258 THE EXPANSION OF ENCLAND 



THK MOVEMKNT FOR THK POSSESSION OF INDFA AND THE DISCOVEHY 

 OF AUSTRALIA AXD NEW ZEALAND COLNCIDKXT WITH THE LOSS OF 

 HER AMERICAN COLONIES 



I mentioned the coincidence of the planting of Pl^'mouth and tlie 

 organization of the East India Cotni)any. I note another coincidence. 

 Washington began his worlc as the expander of EngUmd in that great 

 struggle of England for North America. In 1753 was his first expe- 

 dition beyond the up{)er Potomac to the site of the present city of 

 Pittsburg. His report of that expedition, when he came back to Vir- 

 ginia, was his first appearance in print. The next year it was reprinted 

 in London. Copies of that book by George Wasiiington, printed by 

 somebody in Fleet street, I think, are to be found in the lil>raries. 

 I love to think that into that little book shop in Fleet street, or wher- 

 •ever it was, there may have strolled one day two very different men, 

 because they were both in London in that same year, 1754, to pick up 

 that book. One of them was a young Irish lawyer who had just come 

 to London and was busy paying attention to almost everything but 

 the law. I love to tliink how that young Irish lawyer, Edmund 

 Burke, may have come into that little book .shop; and of another 

 man, of about Edmund Burke's age and of about George Washing- 

 ton's age, who came back to England that year from India, where he 

 had entered upon one of the most eventful careers in modern times. 

 It was in 1754 that Robert Clive, who had begun his work in India 

 just as George Washington began his work, came back on his first 

 visit to London. In that London book shop they might also have 

 read of the Congress at Albany, New York, at which Benjamin 

 Franklin sul^mitted his plan for the union of the colonies for tlie pur- 

 pose of defense — a noteworthy utterance of that idea of federation 

 destined to play so considerably a part in the expansion of Engl:ind. 



The movement for the po.ssession of India by England was a move- 

 ment precisely coincident with the loss of her colonies herein America. 

 Clive was l)orn in 1725, and died in 1774, just tlie year before our 

 Revolution broke out. Macaulay comparetl Clive to Napoleon as a 

 military genius, and said that if Robert Clive had not died in England 

 and had come over here, instead of Howe and Burgoyne and Clinton, 

 we might have had a harder job in getting our freedom. It is worth 

 remembering here that Cornwallis, who, so disastrously to England, 

 surrendered in America, became afterward Governor-General of India 

 and a successful administrator there, as in Ireland. It was under 

 Clive that the foundations were laid of the great British Indian em- 



