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Rh to enter, is that during which England was contending with the native Indian powers, not for commercial preponderance or for strips of territory and spheres of influence along the seaboard, but for supremacy over all India. Reckoning the beginning of this contest from 1756, when Clive and Admiral Watson sailed from Madras to recover Calcutta from the Nawab of Bengal, it may be taken to have been substantially determined in fifty years; although for another fifty years the expansion of British territory went on by great strides, with long halts intervening, until the natural limits of India were attained by the conquest of Sind and the Panjab.

The first thing that must strike the ordinary observer, on looking back over the hundred years from 1757 to 1857, during which the acquisition of our Indian dominion was accomplished, is the magnitude of the exploit; the next is the remarkable ease with which it was achieved. At the present moment, when, from their small island in the West, the English survey the immense Eastern empire that has grown up out of their petty trading settlements on the Indian seaboard, they are apt to be struck with wonder and a kind of dismay at the prospering of their own handiwork.

The thing is, as has been said, so unprecedented in history, and particularly it is so entirely unfamiliar to modern political ideas – we have become so unaccustomed in the Western world to build up empires in the high Roman fashion – that even those who have studied the beginnings of our Indian dominion are inclined to