Page:Sir Thomas Munro and the British Settlement of the Madras Presidency.djvu/43

 WAR WITH HAIDAR ALT 35

mercy of capricious women, who made and unmade ministers, generals, and admirals almost every month, and when commerce and even the naval profession met with no encouragement ; I cannot but fear that when she shall direct her attention to the sea, she may wrest from Britain her empire of that element, and strip her of all her foreign possessions. When two countries have made nearly the same progress in the arts of peace and war, and when there is no material difference in the constitution of their govern- ments, that which possesses the greatest population, and the most numerous resources from the fertility of her soil, must in the end prevail over her rival. But let us leave this struggle with France, which I hope is yet at some distance, and talk of the affair which we have now upon our hands with Tipii, &c.'

Turning now from Munro's descriptions of campaigns and views on the politics of the day, we have the following graphic account of his daily life as a subaltern in India, and of the hardships and actual poverty he had to endure. The following is from a letter to his sister, dated Madras, January 23, 1789.

' I have often wished that you were transported for a few hours to my room, to be cured of your Western notions of Eastern luxury, to witness the forlorn condition of old bachelor Indian officers ; and to give them also some comfort in a consolatory fragment. You seem to think that they live like those satraps that you have read of in plays ; and that I in particular hold my state in prodigious splendour and

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