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266 again in India, but their foreign policy was now suffering incipient paralysis from their growing internal complications. With France, therefore, England had a truce that lasted for ten years, to our great advantage in India, until in the final decade of the eighteenth century a fresh and furious storm broke over Europe with such violence that it rebounded upon India, and levelled most of the remaining obstacles to the expansion of the English dominion in that country.

If we are to measure the growth of the British power in India by the expansion of its territorial dominion, the interval of twenty years between Clive's acceptance of the Diwani in 1765 and the departure of Warren Hastings from India in 1785 may be reckoned as a stationary period. It is true that from Oudh we acquired Benares and Ghazipur on the northwest of Bengal in 1775 – although the transfer merely registered our possession of two districts which had long been under our political control – and that we also obtained Bassein and Salsette, small though important points close to Bombay. But during the Governor-Generalship of Hastings, we had been so far from extending our Indian domain that our hold upon our actual possessions had been severely strained, our territory had been invaded, our arms had suffered some reverses, and the safety of one Presidency capital, Madras, had been gravely endangered. In point of fact, the English ascendency in India at this time had by no means been conclusively established; for although we were proving ourselves the strongest of the powers