highways to the remote markets credited
with fabulous wealth which would have been otherwise lost to them
indefinitely. The handful of English merchant-venturers who under Queen
Elizabeth's charter first established three hundred years ago a few
precarious settlements on the far-flung shores of a then almost unknown
continent no more dreamt of ruling India than did the great East India
Company of which they had laid the foundations when it first sought to
extend its trading operations into the interior and sent an embassy to
court the goodwill of the mighty Moghul emperors then at the height of
their power. Throughout those early days co-operation between Indians
and Englishmen, though then for the sole purpose of trade, was the
principle that guided British enterprise in India, and the venturers
would never have grown and thriven as they did had they not laid
themselves out to secure the confidence and co-operation of the Indians
who flocked to their "factories." At home too it was not dominion, but
the profits derived from the Indian trade that occupied the mind of the
nation. Not till the disintegration of the Moghul Empire in the
eighteenth century plunged India into a welter of anarchy which
endangered not only our trade but the safety of our settlements, which,
like the foreign settlements in the Chinese Treaty Ports to-day,
attracted in increasing numbers an indigenous population in search of
security for life and property, did the Directors of the East India
Company consent to depart from their policy of absolute non-intervention
in the internal affairs of India. Nor was it till, in the course of the
great duel between England and France for the mastery of the seas which
only ended at Trafalgar, the genius of Dupleix threatened the very
existence of the East India Company that the British nation began to
face the responsibilities of British dominion in India as the only
alternative to the greater danger of French dominion. It was the French
challenge to Britain's position all over the world far more than any
deliberate policy of conquest in India that drove successive agents of
the East India Company to enlarge the area of British authority, and
successive Governments at home to acquiesce and aid in its enlargement,
until ultimately the whole peninsula was made subject to the paramount
British power from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.

But even that long period of irresistible expansion was a period of
almost co