Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/226

 have been exhibited by our governors-generals and armies on the plains of Hindostan: but if there ever was one system more Machiavelian—more appropriative of the shew of justice where the basest injustice was attempted—more cold, cruel, haughty and unrelenting than another,—it is the system by which the government of the different states of India has been wrested from the hands of their respective princes and collected into the grasp of the British power. Incalculable gainers as we have been by this system, it is impossible to review it without feelings of the most poignant shame and the highest indignation. Whenever we talk to other nations of British faith and integrity, they may well point to India in derisive scorn. The system which, for more than a century, was steadily at work to strip the native princes of their dominions, and that too under the most sacred pleas of right and expediency, is a system of torture more exquisite than regal or spiritual tyranny ever before discovered; such as the world has nothing similar to shew.

Spite of the repeated instructions sent out by the Court of Directors to their servants in India, to avoid territorial acquisitions, and to cultivate only honest and honorable commerce; there is evidence that from the earliest period the desire of conquest was entertained, and was, spite of better desires, always too welcome to be abandoned. In the instructions forwarded in 1689, the Directors expounded themselves in the following words: "The increase of our revenue is the subject of our care, as much as our trade:—'t s that must maintain our force when twenty accidents may interrupt our trade;—'t is that must make us a