Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/342

298 to prepare for hostilities almost immediately after his arrival at Calcutta; and he soon discovered that the restraining statutes operated to promote the very evils they were intended to prevent. Under their restrictions the English Governor-General was obliged to look on with tied hands at violent aggressions and dangerous combinations among the native states, and was held back from interposing until matters had reached a pitch at which the security of his own territory was actually and unmistakably threatened. The Mysore war, and a considerable extension of dominion, followed in spite of all injunctions and honest efforts to the contrary. Yet such was the confidence in the good intentions of Cornwallis that, when he left India in 1793, there was a general impression in England that he had merely taken the necessary steps for inaugurating a pacific and stationary policy; whereas in fact the British were on the threshold of an era of wide-ranging hostilities and immense annexations.

Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable, as illustrating the persistence of the natural forces that propelled the onward movement of English dominion, than the fact that the immediate consequence of bringing India under direct Parliamentary control was to stimulate, not to slacken, the expansion of British territories. Mr. Spencer Walpole has declared in his "History of England" that every prominent statesman of the time disliked and forbade further additions to the Company's territories; and we have seen that frequent laws were passed to check the unfortunate propensity for fighting