78 Notes of the Month on [Jan. 
In the later ages, Portugal, Holland, and France lavished their blood 
and treasure for this supremacy. In the older times, the states round the 
Mediterranean were powerful, or weak, in proportion as they possessed or 
lost this opulent connexion ; and the declaimer against the value of India 
to its present great possessor, must first prove that the course of nature 
which, since the earliest ages, has made India the source of opulence to 
the west, has been superseded, when the great experiment is to be tried 
by England; and that the languid industry, imperfect knowledge, and 
tyrannical restraints, which enfeebled and impoverished the progress of 
commerce in all ages, are more congenial to national success, than the 
admirable intelligence, exhaustless industry, and matchless freedom of 
mind, habits, and institutions, that place England at the head of the 
modern world. 
It is unquestionable that Great Britain has not, hitherto, been en- 
riched by India. The possession has been too brief; scarcely more than 
half a century has passed since the British name was almost unknown in 
Asia, since our dominion was limited to a factory, and our influence 
to the ear of some menial of the Mahometan courts, purchased by the 
humiliating submissions and bribes of a few merchants, whose ventures 
scarcely deserved the name of trade. Since that period we have had 
the up-hill work of constructing an empire. In a country hostile to our 
name, our faith, and our rights, we have been compelled to fight, at times, 
for existence ; and, in all instances, with an inferiority of means that 
made the effort as hazardous as the triumph was precarious and limited. 
We still persevered, under difficulties which never were surmounted 
by our earlier competitors for this most magnificent prize of valour and 
council ; and by the qualities which so nobly characterize our country, 
by the union of indefatigable firmness with active resolution—by blame- 
less justice and brilliant energy, we have at length established the British 
name in direct, or virtual authority, over a population of sixty millions. 
For the clamours which charge our mastery of India with usurpation, 
we shall not care, until they are supported by proof. The history of our 
dominion is plain and honourable. Established, originally, in a small 
factery in Bengal, our merchants were called on by the sovereign of the 
province to assist him against his invader. Every man has a right to 
defend himself; and the British factory, in taking up arms, were only 
resisting plunder and massacre. Their aid gave the victory to their 
protector. In his gratitude he enlarged their territory. The changes 
of government in India, where the slave often succeeds to the throne of 
the master whom he murders, often exposed the British factory to the 
violence of those lawless and plundering usurpers. The British vigour 
and discipline as often turned the attack into defeat ; and the territory torn 
from the invader consolidated the power of the settlers. The progress, 
thenceforth, was obvious, even to an extent of dominion which it has 
actually, at all times, deprecated, but to which it has been driven by the 
necessity for providing against the habitual violence and treachery of 
barbarians, whom it was always incomparably safer to meet in the 
field than to trust in treaty. But the expense of those struggles has been 
inordinate—vast armies to be supported—a multitude of functionaries to 
be kept in activity—a great system of law, commerce, and government, 
to be urged through the decayed and choked-up channels of the old 
Indian sovereignties, have absorbed the revenues of the country, and to 
this hour England is actually the poorer for her intercourse with India. 
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