we might expect, and they form a very convenient framework for the history of the Company. The first is one of the most important of all. If 1748 marks the beginning of the movement which led to the creation of British India, 1773 may be said to mark the creation itself of British India. In that year began the line of Governors-General, though for a long time they had not the title of Governor General of India but only of Bengal ; then too was founded the Supreme Court of Calcutta. The enormous danger which attended the new state of our Indian affairs was at the same time met, and the root of corruption cut through, by the abolition of the power in the Company’s affairs of the share- holders or so-called Proprietors.
The next renewal in 1793 is less important, though the debates which then took place are 310 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND leot.
interesting now for the picture they present of the phase of Anglo-Indian life when it was hrahminised, when the attempt was made to keep India as a kind of inviolate paradise, into which no European and especially no missionary should be suffered to penetrate. But the date 1793 is itself as important as any other, being the date not merely of a renewal of the Charter, but also of the famous Permanent Settlement of Bengal, one of the most memorable acts of legislation in the history of the world. It was at the next renewal in 1813 that the aged Warren Hastings, then in his eightieth year, came from his retirement to give evidence before the House of Commons. This date marks the moment when the monopoly begins to crumble away, when the brahminical period comes to an end, and England prepares to pour the civilisation, Christianity, and science of the West into India.
In 1833 the monopoly disappears, and the Company may perhaps be said practically to have ceased to exist. Henceforward it is little more than a convenient organisation, convenient because of the tradition it represents and the experience which it guards, by means of which India is governed from England. At this time too the systematic legislative labours of our Indian Government begin.
Finally 1853 is the date of the introduction of the system of appointment by competition. That old question which had convulsed England in 1783 and which statesmen had been afraid to touch since, the question who should have the patronage of India or VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 311 how it should be dispensed without shaking the constitution of England, was in this way solved. But here we are reminded that history cannot for a very long time proceed in this regular manner, so convenient to our memories. The convulsion of 1857 put a final end to this periodicity, and 1873, the centenary of the Regulating Act, is no great Indian date.
It appears from this outline that 1813 is the year when the monopoly was first seriously curtailed and 1833 the year when it was destroyed. Now Macculloch when he speaks of the utter insignificance of our old trade with India has before him the statistics up to the year 1811, and the statistics which show so vast an increase in the modern trade refer to the years after 1813, and especially to those after 1833. In other words, so long as India was in the hands of those whose object was trade, the trade remained insignificant; the trade became great and at last enormous, when India began to be governed for itself and trade-considerations to be disregarded. This might seem a paradox, did Ave not remember that in dismissing trade-considerations we also de- stroyed a monopoly. But there is nothing wonderful in the fact that an exclusive Company, even when its first object is trade, carries on trade languidly, nothing wonderful in a vast trade springing up as soon as the shackles of monopoly were removed.
On the other hand we do not find that the increase of trade corresponds at all to the augmentation of our territorial possessions in India.
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There have been four great rulers in India to whom the German title of Mehrer des Eeichs or Increaser of the Empire might be given. These are Lord Olive, the founder, Lord Wellesley, Lord Hastings, and Lord Dalhousie. Roughly it may be said that the first established us along the Eastern Coast from Calcutta to Madras ; the second and third overthrew the Mahratta power and established us as lords of the middle of the country and of the Western side of the peninsula ; and the fourth, be sides consolidating these conquests, gave us the north-west and carried our frontier to the Indus. There were considerable intervals between these conquests, and accordingly they fall into separate groups. Thus there was a period of conquest be- tween 1748 and 1765, which we may label with the name of Clive, a second period beginning in 1798, which may be said to have lasted, though with a long pause, till about 1820 ; this period may bear the names of Wellesley and Lord Hastings ; and a third period of war between 1839 and 1850, but of this the first part was unfortunate, and only the second part led to conquests, of which it fell to Lord Dalhousie to reap the harvest.
Now there was no correspondence whatever in time between these territorial advances and the advance of trade. Thus we remarked how insignifi- cant the trade of India still was in 1811, and yet this was shortly after the vast annexations of Lord Wellesley. On the other hand trade took a great leap about 1830, and this is one of the peaceful in- VI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 313 tervals of the history. About the time of the mutiny annexation almost ceased, and yet the quarter of a century in which no conquests have been made has been a period of the most rapid gi-owth in trade. And thus the assertion which is often made, and which seems to be suggested by a rapid survey of the history—the assertion namely that the Empire is the mere result of a reckless pursuit of trade—proves to be as untrue as the other assertion sometimes made, that it is the result of a reckless spirit of military aggression.
Our first step to empire was very plainly taken with a view simply of defending our factories. The Madras Presidency grew out of an effort, which, in the first instance, was quite necessary, to protect Fort St. George and Fort St. David from the French. The Bengal Presidency grew in a similar way out of the evident necessity of protecting Fort William and punishing the Mussulman Nawab of Bengal, Surajah Dowlah, for his atrocity of the Black Hole.
So far then the causation is clear. In the period which immediately followed, the revolutionar}’ and corrupt period of British India, it is undeniable that we were hurried on by mere rapacity. The violent proceedings of Warren Hastings at Benares, in Oude, and Rohilcund, were of the nature of money-specula tions. If the later history of British India had been of the same kind, our Empire might fairly be said to be similar to the Empire of the Spanish in Hispaniola and Peru, and to have sprung entirely out of the reckless pursuit of gain.
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But a change took place with the advent of Lord Cornwallis in 1785. Partly by the example of his high character, partly by a judicious reform, which consisted in making the salaries of the servants of the Company considerable enough to remove the excuse for corruption, he purged the service of its immoral ity. From that time it has been morally respectable. Now among the consequences of this change we might expect, if gain were the principal inducement to conquest, to see the aggressions of the Company cease. For not only had its agents from this time a character to lose, but it was also impossible for it to engage in purely wicked enterprises of conquest, since under the double government introduced by Pitt in 1784 it would have had to make the English Ministry its accomplice. Now the English Ministry may be supposed capable of crimes of ambition, but hardly of corrupt connivance at the sordid crimes of a trading-company.
The truth is that from the time of Pitt’s India Bill the supreme management of Indian affairs passed out of the hands of the Company. Thenceforward therefore an enterprise begun for purposes of trade fell under the management of men who had no concern with trade. Thenceforward two English statesmen divided between themselves the decision of the leading Indian questions, the President of the Board of Control and the Governor-General, and as long as the Company lasted, the leading position belonged rather to the Governor-General than to the President of the Board. Now it was under thisVI PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA 315 system that the conquest of India for the most part was made, and it is certain that in this period the spirit of trade did not preside over our Indian affairs.
“With the appearance of Lord Wellesley as Governor-General in 1798 a new era begins in Indian policy. He first laid down the theory of intervention and annexation. His theory was afterwards adopted by Lord Hastings, who, by the way, before he be- came Governor-General had opposed it. Later again it was adopted with a kind of fanaticism by the last of the Governors-General who ruled in the time of the Company, Lord Dalhousie.
Now this is the theory which led to the conquest of India. I have not left myself space in this lecture to examine it. I can only say that it does not aim at increase of trade, and that accordingly, instead of being favoured, it was usually opposed by the Com pany. The Company resisted Lord “Wellesley and censured Lord Hastings ; if they were strangely compliant in dealing with Lord Dalhousie, it is to be remarked that in his time the directors had practically ceased to represent a trading Company. The theory was often applied in a most high-handed manner. Lord Dalhousie in particular stands out in history as a ruler of the type of Frederick the Great, and did deeds which are almost as difficult to justify as the seizure of Silesia or the Partition of Poland. But these acts, if crimes, are crimes of the same order as those of Frederick, crimes of ambition and of an ambition not by any means purely selfish. Neither 316 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect. vi he nor any of the great Governors-General since Warren Hastings can be suspected for a moment of sordid rapacity, and thus we see that our Indian Empire, though it began in trade and has a great trade for one of its results, yet was not really planned by tradesmen or for purposes of trade.
LECTURE VII