Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/322

 But when all has been said that can be said of the work of the early adventurers something is left for explanation as to the causes which produced the wonderful results which are seen visibly shaping in the immediately preceding chapters. England, beaten, humiliated, discredited in Eastern Asia, turns her face to India. Her resources are limited, her prestige is lower than at any period in her recent history, and she has almost lost faith in herself amid the misfortunes of a period of internal conflict and;subsequent degeneracy of national morals and instincts; and yet in spite of all she steadily marks out for herself the lines upon which in the next century she advances—as regards her European rivals—to an impregnable position on the Indian peninsula. Can we account for this except by a reference to those higher influences which govern our lives? As "there's a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," so in the working of that miracle, the establishment of British rule in India, may we not see the finger of Providence?