Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/25

 FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE xvii the middle of the eighteenth century the power of England was not greater than that of France, and France had servants in the East neither less brave, nor less skilful and fortunate, than our own. But the English in India had then their nation at their back; the French had not; and again the supremacy in the East passed to the people who were willing to endure most for it. The crux in Asia has always been not the validity of rival titles, but which nation could enforce its claim. Nor has any Western nation preserved its ascendency in the East after it has lost its position in Europe. The English connection with India has grown with the growth of England, till it now forms flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. The Papal partition of the new Southern world between Spain and Portugal in 1493 forced England to try for a passage by the north; and her persistent quest for India and Cathay through the Arctic Circle in the sixteenth century became the starting-point of British exploration. At each stage our Eastern enterprise has taken the popu- lar temper of the times. Garbed in religious phrases when England was Puritan, exuberantly loyal under the Restoration, a great constitutional question at the Revolution, cynical with the cynicism of the eight- eenth century, yet quick to feel the philanthropic im- pulses of its close those impulses which brought East Indian pro-consuls before the bar of an awak- ened public opinion, which were to give freedom to