Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/340

296 ment in India, where the policy of neutrality and non-interference only ripened the seeds of eventual discord, compelling the English to step in at last for the cure of evils that might have been prevented. No other considerable power in the country was interested in the preservation of order; the stronger preyed, as a matter of course, upon the weaker; and there was always the danger, almost the certainty, that any military chief who should succeed in trampling down his rivals would before long turn his accumulated force against British territory.

We may remember that the British Islands had never been able to abstain from taking part in any great war, during the eighteenth century, among the neighbouring nations of the European continent, where England owned no land except Gibraltar. There is little cause, then, for surprise that the English in India, with possessions scattered, isolated, remote from each other, intermixed with foreign territory, and exposed to easy attack on every side, except from the sea – in a country where, as Arthur Wellesley later said, no such thing as a frontier really existed – were invariably, though often reluctantly, drawn into participation with the quarrels and scrambling for dominion which in those days were continually upsetting the balance of power and the tranquillity of the country.

Thus the acts and results of Lord Cornwallis's administration show how difficult it had become for the English to stand still, or to look on indifferently at the conflicts that broke out all round them in India.