1832.] 
COMMERCIAL RIVALRY. 
373 
tunate Count Lally was commissioned in charge of the French 
interest, and, for a time, every thing seemed to promise a complete 
ascendency. But the Enghsh, hke certain colonies once in their 
possession, " the more they were whipped, the more they would 
not stay whipped," being now guided in their councils by the 
transcendent genius of the elder Pitt, soon regained what they 
had lost, and carried their victorious arms to all parts of the 
world. The dark intrigues of the Carnatic now followed in 
quick succession. New sultans were set up, and old nabobs put 
down, as these movements promised a profitable entry on the 
company's leger. From seventeen hundred and sixty to seven- 
teen hundred and eighty-four, the English power, under the man- 
agement of the East India Company, increased rapidly. Though 
the history of her conquests in India, like all other European 
nations, is little else than a history of continued aggression, full 
of injustice and sickening detail : and it is a matter of astonish- 
ment, that a nation like Great Britain, so watchfully jealous of 
her commercial rights, should so long have permitted her honour 
and her true interests to remain in the keeping of a heartless, 
grasping, and almost irresponsible company ; a company which 
has extended its power among a disunited and feeble people, 
until it embraces^nearly the whole of that vast region, which ex- 
tends from Cape Comorin to the mountains of Tibet, and from 
the mouth of the river Bohmapootra to the Indus. 
How often has the British nation been called on to sustain, with 
her best blood, the military operations and schemes of conquest 
of this company, among the imbecile princes of India ? And all 
for what purpose, except to raise up an anomalous power, which 
has shackled for so many years the enterprise of British mer- 
chants, and been a heavy tax on the British nation ? 
It was at this period, seventeen hundred and eighty-four, when 
the war of our revolution had been so gloriously terminated in the 
establishment of our independence, that the maritime spirit and 
intelligence of our own merchants, no longer shackled by op- 
pressive colonial restrictions, looked abroad to all parts of the 
globe ; and, though with limited capital, soon gave an earnest of 
that expansive enterprise, which has added so much to our national 
prosperity and power, and from which such high destinies may 
await us in all coming time. 
