are given by charter to the Proprietors and Directors of the East India Company, but as from the distance between the sphere of operation, and the point where their consultations are held, great obstructions must necessarily lie in the way of that prompt and secret action which the government of so vast and unsettled a country as India must require, they have gradually yielded one after one of their prerogatives into the hand of the governor-general, who is thus invested with vice-regal authority over the empire in which his dominion is seated. A company of merchants in Leadenhall street found themselves, very naturally, inadequate for the municipal regulation of a country half a hemisphere distant, and they have consequently surrendered to their agents their proconsular power, which gives them, in fact, privileges more extensive than those which are possessed by the king of Great Britain, on his native shores. The control over peace and war, the regulation of commerce, the prerogative of pardon, the supervision of justice, the patronage of government in a country where blue-book is a library in itself, the privilege of drawing bills of exchange on the company at home, which bear on their face negotiability, are powers which, centred as they are in the hands of a single individual, contribute to endow him, during the time of his administration, with authority which is, for all material purposes, supreme. It would seem as if the board of directors, after a few attempts at police legislation across the ocean, on a system so extensive that it would require magnetic powers to perfect it, had grown sick of their office, and by a single shuffle of their cards had tossed their whole authority into the hands of a dignitary who had before been only the most conspicuous among their servants. It is true that they have hung around him a few gilded manacles, which he may rattle on his arms as he stalks about in the plenitude of his sway, but such baubles have been always pleasing to the most despotic monarchs, for nothing can be more grateful to the man who feels that if his plans succeed, their whole credit will remain with him, than to know that in the case of their failure, their ignominy can be shifted in other hands. The governor-general is assisted by a council of state, consisting of five members, who have the right of expressing their opinions on all subjects that are presented for executive action, of recording their sentiments on their merits, and in case of their determined opposition to any measure which may be laid before them, of postponing its operation for forty-eight hours. If after that period the governor-general persists in his plan, he is able to carry it into execution. It is not difficult to see that under such a charter it would be impossible for the council to lay a serious restraint on the hands of the executive; nor indeed, as we shall afterwards see, do the peculiar exigencies of the empire require so much that its government should be one of caution and of reserve, as that its measures should be promptly and vigorously enforced. The civil authority of the company has under such arrangements been almost entirely transferred into the hands of the colonial administration. In the course of a few years longer, their ancient privileges and their splendid emoluments will have vanished; and their banking-house, which was once the scene where the fate of Asia was decided, will be gradually deserted, till a few superannuated clerks will be all that will remain to tell the story of its former grandeur.

It was through an accident which has afterwards afforded a theme of much romance, that the company's authority in India was established. A physician named Boughton, having accompanied a British envoy from the

factory at Surat to the court of the Great Mogul of Agra, succeeded in recovering from a fatal illness the daughter and heir of that great potentate. The ordinary course of events in so generous a climate would have been, we should think, to have raised the successful practitioner to the throne which he saved from an early pall; but the maxims of trade seem to have crept as far as the palace of the Great Mogul, and instead of raising Dr. Boughton at once to royal honors, the grateful father thought it more expedient to endow him with the privilege of trading wherever he liked throughout the Mogul empire. We are sorry to say that the physician was devoid of those romantic considerations which should have induced him to have retained for ever so touching a keepsake, for it seems that no sooner had he left the court, than, to the horror of his royal benefactor, he sold his charter to the East India Company, who immediately took advantage of it by erecting, in 1656, on the banks of the Hoogly, on the spot where Calcutta now stands, the trading-house that was to form the centre of a future empire.

Could the merchants who were present at its erection have looked beyond its site, they would have seen a country which was at once the most vast and the most fertile that had ever been inhabited by a civilized nation. They would have seen to the north the lofty limits of the Himmelayahs, while far to the south were stretched along the Arabian Sea, the mountains of Gaut, confining the rich and beautiful coasts of Cutch and of Belochistan. To the south lay Bengal, purple with poppy fields, and by them stood the Ganges, with its crooked roots coiled round the spot where their settlement was planted. If they had been pointed to the vast tract of Chinese Tartary, swathed around the centre of Asia like a belt which it would take a degree of latitude to measure, and had been then turned farther to the west, where the golden gates of the capitol of Persia were opened before them; and had then been told that over the vast region upon which their eye wandered, they should soon bear sway, that their children should be nobles, and their servants nabobs, they would probably have shrunk from such perilous honors, and would have drawn their heads back again within the limits of their trading-house, to nestle in quiet in the comfort of unmolested gain. Fraud and violence! The field was red with blood, and the council chamber tangled with snares; and if they could have anticipated the sad temptations into which their probity might be seduced by their avarice, and the misery and the bloodshed that would follow, they might have been contented to traffic with a Hindoo prince, or to higgle with a Chinese mandarin. We do not charge on the British authorities the deliberate conception of those measures of deceit which were afterwards perpetrated by their agents. They were brought about by the supposed necessity which was induced by the perfidy of the chiefs who opposed them. We must in the first place remember the relative positions of the combatants, and reflect that the army of the one was vast, though imperfectly disciplined, while against it was opposed a handful of foreign troops whose polished armor could scarcely compensate for their inferior size. In 1756, a dispute took place between the English factory in Bengal, and the nabob of that country, which was the cause of that horrible Calcutta massacre, which afforded the English so admirable a plea for the vengeance which they determined to wreak. If Clive wanted provocation for the conquest he was about to make, there it was. He was at Madras at the time, at the head of nine hundred men; but with

that intuitive sagacity which marked him even in the hours of his most fearful onsets, he marched to Calcutta, before the native forces could awake from the sleep into which their glutted cruelty had cast them. An army of 20,000 Indians tottered out to meet him, but like puppets in an assaulted show-box, they were annihilated in the shock.

But it was not at the threshold of the palace that Clive could rest. There arose a civil war between the pretenders to the Bengal throne, and in order to settle the disputes which by a little concession they could have extinguished, the rival candidates called in the assistance of an arbitrator, who at a blow drove them together from their prey. The British general found all Bengal looking on with indifference at the tournament in which their leaders were engaged; and while the few native troops who entered into the contest were ranged on the side of Meer Jaffier, Surajee, who boasted an equal title to the crown, found that through the aid of the remnant of the French army, he was more than a match for his rival. The wild but splendid game that had been chalked out by Dupleiss on the Asiatic peninsula, had then been pushed to desperation, and it was a final and desperate move, that the civil disturbances in Bengal were fomented, and the claims of Surajee had been supported by the remains of that celebrated army which had once claimed the continent as its prize. Clive soon determined on the policy which was most congenial to his interest. Though his original troops were rather weakened than reinforced by their victories, and though his native allies thought it presumptuous in them to buckle themselves arm to arm with heroes whose prowess bore about it marks of inspiration, he marched directly against the French and Indian army of 60,000 drilled soldiers, and so tumultuously defeated them that their cannon was left in many cases on the field before the slow torch had touched their powder. The old Jugurthian tactics were renewed. Meer Jaffier was placed on the Bengal throne more firmly than any of his ancestors, because he was placed there as a column on the capital of which his allies had erected a sovereignty so ponderous, that if he flinched, he would be crushed beneath its weight. He became, at the best, the mesne tenant of the kingdom of which he had once possessed the absolute fee, and he found that Clive was a lord paramount, who would exact from him the minutest homage, as well as the most enormous rent. The sum of twenty millions of rupees were drawn from him as a tribute for assistance which he would have willingly dispensed with; and he found, after he had held the sceptre a little while, that his allies claimed it as their prerogative to appoint his successor, and ultimately to supersede himself.

The Dutch troops, who had for some time past played a conspicuous part in the Carnatic, made an ineffectual effort to regain their lost position. Clive succeeded by dint of manoeuvres, which, unfortunately for his character, he was very much addicted to, in buying from the emperor of Delhi through an annual stipend, which, at the time it was granted, was not meant to be persevered in, his feudal sovereignty over the province of Bengal. Nothing now remained for the company to effect, than by the aid of a few more easily purchased victories, to dethrone the surrounding nabobs, and to huddle them together in an asylum, as the pensioned dependents of the British crown. The governor-general, for to that rank Clive had been elevated, had officially proclaimed the incapacity of the reigning princes for the province of government, and argued therefore that it was his duty, as self-constituted overseer of the plantations which

he had ransacked, to draw away from them their remaining authority, and to assume for himself the equitable direction of their affairs. It would have been more conformable to precedent to have formally sued out a writ of chancery for the committing the custody of the refractory nabobs to a special committee, who should be appointed directly by the government who had humbled them; but as Lord Clive was unwilling to pass through the labyrinth of so tedious a procedure, he cut at once the chain which kept up the semblance of national authority, and in ten years after the first English victory, the ancient principalities of Hindoostan were demolished.

In the year 1785, when Warren Hastings was withdrawn from the post of governor-general, in which he succeeded Clive, to play the victim in the most splendid instance of ineffectual prosecution on record, the British arms had made conquests in the south of India, as extensive as those which they had previously achieved in the north. The provinces of Guntoor and the Circars had been wrested from the viceroy of Deccan; who, though nominally the subject of the Great Mogul, had been, till the hour of his final overthrow, the independent ruler of ten millions of people. We shall not detail the means by which the conquests of Warren Hastings were effected. They are written in words that cannot easily be washed away. Forty years ago, he was acquitted after a trial the longest and the most harassing in history; but he was acquitted because, as the disgrace which he had already suffered had brought him close to his grave, it seemed an unnecessary exertion of public justice to hurry him to a violent and ignominious death; because, secondly, his friends had been committed on a national scale, as the widows and the fatherless whom he had robbed had been the princes of an ancient though plundered empire; and because, finally, he had come with empty pockets through the treasures which he had collected for his masters, without having undergone the accusation of having peculated for anybody but for themselves.

It is probable that the subsequent administration would willingly have extricated themselves from the tortuous policy that had been adopted by Clive and Hastings, but it was more easy to weave the snares which they had invented, than to drop them after they had lost their use. Like the South American buffalo hunters, they had careered over the plains of India with lassoo in hand, in pursuit of the objects of their chase, but as their victims had grown alert under the experience, and had become accustomed to its exercise, they found it difficult to hit upon any scheme which they could manage so well, which would not be easily eluded. We think that had Lord Clive pressed his conquests with that singleness of purpose which in his greatest difficulties he displayed, he would have planted his standard more strongly, for it would have been propped up by the respect of the conquered people. But the rudest nation among them could not but see through the flimsy veil that was flung before their eyes. It became with them the consummation of art, to cast back on the face of the deceiver, the snares which he had constructed for their own detention. They had been traitors themselves from the beginning, and they were not so much enraged at being temporarily defeated, as at being entirely out-duped. But had it not been for their extraordinary good fortune in the selection of a chief, and for the occasional assistance of the French revolutionary government, the insurgent tribes would have been one by one annihilated, before they could have had the opportunity to have consolidated their strength. Hyder Ali had been in his boyhood a camel

driver; and among the wild and warlike tribes who hover over the sands of Arabia, he had caught his habits and his principles. Implacable hatred to England, devotion to whatever could oppose her, had become the cardinal passion in his breast, and he stood by the camp-fires of the Indian council like Scipio in the Roman senate, in urging, summer and winter, the destruction of their successful enemy.

The crusade against the usurping nation, the delivery of the brahminical city from their profane hands, the second destruction of Calcutta, became the objects to which for years his energies had been directed. He had been able, even in his own short lifetime, to span the history of the English conquests in India, and as each fresh inch of ground had been snatched away, he had steeled himself anew for the task of indiscriminating revenge which he was meditating. Supported by France, he marched suddenly against Madras, which was then the centre of the British forces, and so unexpected and vigorous was his onset, that it shook to its roots the youthful empire of Bengal. Accepting from the revolutionary convention the title of French Citizen, he held in the one hand the Jacobin cap and the liberty pole; while in the other, he brandished the bloody sword and the loaded sceptre which the absolute princes of his own land had wielded. The Sultan of Mysore hung out of his prisoncastle a bloody banner, on which he had written the epithets which were borne by the most sanguinary levellers of the reign of terror.

When the Marquis Wellesley heard that Tippoo Saib, who had, on the death of his father, Hyder Ali, succeeded to the command of his army and treasures, had marshalled together his forces, and had concentrated the scattered energies of the Mahratta chiefs, he saw with that plain sagacity which formed his chief characteristic, that on the event of the approaching struggle hung the destiny of the east. The viceroy of Deccan, who had for some time fluctuated between the councils of the French and English residents, had at last unfurled his colors, and was just on the eve of taking the field with the tricolored cockade perched on the crest of his mussulman's turban, when he was startled by the charge music of the British trumpets. The baked meats which he had prepared for the funeral ceremonies of his enemies, were served up as the wedding feast which adorned the nuptials into which he found himself rather unwillingly dragged. The troops which he had equipped to lead against Calcutta, were turned about, and found themselves marching against the Mahratta chiefs. Tippoo Saib had seen too many examples of English gallantry, to doubt the manner in which the new alliance had been achieved, or the object for which it had been contracted; but it is said that when he saw the Hindoo and the English soldiers mingled rank by rank, he rode anxiously around the camp, and extorted again from the swarthy chiefs that token of wild allegiance which can alone afford to them the solemnity of an oath. The naked arms of the Indian captains, the blood drawn from their veins, the solemn incantations which were sung around them by their priests, the strange charms which their magic required, and the uncertain hour which had been chosen to invoke them, were fitted to impress on the superstitious minds of those who joined in the ceremony, the awful stability of their engagements. It was under the command of Colonel Arthur Wellesley that the British troops stormed Seringapatam. The blackhole of Calcutta, we have said, was the overture to those terrible scenes ⚫ of violence and fraud which desolated for half a century the Carnatic: it