nation in India. Without that, we are but as a great number of interlopers, united by his Majesty's royal charter, fit only to trade where nobody of power thinks fit only to prevent us; and upon this account it is that the wise Dutch, in all their general advices which we have seen, write ten paragraphs concerning their government, their civil and military policy, warfare, and the increase of their revenue, for one paragraph they write concerning trade."[1]
Spite of all pretences to the contrary—spite of all advices and exhortations from the government at home of a more unambitious character, this was the spirit that never ceased to actuate the Company, and was so clearly felt to be it, that its highest servants, in the face of more peaceful injunctions, and in the face of the Act of Parliament strictly prohibiting territorial extension, went on perpetually to add conquest to conquest, under the shew of necessity or civil treaty; and they who offended most against the letter of the law, gratified most entirely the spirit of the company and the nation. Who have been looked upon as so eminently the benefactors and honourers of the nation by Indian acquisition as Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, and the Marquess Wellesley? It is for the determined and successful opposition to the ostensible principles and annually reiterated advices of the Company, that that very Company has heaped wealth and distinctions upon these and other persons, and for which it has just recently voted an additional pension to the latter nobleman.
What then is this system of torture by which the possessions of the Indian princes have been wrung
- ↑ Mills's Hist, of British India, i. 74. Bruce, iii. 78.
