are generally foredoomed to failure. Yet in Europe it was once an ordinary method of vexing or weakening an antagonist, and in Asia it is still a very popular kind of adventure; while Anglo-Indian history contains several examples that are invariably warnings.
Thus the backing of Raghunath Rao for the Maratha premiership turned out a disastrous speculation, for the second expedition ended in ignominious failure. Its leaders, civil and military, blundered signally and retreated disgracefully; the pretender fled back into exile; and nothing was gained except the just and enduring resentment of the Marathas. The Bombay government, says Grant Duff, had desperately sent a handful of men against the Maratha empire and had committed the conduct of such an enterprise to men totally unfit for such a charge; the truth being that the Marathas were at that time, and nearly up to the end of the century, at least a match for the English.
After this second discomfiture in the field, and after the miscarriage of some very diplomatic attempts to detach certain of the leading chiefs from the Maratha confederacy – attempts in which he was outwitted by those adepts in subtle statecraft – Hastings found himself caught in the meshes of protracted war with a loose, active, shifty, and indefatigable enemy, who well knew how to stir up trouble for him in various parts of India. Hyder Ali of Mysore, who for some years had been husbanding his resources and biding his time in the peninsula, now began to disclose ominous symptoms of the vindictive spirit that had been
