pressure, and thus to confirm rather than impair British ascendency. Warren Hastings, in reviewing the state of Bengal at the end of his Governor-Generalship, wrote that the late war had proved to all the leading states of India "that their combined strength and politics, assisted by our great enemy the French, have not been able to destroy the solid fabric of the English power in the East, nor even to deprive it of any portion of its territories."
It was this conviction that the Company were now masters in India, that they had grown too powerful for a trading association – so powerful, indeed, as to have become an anomaly under the British constitution and even a danger to it – that gave weight and momentum to Burke 's assault upon the whole system. In his speech delivered in December, 1783, upon Fox's East India Bill, which was to transfer the Company's authority to Parliamentary Commissioners, he enlarges upon the extent of the Company's territory and the immense range of their arbitrary despotism. "With very few, and those inconsiderable, intervals, the British dominion, either in the Company's name or in the names of princes absolutely dependent on the Company, extends from the mountains that separate India from Tartary (the Himalayas) to Cape Comorin, that is, one and twenty degrees of latitude. ... If I were to take the whole aggregate of our possessions there, I should compare it, as the nearest parallel I could find, to the empire of Germany. Our immediate possessions I shall compare with the Austrian dominions, and they would
