Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/188

152 mind of French statesmen and writers had become still more impressed by political idealism, Rousseau followed in a like vein with his discourses on the corrupting effects of luxury and modern civilization. And although these writers varied widely in their points of view, they united in attacking with caustic irony or sombre reprobation the sinister influences of priestly ambition and unscrupulous propagandism. The subordination of civil to ecclesiastical interests had too often hampered the authority of French governors in Canada, where the religious orders were much too strong; nor should we forget that in India the intrigues of the Jesuit Lavaur were held to have fatally accelerated the disgrace and condemnation of the unfortunate Lally.

But while in France the new spirit of humanitarian philosophy was consoling the nation for the loss of foreign trade and distant colonies, in England the tolerant and progressive ideas of the eighteenth century operated favourably rather than otherwise toward the spread of Asiatic dominion. As commerce has invariably bred freethinking in religion and politics all the world over, so rationalism and liberal principles in their turn helped commerce, by saving Englishmen from the mistakes and prejudices that had hampered the commercial enterprise of Spain, Portugal, and, partly, of France. England's conquests in India began at the period, about the middle of the eighteenth century, when, according to Lecky, "a latent skepticism and a wide-spread indifference might be everywhere traced among the cultivated classes."