alike of the Peishwa of the Mahrattas and of the Great Mogul himself. But the event was not wonderful in the sense that it is difficult to discover adequate causes by which it could have been produced. If we begin by remarking that authority in India had fallen on the ground through the decay of the Mogul Empire, that it lay there waiting to be picked up by somebody, and that all over India in that period adventurers of one kind or another were founding Empires, it is really not surprising that a mercantile corporation which had money to pay a mercenary force, should be able to compete with other adventurers, nor yet that it should outstrip all its competitors by bringing into the field English military science and generalship, especially when it was backed over and over again by the whole power and credit of England and directed by English statesmen.

The sum of what I have urged is that the conquest of India is not in the ordinary sense a conquest at all, because it was not the act of a state and was not accomplished by the army and the money of a state. I have pointed this out in order to remove the perplexity which must be caused by the statement that England conquered India, that is, a population as large as that of Europe and many thousand miles off, and yet that England is not a military state, though this enormous conquest was achieved by England without any exhausting effort and without any expense. The explanation of this contradiction is that England did not in the strict sense conquer India, but that certain Englishmen, who happened to reside in India at the time when the Mogul Empire fell, had a fortune like that of Hyder Ali or Runjeet Singh and rose to supreme power there.

But yet of course in its practical result the event has

proved to be a conquest of India by England. For now that the process is complete and the East India Company has been swept away we see that Queen Victoria is Empress of India, and that a Secretary, who is a member of the English Cabinet and sits in the English Parliament, is responsible for the administration of India. England as a state did not make the acquisition, yet it has fallen to England. This is merely an exemplification of the general principle, which, as I pointed out above, has governed all the settlements of Europeans outside Europe since the time of Columbus. However far they roamed, however strange and wonderful was their success, they were never able at the outset to shake off their European citizenship. Cortez and Pizarro trampled under their feet the Governments they found in America. With scarcely an effort they made themselves supreme wherever they came. But though they could set at nought in Mexico the authority of Montezuma, they could not resist or dream of resisting the authority of Charles V. who was on the other side of the Atlantic. The consequence was that whatever conquests they made by their own unassisted audacity and effort were confiscated at once and as a matter of course by Spain. So with the English in India. After 1765 the East India Company held nominally a high office in the Empire of the Great Mogul. But it was asserted at once by the English Parliament that whatever territorial acquisitions might be made by the Company were under the control of Parliament. The Great Mogul's name was scarcely mentioned in the discussion, and the question seems never to have been raised whether he would consent to the administration of his provinces of Bengal, Behar and Orissa being thus conducted under the control of a foreign Government. The Company

made part of two states at once. It was a Company under a Charter from the King of England; it was a Dewan under the Great Mogul. But it swept away the Great Mogul, as Cortez swept away Montezuma; on the other hand it submitted all its boundless acquisitions meekly to the control of England, and at last, when a century was completed from the battle of Plassey, it suffered itself to be abolished and surrendered India to the English Government.

LECTURE IV.

HOW WE GOVERN INDIA.

I HAVE considered the nature of the relation in which India stands to England and have tried to explain how this relation could spring up without a miracle. We may now advance a step and form some opinion on the question whether that relation can endure without a miracle, as it was created without one, or whether we ought to regard the government of India by the English as a kind of political tour de force, a matter of astonishment while it lasts, but certain not to last very long. For the great difficulty which the student has to contend with in studying Indian affairs is the dazzling effect of events so strange, so remote, and on a scale so large, by which he is led to think that ordinary causation is not to be expected in India, and that in that region all is miraculous. The rhetorical tone ordinarily adopted in history favours this illusion; historians are fond of parading all the strange and marvellous features of the Indian Empire, as if it were less their business to account for what happens than to make it seem more unaccountable than before.

Thus we come to think of our ascendancy in India as an exception to all ordinary rules, a standing miracle in

politics, only to be explained by the heroic qualities of the English race and their natural genius for government. So long as we take this view, it is of course impossible for us to form any opinion concerning the duration of it. What was a miracle at the beginning is likely to continue so to the end. If ordinary laws are suspended, who shall say how long the suspension is likely to last? Now I have tried to look calmly at our Empire in its beginning. I have examined the conquest of India and have found that it is indeed miraculous in the sense of being unlike our experience the revolutions of Asiatic society would naturally be unlike those of Europe-but that it is not miraculous in the sense of being unaccountable, or even difficult to account for. I now inquire whether our government of India is miraculous in this sense.

It must certainly appear so, if we assume that India is simply a conquered country and the English its conquerors. Who does not know the extreme difficulty of repressing the disaffection of a conquered population? Over and over again it has been found impossible, even where the superiority both in the number and efficiency of troops has been decidedly on the side of the conquerors. When the Spaniards failed in the Low Countries, they were the best soldiers and Spain by far the greatest state in the world. For the instinct of nationality or of separate religion more than supplies the place of valour or of discipline, being diffused through the whole population and not confined to the fighting part of it. Let us compare the parallel case of Italy. Italy corresponds in the map of Europe to India in that of Asia. It is a similar peninsula at the south of the Continent with a mighty mountain range above it and below this a great river flowing from west to east. It is still more similar in the circumstance