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Rh stronger rivals must inevitably be compelled, by fair means or forcible, to acknowledge.

When the acquisition of Bengal had given the English power a focus and a firm centralization, this assimilating process began steadily with a slow movement against stiff obstacles, but by the end of the century it had acquired great impetus and velocity. For the English viceroys were now supported by the direct strength and resolution of the nation in securing their Indian possessions; and the temper of those stormy times coloured all their proceedings. What in Hastings would have been reckoned an act of rank iniquity was in Lord Mornington (now Marquis Wellesley) no more than an energetic measure of public necessity. The views and policy of these two statesmen were essentially identical; but Hastings was striving painfully, with slender resources, on the defensive, while Wellesley, backed by a war ministry at home, boldly assumed the offensive on a magnificent scale of operations.

The dissolution of Mysore set the British dominion forward by two important steps. It finally removed an inveterate enemy, whose position had endangered the English possessions in South India for thirty years; it also gave the British complete command over the seacoast of the lower peninsula, and thus greatly diminished any risk of molestation by the French. It led, moreover, directly to the virtual extinction of that power for the control of which the English and French had fought so sharply in the days of Dupleix and Clive, the Nawabship of the Karnatic. From the time when