Page:Earl Canning.djvu/14

8 vicissitudes, — the import of which they were unable, at the time, to comprehend, — the paramount power among; the unstable governments and shattered nationalities of Hindustán.

Destiny had driven them — much against their will — to discard their counting-houses and ledgers for an Imperial task. Dupleix's bold conception of employing one set of natives to subjugate another had been employed to good effect. Again and again Indian troops, drilled and led by Englishmen, had triumphed over an Indian foe. One great State after another had succumbed, and — effete, prostrate, moribund — had been converted into component parts of a living organisation. The robber communities — 'jackals tearing at the carcase of the Mughal Empire' — had been tamed into order or scared to flight. There had been fierce struggles in which Maráthás or Sikhs had tested the prowess of the Western conquerors to the utmost — dark hours in which it had seemed doubtful whether those Western conquerors were destined to hold their own. But their ascendancy was now complete. Dalhousie's masterful will and firm hand had crushed the last serious effort of the fiercest of the races who had ventured to contest it. The Sikhs, after a crushing defeat at Gujarát, had bent in submission to the fated conqueror, and their Afghán allies had fled cowering through the Kháibar Pass. From the Himálaya to Cape Comorin no power questioned the supremacy of the English Ráj.

On such a theatre it was inevitable that the idiosyn-