Page:Final French Struggles in India and on the Indian Seas.djvu/15

Rh and the events they record are summarised by an English writer, likewise an eye-witness. Yet the reader of the earlier editions of Mill's History of India would rise from the perusal of his description of the war terminated in 1783, and of its details, without the smallest suspicion that the supremacy of the English in Southern India had been greatly endangered. The account is more than meagre. It induces a belief that important events were unimportant. In a word, it suppresses the point of the subject of which it professes to treat.

A writer so honest and so conscientious as the late Professor H. H. Wilson could not pass over this omission without notice. The foot-note in which he gives to the subject its true point, although short, is most suggestive. "It seems probable," he writes, "that but for the opportune occurrence of peace with France the South of India would have been lost to the English. The annihilation of the army at Cuddalore would have been followed by the siege of Madras, and there was little chance of defending it successfully against Tippoo and the French." The conclusion arrived at by Professor Wilson is so fully borne out by the facts of the case that the omission