Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/162

126 in the French introduction of the practice of drilling a few native regiments for their own service. The Moghul army had always contained some European officers, while the Maratha chiefs were forming trained regiments within a very few years after the time of Dupleix; and so soon as the European Companies began to engage in Indian wars, the expedient of giving discipline to the mercenaries who swarmed into their camps was too obviously necessary to rank as a discovery. The real discovery of the value of organized troops had to be made, not by Europeans who knew it already, but by the natives of India, who had never before made trial of such tactics or had met such bodies in the field.

But there is no need to attempt any detraction from the high credit fairly due to Dupleix for having first started on the right road toward European conquest in India. The more interesting question is why, with so much energy, ability, and patriotism, he made so little way. To those who maintain that, but for the blindness of the French government towards the ideas of Dupleix, the blunders of colleagues or subordinates, and the final disavowal of Dupleix, France might have supplanted England in India – the true answer is that these views betray a disregard of historic proportion and an incomplete survey of the whole situation. They proceed on the narrow theory that extensive political changes may hang on the event of a small battle, or on the behaviour of a provincial general or governor at some critical moment. The strength and resources of France and England in their contests for the possession of