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174 the Resident, if the British Government were prepared to extend to them their protection. This the British Government desired to do, but were uncertain how best to act. They wished to limit the ambition of the Mahárájá to the north of the Sutlej. But, at the same time, they were well aware of his determination to bring all Sikhs, south as well as north of that river, under his supremacy, and they were afraid of thwarting him so abruptly as to cause a rupture of friendly relations and throw him into the arms of France. For, however strange it may seem in these days, when the power of France in Hindustán is represented by two or three insignificant settlements, it was very different at the beginning of the century.

The Titanic contest between England and France, of which the prize was the commercial and colonial supremacy of the world, had been fought out in India as fiercely as elsewhere, and only terminated with the Peace of Versailles in 1783. Since then, the tradition of hostility and hatred of England had been fostered in native India by French generals of ability, like the Comte de Boigne, Perron and Bourquien, who turned the Maráthá hordes into a disciplined force in the same manner as Ventura, Allard and Court transformed, forty years later, the army of the Khálsa. After this, more terrible than the wrath of kings of France or the mad fury of the Republic, the shadow of the genius and ambition of Napoleon clouded the Asiatic as well as the European sky. The echo of the cannon of Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena reached