CHAPTER XI

HOW THE STAGE WAS SET FOR THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Thus England's star went setting in the West; but in the East coincidentally it rose continuously to greater glory. Plassey had given Bengal into her hands; Wandewash had made her authority dominant in Southern India. But as yet it was not England, the nation and the King of England, that held this scarcely defined authority. It was the great trading concern known as the East India Company.

"Some have greatness thrust upon them"; and this was remarkably true of the empire of India which Great Britain was really compelled by the force of circumstances to assume. The trading company did not desire to govern the country: they wished to fulfil their original purpose of trade, of making money. It was the aggression of the French and the oppression of the native ruler of Bengal, as we have seen, which obliged them to fight for the very liberty to trade. Further, they were compelled to maintain some kind of order in the districts in which they thus became supreme. It was not easy for them to do this under their charter as traders. The government of the native princes of Bengal was inefficient and corrupt and the people under them were in misery. An Act of the British Parliament in 1773 appointed a Governor-General with powers over all the British possessions in {146} India. Warren Hastings, a civilian in the Company's service, was the first to hold that high post, and with a strong hand he reduced to nothing the powers of the worst of the native rulers and made the government of the better among them less ineffective and corrupt. With the rulers of some of the independent States he entered into treaties and alliances. The idea of Britain's Indian Empire seems to have been born in the brain of Warren Hastings.

[Sidenote: Warren Hastings]

And the peculiar conditions of India made the realisation of that idea not only possible but inevitable. Through the whole of her story Hindustan has been a land of constant strife between various races settled on her soil and between those settled races and warlike tribes coming down upon her from the north through the passes of her great boundary mountains, the Himalayas. But the greatest cleavage of all among her people was that which still exists between the Moslems and the Hindus of the Buddhist faith. All the many divisions have been causes of jealousies and fighting, but none so constant and prolonged as those due to these two opposed faiths. It is that opposition, in the main, which has made the British Empire in India both possible and necessary--possible, because without that cleavage there might well have been a union of native strength sufficient to withstand the British domination, and necessary, because at every step the British found their trade and their peace imperilled by disturbances beyond the latest limits within which they had made good their authority. They were impelled, for their own mere safety, to push that authority further and further again. And it was a necessity imposed on them also by consideration for the sufferings of the natives in some of the worst governed States. It was a veritable "white man's burden" laid, of no will of their own, and sometimes sorely against their will, upon their shoulders.

[Illustration: WARREN HASTINGS]

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Warren Hastings had to stand a prolonged trial on his return home for what almost certainly were acts of exceeding harshness in his dealings with some of the native rulers. He was acquitted; and it is not possible for us now to try him over again. Almost certainly he dealt very hardly; but almost as certainly no man who did not deal very hardly could have done {148} what he did to bring a large part of India under a government which gave its subjects greater peace and happiness than they had known before.

As we know, there was another power besides the French with which Great Britain came into collision in the East--the Dutch. Ever since the middle of the eighteenth century there had been much ill-will in Holland against England. Holland only a little while before had been the chief naval power in the Northern seas. Her ships had even come conquering and destroying far up the Thames. And now the Dutch saw that supremacy gradually taken from them; the British Government actually passing resolutions to restrain their free right of traffic on the high seas. And at the same time Great Britain was taking much, and constantly more and more, of the carrying trade away from Holland; Great Britain was trading more and more, on her own behalf and on that of other nations, with the East; Great Britain was bringing to the West, from her ever-growing Eastern possessions, the produce of the East which used to be brought from the Dutch colonies in Dutch ships; some of these colonies and trading settlements themselves were being taken from the Dutch by the British; and where the Dutch rights were not very firmly established British traders set up settlements to compete with them.

A state of actual war between the countries existed from 1780 to 1784. The terms of the treaty which put an end to that active warfare could not put an end to their constant trade rivalry in the East in which Great Britain was usually the gainer and Holland the loser. By the date of the great convulsions caused by the French Revolution we find Holland so diminished in power as to be ready to do the bidding of Great Britain and of Prussia.

It was thus that Britain's star rose higher and {149} brighter in the East even as it sank in the West, and if we look to the far southern quarter of the world stage we find it in the ascendant there also, for in 1787 New Zealand was declared a British possession, and that declaration was followed in the next year by the colonisation of New South Wales. The beginning of the British occupation of the west coast of Africa dates from the same time. On every side therefore, except along that eastern fringe of the American continent where the colonists had gloriously won their independence, the British, the Anglo-Saxons, were extending their sway.

[Sidenote: Poyning's Act Repealed]

There was one people, British yet not Anglo-Saxon, very, much nearer the home centre, who made a bold claim, and in part a successful claim, at this moment for their independence--the Irish. By a law of George I., known as Poyning's Act, from its proposer, no measure passed by the Parliament of Ireland could become law until it had received the assent of the King of England. It was this law of which the Irish, under the lead of Grattan, their great orator, obtained the repeal in the year 1782, taking advantage of the dire straits in which England then found herself. It needs but a moment's thought to show that this repeal meant all the difference between a dependent and an independent Parliament in Ireland. It put Irishmen into the position that they were free to legislate in all Irish matters without interference from England. Irishmen in large numbers had before this emigrated to America, and naturally had been active in inflaming the anti-English feeling in the colonies. Besides all political reasons, and the real grievances under which the Irish had suffered from the English, the fact that the great majority of them were Catholics was an added occasion why these people of a Celtic origin could not be at rest under the government of the Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

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[Sidenote: Church of Rome in Ireland]

The political power of the Church of Rome, that is to say, the power of the Pope to interfere in the government, had received some severe checks even in the countries where Roman Catholicism was the religion of the State. As early as 1753 the Pope had yielded to the King of Spain the power to make appointments to the high dignities in the Church; but still the Romish Church meddled with politics abroad. Such interference was resented by the despotic kings of the Bourbon branch of the great Capet stock, both in France and Spain. The political activities of the very able and energetic order of Jesuits gave special offence to the Governments. Portugal had commenced the campaign against them by driving them out as early as 1759. In France their activities were suppressed five years later. In 1767 they were expelled from Spain, and within a very few years such pressure was put upon the Pope that he was obliged to break up their order in Italy itself. We have seen how Spain was ground beneath the heel of the Inquisition--not acting under orders from Rome but on its own initiative. Now, that is to say, in 1774, the Spanish Government asserted itself to confine the judicial power of the Inquisition to ecclesiastical cases; that is to say, that its officials might only arrest and try and punish the people guilty, or suspected of guilt, against the laws of the Church. Before that, it had been in the habit of arresting and trying and punishing persons suspected of breaking the common law of the land, the civil law. The Inquisition's claim to try these civil cases had been without legal warrant, but the Government had not till now found the courage to resist it. And this withdrawal of all such cases out of the hands of the Inquisition gave a blow that was really deadly to the power of that cruel and dreaded institution, though it was not finally abolished until nearly half a century later.

Thus, in all these strongholds of the Roman {151} Catholic faith the political activity of the Church was checked. It received no such check, however, in Ireland. That island was as true a stronghold of the old faith as any of those others and had escaped, as they had not, much, both of the darkening of the faith in the Middle Ages, and also of the storms that shook it in the Reformation. Rome's authority received no check from any Government in Ireland, because it had never come up against the authority of an Irish Government. During the years in which other Governments were growing restive under the political interference of the Church, and latterly of the Jesuits more particularly, there was no independent Government in Ireland, and the native leaders of Ireland were ready enough to welcome any form of interference with England's Government. For this reason the Church continued to be politically active in Ireland--always in opposition to Protestant England--without arousing the hostility to which it had been obliged to yield in other Catholic countries.

And now the course of this Greatest Story has brought us to the years in which the centre of the stage begins to be occupied by the tragic figure of France struggling in the throes of her revolution. Even at that time, although communication was comparatively very difficult and slow, the tremors of the revolution were felt over nearly all the world stage. Temporarily it changed the map of Europe beyond recognition. And not only temporarily, but for all time, it changed the minds of men not only in Europe, but nearly the whole world over.

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