ruled by so consummate a statesman as Hyder Ali? There seems to have been something providential in the events that caused them to pass from traders to conquerors, at the only time when such a transition could be made either with safety or success. That their career of conquest has been occasionally marked by injustice and crime proves nothing against the position that they may have been appointed by a higher Power to work out a revolution in the East. “The dark mystery of the moral world,” in this as in a thousand other instances, remains impenetrable. Heaven selects its own agents, and all that it becomes us to say concerning such relations is, that they do not appear in all cases to be made from among men specially entitled to the honors of canonization.
The English have frequently been denounced, not only for their errors in governing India, but for their conquest of that country. The French have been especially fervent in these denunciations. It is a fact, however, that the French saw nothing wrong in subduing India until all their own plans to that end had utterly failed. The device originated with them, but the English applied it. Dupleix planned for France what Clive executed for England. The French adhered to their plans for years, and it was not until a very recent period that the last remnants of their influence disappeared from India. They saw not the evil involved in the overthrowing of virtuous nabobs and venerable viceroys, until time and a whole train of events had proved that England alone was competent to the full performance of the work. The English in India have not, on all occasions, been saints; but we are unable to see what moral right the French have to reproach them with the enumeration of their errors. In the East, France was “overcrowded” by England; and that is the sole and the very simple cause of the vast amount of “sympathy” which the French have bestowed upon suffering Indian princes, whose condition in no sense would have been improved, had fortune favored the Gallic race, instead of the Saxon, in their struggle for supremacy in Hindostan.
The prejudice that exists in many minds against England, concerning her Indian empire, is in no small degree owing to something of which she is justly proud; to the talent that characterized the prosecution—his friends called it the persecution—of Warren Hastings. No man, not even Strafford, when borne down by the whole weight of the country party in the first session of the Long Parliament, ever encountered so able a host as that which set itself to erect the ruin of the great British proconsul. He was acquitted by his judges, but he stands blackened forever on the most magnificent pages of his country's eloquence. Burke's speeches are yet read everywhere; and to Burke, Hastings was the principle of Evil incarnate. The two great divisions of civilized mankind hold Burke in lasting remembrance,—the liberals for his labors in the early part of his life, and the conservatives for his writings against the French Revolution; and it is impossible to admire him without condemning Hastings. It is equally impossible to condemn Hastings without condemning the nation for which he performed deeds so vicious and cruel, and which formally acquitted him of each and every charge preferred by Burke and his immortal associates, in the name of the Commons of England. Even those charges were the result, not of conscientious conviction on the part of the Commons, but of Mr. Pitt's determination to crush one who promised to become formidable political rival. The arguments and eloquence of such men as Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Grey, constitute a splendid armory, from which the enemies of England can forever draw admirable weapons with which to assail her Indian policy; and they have not been backward in making use of this mighty advantage. No one, who has ever sought to defend England's course in the East, but has had experience of the difficulties which those
