Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/555

Rh of events and influences, their result is none the less singular. One remarkable characteristic of the history of the British dominion in Asia is that it affords an entire and connected view of the germination, growth, and expansion of a first-class territorial sovereignty. The ancient world has left us an unbroken record of the life of the Roman state, from its birth to its full strength and stature; but the phenomenon of an empire's complete evolution is most rare in modern times, and it may be said that India is the only example now existing. The Spanish dominion in America grew to vast dimensions out of the conquest of Hispaniola by Columbus, but the nineteenth century witnessed its disintegration, until at the present day Spain retains only a fragment of her former possessions.

The situation of the Indian Empire is thus unique in many respects; the annals of modern sovereignties show no parallel; and people still ask whether good or ill will come of it. When Sir James Mackintosh remarked that England had lost a great dominion in North America in 1783 and had won another in India by 1805, he added that it was still uncertain whether the former was any real loss, or the latter any permanent gain. Mr. Spencer Walpole, a much later authority, inclines toward the view that in the end nothing will have been gained. "Centuries hence," he writes in his "History of England," "some philosophic historian ... will relate the history of the British in India as a romantic episode which has had no appreciable effect upon the progress of the human family."