The Story of Greater Britain.
By Viscount Morpeth.
VI. Builders of the Empire II.
Every schoolboy, as Macaulay would say, knows the names and history of CLIVE and Warren HASTINGS, largely owing to his own brilliant essays, in which he has recounted their lives with great vividness and colour, though as a politician and political heir to BURKE he has allowed that orator's partisan denunciations of HASTINGS to somewhat warp his conclusions. But if CLIVE and Warren HASTINGS are famous it is to be feared that other builders of Indian Empire are unknown, not only to "the schoolboy" but even to his seniors. This is the more regrettable as the English have always considered rightly that the conquest, and more especially the government, of India is the most creditable achievement that they have as a race accomplished. England's contribution to the work of the world has not been in the arts nor in philosophy, but in the art of politics. She has developed and given to the world for imitation a system of representative government, and she has also created and organised the greatest benevolent autocracy in existence. As to the beneficence of this rule, there can be no question, though some writers, seeing the ills that are common to Asiatic countries, drought, famine and pestilence, with their accompanying poverty, have asserted that English rule has been a failure, and that our government has impoverished the country. The present condition is certainly not all that we could wish, but if these critics would read the description of India written by BERNIER, a French doctor at the court of Aurungzebe, when the Mogul Empire was tottering to its fall, they would realise the progress that has been made. The Government was impotent: war was chronic; the country was overrun and devastated by bands of Mahrattas and other plunderers; governors thought only of what they could squeeze from their subjects, whose misery, says GERNIER, was simply inconceivable. The empire of Victoria differs both in kind and in degree from that of Aurungzebe. A history in which there has been such development must be interesting, not only for its romantic incidents, which form the vast part of history, but also because of the enormous social progress of the people, which should be the chief theme of the historian. The comparative ignorance of Englishmen in what is so interesting as well as so important, arises perhaps from the strangeness of Asiatic customs and manners as well as from the remoteness of India, and from the fact that Indian history is detached and does not fit in closely with the main stream of English history.
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