UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA

HISTORY OF INDIA

CHAPTER XIII.

THE DAWN OF EMPIRE.

Section 1: Change in the Company's position-Section 2: The Nepalese war and minor disturbances-Section 3: The Pindari war.

SECTION 1.-The new Governor-General, Lord Moira, was of that excellent Anglo-Irish stock, which, from the days of Sir Eyre Coote to those of Lord Roberts, has supplied British India with so many fine officers.* As Colonel Rawdon, he had been distinguished-so far as distinction was to be had there in the American war, where he attained the post of Adjutant-General, and learned the art of strategy. After his return to Europe he was created Baron Rawdon; and about 1793 succeeded his father who had been raised to the peerage as Earl of Moira. Two years later he took part in the attack of the French royalists on Quiberon, which was so signally defeated by Hoche. A favourite of the Prince of Wales, he followed the Whigs, and in 1806 obtained the post of Master-general of the Ordnance. After a few years of London life, and the political activity of which we have already had a glimpse, he was imposed on India by the will of his master-now become Regent. Moira had by this time attained his 59th year, an age at which modern Indian * Such were also the Wellesleys, Gillespie, C. Napier, Gough, the Lawrences, and Mayo.

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officials are usually superannuated: he had no better record but that of a fair soldier and a zealous courtier; and he was undertaking the Herculean task of governing an unknown country with the additional duties of Commander-in-Chief, and under entirely new conditions.

Before relating the events of the epoch so singularly opened, it will be well to give some conception of these changes, and of the causes by which they were produced. The authority of the Company, which had chafed Wellesley and shackled Barlow and Minto, was no longer to impede the spread of the Empire; and the manner of this emancipation must now be briefly reviewed.

The Company had obtained a renewal of the Charter in 1793, as we have already noticed; on which occasion attempts were un successfully made by Glasgow, Liverpool, and Bristol, to secure a share in the Eastern trade.* But, indeed, the existing state of things was not without its recommendations, and the acts of so remote a period ought not to be altogether judged from the point of view that offers itself a hundred years later. In 1793 a great deal remained to be done before the public mind became convinced that the Eastern trade could be safely thrown open. In China there was but one port, Canton ; but it was watched and regulated by a strong and jealous Government. In India difficulties of the opposite nature existed. There could not well be treaty-ports, for want of a valid native government, with which to make treaties. There were strong reasons why the King of Great Britain should not conquer the various States of India by means of his own armies, or rule them through his own administrators. So a compromise was adopted, for which the Declaratory Act of 1788 had, in some degree, prepared the way; provision being made for a small allotment of tonnage to private trade, the monopoly of the Company had been in general renewed for another twenty

* v. Vol. I p. 290.

years; the presence of Europeans not connected with the Company continued to be forbidden; and the interdict was made expressly to include persons undertaking to go to India as missionaries or instructors of the people. Whether consciously or not, the men of those days were avoiding the errors of the Portuguese, who had lost the trade that they had tried to carry on with no chartered company and no territorial empire, but with ardent efforts for religious proselytism.

But in 1813 times were a good deal changed; and such rules might well be considered open to discussion, even among those who might have thought the matter plain twenty years earlier. Questions of deep import had arisen; as for instance in the Persian business when the Governor-General (Lord Minto), had claimed a right to send an ambassador to Teheran on the express ground that the Company's Government was vested with sovereign power within its own borders; and in that character had, as he said, been acknowledged by the Sháh. "This acknowledged character," Minto added, "as it constituted the basis so it must form the cement of our external relations." This was plain speaking, and conveyed a challenge almost bound to be taken up by Parliament and the King's Cabinet. The matter of Sovereignty was seen to involve two questions; If the Company was a Sovereign ought Sovereigns to trade? If it were engaged in trade ought it to be a Sovereign? These questions soon began to engage the attention of politicians when once they had been perceived; but there still remained minor points hardly less interesting to Parliament and the public at large. One was the point of patronage: if the Company were abolished would not the nomination to Indian administrative posts and military commissions, falling into the hands of Ministers, add a mass of influence which would enable the party in power to corrupt the Commons and the constituencies, so that it might become immovable and autocratic? That was one important point: another being as to missions and missionaries. If the Company were to be maintained what

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precautions would have to be taken against the dangers indicated by the mutiny at Vellore, on one hand, and by Minto's recent action, on the other?

The subject of the widest national interest was, and perhaps is still, the Eastern trade. In those days, certainly, when the British Isles still grew their own food, it was natural that an ideal should exist that the best relations between India and England was this: that the former should take the manufactures of the latter, paying for them in raw material, at the lowest possible rates. In early days it had not been so; if, indeed, any ideal had at all been formed; but it may rather be said that the existence of the East India Company had been required and maintained by the impossibility of obtaining an adequate supply of nutmegs and tea, pepper and piece-goods through any instrumentality equally convenient and trusty. An important modification, however, occurred about the beginning of the 19th century. The Company's agency might still be useful in regard to tea, but spices were easier to come by, now; while, as to piece-goods, the enormous improvements in machinery for twisting and spinning, and the introduction of steam-power, had made it possible to produce fabrics, at home, whose cheapness almost forbade importation. In 1808 the value of imported Indian textiles had fallen from three millions sterling to little over four hundred thousand pounds and the trade of the Company was so disorganised that the Court of Directors had to call home their cash-balances. In September of that year Mr. Dundas, the President of the Board of Control, sent a letter to the "Chairs," in which he informed them that the propriety of renewing the Charter was about to be considered by the Government, and invited them to submit to the early decision of Parliament any arguments that they might desire to urge against the abolition of the Company. To this the Chairs made answer that they could and would presently show that the maintenance of their commercial monopoly and

of their political power was alike desirable in the interests of both themselves and the public, i.e., of "England and India alike," as we should now phrase it.

A Select Committee of the Commons was appointed, which during the next four years examined many witnesses of conspicuous knowledge and importance; all the arguments for and against the commercial and political claims of the Company, were discussed in the press and debated in both chambers of the legislature; in November, 1811, a statutory notice was sent to the Court of Directors by the Speaker, signifying that the Company's commercial privileges would cease on the 10th April, 1814. That notice, indeed, was only formal, and did not, by itself, preclude the possibility of renewal; nevertheless, the tenor of all that Mr. Dundas wrote was decidedly in the direction of non-renewal. He even intimated a design of amalgamating the Company's troops with the Royal Army. Early in 1812, the President, who, on the death of his father, had become. Lord Melville, explicitly apprised the Directors that he remained entirely unconvinced by any of the arguments urged in favour of their commercial monopoly, excepting so far as the Canton trade was concerned. On this the Directors took earnest action; and, after duly consulting their constituents, the "proprietors" (as the shareholders of the Company were called), preferred their petition for renewal on 7th April, 1812. The attention of the mercantile community was now fully aroused; and petitions on the other side poured into the Lower House, alike from London, which desired to inherit the Company's monopoly, and from the merchants of the "outports" of Liverpool, etc., who wished that all monopoly should be swept away.

In May the Prime Minister was assasinated, and the unsuccessful attempt at Cabinet-making by Lord Moira took place which has been already mentioned as the cause of that nobleman's appointment to India. Two politicians acquainted with