gagged like the lowest criminal when he resolutely
mounted the fatal ladder; he knelt without assistance, and calmly awaited
his death-blow. "Everybody," observed D'Alembert, expressing by that
cruel saying the violence of public feeling against the condemned,
"everybody, except the hangman, has a right to kill Lally." Voltaire's
judgment, after the subsidence of passion and after the light thrown by
subsequent events upon the state of French affairs in India before
Lally's campaigns, is more just. "It was a murder committed with the
sword of justice." King Louis XV. and his government had lost India; the
rage and shame blindly excited amongst the nation by this disaster had
been visited upon the head of the unhappy general who had been last
vanquished in defending the remnants of French power. The English were
masters forever of India when the son of M. de Lally-Tollendal at last
obtained, in 1780, the rehabilitation of his father's memory. Public
opinion had not waited till then to decide the case between the condemned
and his accusers.

Whilst the French power in India, after having for an instant had the
dominion over nearly the whole peninsula, was dying out beneath the
incapacity and feebleness of its government, at the moment when the
heroic efforts of La Bourdonnais, Dupleix, and Lally were passing into
the domain of history, a people decimated by war and famine, exhausted by
a twenty years' unequal struggle, was slowly expiring, preserving to the
very last its hopes and its patriotic devotion. In the West Indies the
whole Canadian people were still maintaining, for the honor of France,
that flag which had just been allowed to slip from the desperate hands of
Lally in the East. In this case, there were no enchanting prospects of
power and riches easily acquired, of dominion over opulent princes and
submissive slaves; nothing but a constant struggle against nature, still
mistress of the vast solitudes, against vigilant rivals and a courageous
and cruel race of natives. The history of the French colonists in Canada
showed traits and presented characteristics rare in French annals; the
ardor of the French nature and the suavity of French manners seemed to be
combined with the stronger virtues of the people of the north;
everywhere, amongst the bold pioneers of civilization in the new world,
the French marched in the first rank without ever permitting themselves
to be surpassed by the intrepidity or persever