Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/389

Rh conquests, and when a powerful Tory Ministry was governing at home by measures that in these days would be denounced as the most arbitrary coercion. At such a conjunction there was little time or inclination to look narrowly into Wellesley's declarations that the intrigues of the French in India and the incapacity or disaffection of the native rulers reduced him to the necessity of dethroning or disarming them, and that for British rule to be secure it must be paramount. As a matter of fact, he was applauded and supported in measures ten times more high-handed and dictatorial than those for which Hastings had been impeached a dozen years earlier. During that interval the temper of the English Parliament had so completely changed that he could afford to ride roughshod over all opposition in India, and to regard the pacific directors of the East India Company as a pack of narrow-minded old women.

The avowed object of Lord Wellesley had been to enforce peace throughout India, and to provide for the permanent security of the British possessions by imposing upon every native state the authoritative superiority of the British government, binding them forcibly or through friendly engagements to subordinate relations with a paramount power, and effectively forestalling any future attempts to challenge England's exercise of arbitration or control. In short, whereas up to his time the British government had usually dealt with all states in India upon a footing of at least nominal political equality, Lord Wellesley revived and pro-