Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/173

Rh French were expecting strong reinforcements, no immediate collision occurred on the Coromandel coast.

The French government, having resolved to attack the English possessions in the East, laid out their plan of operations, prudently enough, on the principle of a regular military campaign. They committed the charge of a strong expeditionary force to Count Lally, instructing him to abstain from attempting to penetrate inland, to avoid participation in the quarrels of the native princes, and to concentrate his efforts upon seizing the fortified stations of the English on the coast and uprooting their commerce. They warned him, in short, against reverting to the system of Dupleix and Bussy. The directors of the French Company had no wish to set out again on schemes of territorial aggrandizement; they chiefly desired the restoration of their finances and the secure establishment of their commercial monopoly by the total expulsion of the English from the Coromandel coast.

These views are treated somewhat impatiently by M. Tibulle Hamont, the latest French biographer of Lally, who writes that the French directors were better fitted to weigh out pepper than to comprehend the problems of a people's expansion; and who lays very great stress upon Bussy's magniloquent reports of his conquests in the Deccan and of his supreme influence at Haidarabad. It will be recollected that the reigning Nizam (Salabat Jang) had been established on his throne by the French auxiliary troops under Bussy, who from that time forward exercised paramount influence