and eighteenth centuries fully sustains the reputation of this courageous and energetic people. It was through the short-sighted, ill-managed European policy of Louis XV, misguided by his mistresses and by incompetent ministers, that France lost her Indian settlements in the Seven Years' War. When it is remembered that before the end of that war France had surrendered her North American colonies, all her African settlements, and some of her finest West Indian islands, that her campaigns had been unfortunate in Germany, and that she had suffered deplorably at sea, there need be little hesitation in acknowledging that better men than Lally must have failed on the Coromandel coast.
To sum up: the immediate local causes of the English triumphs in India were, first, the conquest of Bengal, which furnished the British with the sinews of war and a firm base of operations on the mainland, whereas the French very soon exhausted their treasure-chest, and their only safe base was at Mauritius. Secondly, the English had the good luck to find a commander of military genius, well versed in Indian affairs, while the French general was inexperienced and without the slightest tincture of the capacity for dealing with Orientals which Frenchmen have often displayed.
The essential underlying causes, the primary reasons, why the French could not hold India are to be discovered in the insolvency of their East India Company, the maladministration of their affairs at home and abroad, the continual sacrifice of colonial and mercantile interests to a disastrous war-policy on the Con-
