Page:The Marquess of Hastings, K.G..djvu/170

162 mis-spent labour, unless it is replaced by something better and more useful to the interests of mankind.

Nor was it only the right of conquest that imposed upon the Indian Government the duty of a re-settlement of the disturbances which hostilities had created, for the immediate and natural result of the war was the de facto recognition, by the whole of India, of England's supreme suzerainty; and although that position was not assumed de jure until within our own generation (some sixty years after the events we are now recording), yet none the less did British authority everywhere supplant the Mughal Emperor effectually and conclusively, and the natives of India universally acknowledged that his traditional rights had thenceforward passed away irrevocably into the keeping of the Government of Calcutta. There was consequently an almost moral as well as material force at the back of the Government, and while this contributed to make the work to be undertaken easier than might otherwise have been the case, yet it also added in no small degree to the responsibility incurred, that the reconstruction to be brought about should be equitable, satisfactory, and beneficial to the people whose happiness and future welfare was entrusted to the care of the British nation.

In the work of pacification (a description of which must necessarily be exceedingly brief and cursory in this small volume), Lord Hastings had the good fortune to be assisted by some of the most distinguished Anglo-Indian administrators that have ever served in