or sending two such terrible adventurers
forth to {248} the great battle-field of India. The history of our
Indian Empire would certainly have been a very different story if only
Mr. Clive had been more attached to his ne'er-do-well son, and if only
Mr. Chiswick had been better affected towards his industrious charge.
In the January of 1750 Warren Hastings said farewell to his dreams of a
scholar's garland in England and sailed for India. In the October of
the same year he landed in Bengal and altered the history of the world.

Gentlemen adventurers who went out to India in the last century in the
service of John Company seldom knew much, or indeed cared much, about
the condition of the country which they were invading. They dreamed
mostly of large fortunes, fortunes to be swiftly made and then brought
home and expended splendidly to the amazement of less fortunate
stay-at-homes. For the past history of India they did not care a penny
piece. What to them were the mythical deeds of Rama and of Krishna;
what to them the marches of Semiramis and Sesostris, or the conquests
of Alexander, or the fate and fortunes of the ancient kingdoms of the
Deccan and Hindostan? They cared nothing for the spread of Mahommedan
influence and authority, the glories of the Mogul Empire, the fate of
Tamerlane, the fame of Aurungzebe. For them the history of India began
with the merchant adventurers of 1659 and the East India Company of
1600, with the grant of Bombay to England as part of the dower which
the Princess of Portugal brought to Charles the Second. Nor were they
moved by imperial ambitions. It did not enter into their heads to
conceive or to desire the addition of a vast Indian empire to the
appanages of the English crown. They cared little for the conflicting
creeds of India, for Brahmanism and Buddhism and Jainism and Hinduism
and the sects of Islam. They knew little of the differing tongues
talked over that vast continent, more than five hundred in number, from
the Hindi of one hundred million men to the most restricted dialects of
the mountains of Assam and Nepaul. India for them meant the little
space of earth where the English had a trading interest, {249} and the
regions of the shadowy potentates beyond from whom in some way or other
money might be got.

[Sidenote: 1750--Suraj ud Dowlah]

When Warren Hastings landed in India the relations of England and of
Englishmen to India were just upon the turn. The star of