home, and that small part of the English people which gave its thoughts to our great Eastern Dependency, had gradually come to the conclusion that the old system of ruling through the make-believe of sham royalties in India could not longer endure. This conviction slowly but inevitably followed from the acceptance by Parliament and the British nation of the principle that India was not to be governed for the profit of the Governors, but for the benefit of the people.
Lord Wellesley (1798-1805) gave, as we have seen, the final development to the system of ruling India by British armies and by British administrators, under the disguise of setting up and maintaining native princes dependent upon us. The result had been two generations of petty despots, secured from the consequences of misrule by British bayonets, and spending their lives in a long listless debauchery, broken by paroxysms of cruelty and oppression. 'If they cannot plunder strangers,' wrote Sir Henry Lawrence, 'they must harry their own people. The rule holds good throughout India.'
The Times newspaper thus summed up, in 1853, the results of this system[1]. 'Sovereigns over almost all the sea-coast, we have left many rich Provinces in the interior still under the nominal
- ↑ Reproduced from Sir Edwin Arnold's Marquis of Dalhousie's Administration, vol. ii. pp. 382-84, ed. 1865.
