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Rh that was to compensate them for heavy military expenditure; while the English Company, though hard pressed, was by no means beaten; their troops were solid and well led, their finances in very fair condition. Dupleix might have gained ground, at best unstable and slippery, among the native princes; but in Europe the English government was remonstrating strenuously, and would certainly go beyond remonstrance whenever it should become manifest to the English people that their Indian trade and possessions were seriously menaced. The headquarters of each rival Company, at Madras and Pondicherri, lay along an open roadstead, completely exposed to attack by sea. The English fleet under Admiral Watson had just reached the coast, and the French government must have been conscious of the inferiority of their own navy. And since the treaty of 1754, which was published in Madras in January of the following year, maintained the French in possession of much larger territory on the Coromandel coast than was awarded to the English – while Bussy was still at Haidarabad with his division of five thousand well-disciplined troops – we may regard the loss of Dupleix himself, and the recognition of Mohammad Ali in the Karnatic, as the only two points in Godeheu's arrangement that could be said to have placed the French at a distinct disadvantage in India.

The French ministers were actuated, moreover, by the imperious and fundamental necessity of restoring their dilapidated finances; they could not, in justice to their overtaxed people, persist in the unsound and ex-