Page:History of the French in India.djvu/452

 426 THE FALL OF DUPLEIX. chap, far the most illustrious of the illustrious men whom the IX France of Louis XV. produced, only to show how un- 1754. worthy she was, in her then degraded state, of a pro- geny so deserving.* " England," says a recent French writer,*} 1 " has been much admired and often cited for having solved that great problem of how to govern, at a distance of 4,000 leagues, with some hundreds of civil functionaries and some thousands of military employes, her immense possessions in India. If there is much that is wonder- ful, much that is bold and daring, much political genius in this idea, it must be admitted that the honour of having inaugurated it belongs to Dupleix, and that England, which in the present day reaps from it the profit and the glory, has had but to follow the paths which the genius of France opened out to her." Yes, indeed ! Now that the lapse of more than a century has cleared away the passions and prejudices of that exciting period ; now that from the basis of accom- plished facts we can gaze at the ideas and conceptions of the men who were the pioneers of European conquest on Indian soil, there lives not a candid Englishman who will deny to the great French Governor the credit of having been the first to grasp the necessity of establish- ing European predominance in Southern India — to show practically how that predominance could be established and maintained. The work of Dupleix did not indeed last, because it was his misfortune to be born at a season when his country was sunk in the lowest abyss of profligacy and misgovernment ; when all the offices of the State had become the patronage of a licensed harlot ; when virtue and honour and truth were openly scoffed at and derided. It did not last, because the besotted Government he served recalled him at the beck of the immemorial enemies of France, just at the Dupleix by Godeheu is based on the t M. Xavier Raymond, official report of the auditors and
 * The account of the treatment of others published by Dupleix.