Carlisle Journal 08 Dec, 1899 Builders of India

Builders of India

Builders of India. As happened in so many other parts of the world, the English were not in pioneers, but only came on the field after the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and the Dutch had established themselves in the East.  Nor were they welcome, for the first comers were determined if possible to keep the field to themselves, and hesitated at nothing, whether force or treachery, to stop the English merchants.  The profits, however, were so enormous that the English were determined not to be excluded; nor is their persistence surprising when we find that in 1600 the profit on the voyage of a single ship to the Spice Islands was 234 per cent.  If the merchants were to maintain themselves they had to do it for themselves, for the State in those days did not protect its merchants, hence the necessity for banding together.  Seeley, in his "Expansion of England," writes that we stumbled into the creation of the Indian Empire haphazard and as if by accident.  This is so paradoxical a statement of one view of the case as to amount to a misconception of the real facts, which are that the country deliberately followed a policy that they knew must result in Empire.  From the very earliest days publicists and economic writers pointed out the strength that England might derive from the East, and how England, a small country in herself, might become powerful the riches derived from India which lay open to the enterprising European.  The marvelous nature of the result, and empire governed by a company of traders, has a little blinded us by making us imagine that no one in the first small beginnings could have foreseen so vast a dominion. At the outset the Company had a hard task to defend itself from its rivals.  It armed ships and waged private war in the East with the companies of other Powers quite regardless of the fact that these countries in Europe were at peace, for in those days international laws did not reach beyond a certain undefined distance, outside which every man fought for himself.  This system certainly had its advantages, for it allowed questions of colonial supremacy to be settled without necessarily embroiling the mother countries.  In these days of telegraphs the smallest colonial skirmish may precipitate a European war.  There is no room here to follow the varying fortunes of the struggle.  Spain and Portugal declined, the Dutch Company tended more and more to concentrate its energies in the East Indian Archipelago, besides England fought three bloody wars in European waters mainly caused by Eastern rivalries.  The result of these was the disappearance of Holland as a serious rival leaving England and France to contend for the mastery of India. So far the English Company had contented itself with trading settlements, without claiming political ownership.  This had now become impossible, for the Mogul Empire was breaking up; all protection for the factories was gone, when every petty potentate became a lawless law to himself, and disregarded the now feeble Emperor.  The policy of the French hastened the change still more.  Their governor, DUPLEIX, feeling perhaps that the French were a nation of soldiers rather than traders, had established political dominion round the French settlements and had organised the first trained Sepoy army.  The English were not slow to follow suit, thus beginning a determined and for long a doubtful struggle. French writers say that if the French Government had supported DUPLEIX India might have been French, but this leaves out of account the great factors that gave the victory to England.  England held the command of the sea, which was essential; the East India Company were prosperous, even lending money to the English Government, the French Company was bankrupt, and was only kept alive by subventions from the Treasury; the French had omitted to build on a sound financial basis the only foundation possible for colonial success.  The determining cause, however, was the difference of the home Governments.  The rule of Louis XIV, and Louis XV., externally brilliant, was utterly corrupt and rotten at the core; the far reaching attempt at conquest of those monarchs only succeeded in making France bankrupt and preparing the way for the French Revolution.  But apart from these determining factors, on the personal side alone DUPLEIX had met more than his match in CLIVE, who with small forces succeeded by daring and energy in winning astounding victories.  Once the question of mastery between the English and the French was settled, it was apparent that India must belong to the conqueror.  CLIVE with 3,000 men and eight guns defeated a native army of 50,000 men with 50 guns and Plessey, thereby conquering the whole of Bengal.  Long before this victory competent observers had foreseen that a small European army could easily subdue India with its hordes of irregular and undisciplined troops.  DUPLEIX had seen this, but fate and his own government had been against him, and he had not accomplished the necessary preliminary of getting rid of the English. The East India Company were fully satisfied with Bengal, they even tried the experiment of governing their province through a native puppet king, a plan which soon failed.  CLIVE had to be sent back to India to put down the corruption that was rampant and shameless among the Company's servants.  It was WARREN HASTINGS, however, who became famous as the administrator and organiser of European rule in India; he is the father of the great Anglo-Indian service; he was ill-repaid by party faction at home, which tried to blacken him but only succeeded in ruining him not his reputation.  Parliament at home was compelled to interfere, to regulate the Company, which with an army, a navy, a civil service, and a diplomacy of its own was literally a state within a state.  The subsequent history of India is a expansion of what has gone before.  The Company were unwilling to extend their possessions, but were forced into it by the strong military states that rose outside their borders, and threatened the peace of British India.  LORD WELLESLEY, with his younger brother, SIR ARTHUR WELLESLEY, afterwards the DUKE OF WELLINGTON (whom Napoleon called the Sepoy General,)  and LORD LAKE defeated the Mahrattas.  After WELLESLEY came a period of peace, followed by fresh expansion under LORD HASTINGS.  His rule was followed by a fresh interval of peace, until the last and most desperate struggle of all, the war with the Sikhs.  One battle was a defeat, others were drawn, those which we won were only gained at enormous cost; but the Sikhs, once conquered, became our best and most loyal soldiers, and India reached approximately the boundaries of to-day, boundaries that will probably not be stretched much further. India, unlike the colonies, has been won not by the settler and the emigrant, but by the administrator and the soldier. .....

 

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