Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/362

314 that contest had been decided in favour of the English, the Nawab had gradually descended, through the stages of a protected ally and a subordinate ruler, to the situation of a prince with nominal authority, and with a revenue heavily mortgaged for the payment of the subsidy that was the price of his protection by the Company. In this unhappy condition he naturally kept up a secret correspondence with the Mysore Sultan, his creditor's enemy, and when Mysore was taken, the Nawab's letters were discovered. Thereupon Lord Wellesley found himself amply justified, upon the double ground of political intrigue and internal misgovernment, in bringing the Karnatic wholly under British administration. The system of divided authority was, he observed, a serious calamity to the country, and for the same incontestable reason he annexed Tanjore and Surat.

The declared object of the Governor-General was now to establish the ascendency of the English power over all other states in India by a system of subsidiary treaties, so framed, as he himself stated in one of his despatches, as "to deprive them of the means of prosecuting any measure or of forming any confederacy hazardous to the security of the British Empire, and to enable us to preserve the tranquillity of India by exercising a general control over the restless spirit of ambition and violence which is characteristic of every Asiatic government." This general control he desired to impose "through the medium of alliances contracted with those states on the basis of the security and pro-