nstant co-operation between British and Indians. The East India
Company extended its authority quite as much by a system of alliances
with indigenous rulers, who turned to our growing power to save them
from destruction at the hands of Haidar Ali or of the Mahratta
confederacy, as by mere force of arms, and, when it had to use force,
its most decisive victories in the field were won by armies in which
Indian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops. At
Plassey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, when the destinies of India were
still in the balance, the British, though the backbone of the Company's
forces, formed only a tithe numerically of the victorious armies that
fought under Clive and Munro. The traditions of loyal comradeship
between the Indian and the British army, only once and for a short time
seriously broken during the Mutiny of 1857, can be traced back to the
earliest days of British ascendancy, just as the map of India to-day,
with hundreds of native States, covering one-third of the total area and
nearly one-fourth of the total population under the autonomous rulership
of their own ancient dynasties, testifies to the wisdom and moderation
which inspired the policy of the East India Company in preferring,
wherever circumstances made co-operation possible, co-operation based
upon alliances to submission enforced by the sword.

In the same spirit there grew up at home with the extension of British
dominion in India a definite determination on the part of the British
Government and the British people to control the methods by which
British dominion was to be exercised and maintained. So when the British
in India ceased to be mere traders and became administrators and rulers,
they had behind them not only the driving power, but the restraining
force also, of a civilisation which was producing in England new
conceptions of personal rights destined profoundly to affect the
relations between those who govern and those who are governed. Those
conceptions which underlay both the great Cromwellian upheaval and the
more peaceful revolution of 1688 were at first limited in their
application to the free people of Britain, but they began before long to
influence also the attitude of the British people towards the alien
races brought under their sway. The motives which prompted English
colonial enterprise in its earliest stages did not differ materially
from those which prompted the Spanish and the Portuguese, the