Page:Final French Struggles in India and on the Indian Seas.djvu/14

vi lines. It is stranger still when we consider how formidable those efforts appeared to contemporary writers, how nearly they approached success, how injuriously they did affect Anglo-Indian interests. The author of a book called Transactions in India, published in 1786, describes in clear and vivid language events in which he himself was an actor, and he paints the effect produced on the minds of the English by the daring exploits of Suffren. The French version of the same story, differing only in unimportant details, and styled Histoire de la dernière guerre, was published in 1787. Colonel Wilks, who wrote his admirable history of Southern India in the early days of the present century; who was in India, when Suffren fought his five battles with his English rival and when Stuart was reduced to extremities at Kadalúr, describes in eloquent and impartial language the dangers incurred by the Presidency of Madras in 1783, and how it was saved from those dangers only by the timely suspension of arms which preceded the Treaty of Versailles.

These are, so to speak, the contemporary records of the period. The case for the English is stated in the Transactions, that for the French in the Histoire,