Page:History of the French in India.djvu/610

 584 THE LAST STRUGGLE FOR EMPIRE. chap, of Joseph Smith, of Dalton, and of many others, stand , out in striking contrast to the feebleness, the incapacity, 1761. the indecision, of the Laws, the d'Auteuils, the Bren- niers, the Maissins, and others whom Dupleix was forced to employ. Never was England better served than during that struggle. Never was there more apparent, alike amongst her civil and military agents, that patriotic devotion to duty, which ought to be the highest aim of every servant of his country. In the French settlement this feeling burned far less brightly. The efforts of the greatest amongst her leaders were marred and thwarted by the bickerings and jealousies of subordinates. We see La Bourdonnais sacrificing the best interests of France to his greed for money and to his jealousy of Dupleix ; Godeheu, owing to the last named feeling, undoing the brilliant work of his predecessor ; Maissin refusing to annihilate the English at TrichinapalH ; de Leyrit and his Council thwarting Lally ; the very Coun- cillors scrambling for illegal gains, and dabbling in peculation ; those energies which should have been united against a common enemy employed to ruin one another. Under such circumstances the result could not have been long deferred. Sooner or later it was inevitable. But for one man the stake for which the two countries played would never have been so great. It was Dupleix who made French India, it was France who lost it. If, in the present day, there exist amongst her citizens regrets at the loss of an Empire so vast, so powerful, so important, inhabited by a people who were civilised when we were naked savages, and who possess so many claims to the sympathy and attachment of evei;y intelligent European, it will be impossible for France herself — however much she may condemn the action of her Government of those days, and lament the infatua- tion and misconduct of her countrymen — to suppress a glow of pride at the recollection that it was a child of