race rapidity which no people of European could equal. So great was the general terror that the Assemblies of Massachusetts and New Hampshire offered a bounty of £50 for every Indian scalp, but appear to have obtained very few. The Dutch merchants of Albany, in the colony of New York, carried on a trade in arms with the Indian allies of the French, purchased their spoil, and allowed marauding parties to march through the neighbourhood of their town towards the New England frontiers. Some reprisals were carried out against the French colony of Acadie; but, after a while, both the Canadians and the New Englanders grew so weary of the struggle that, in 1705, the Marquis de Vaudrueil, Governor of Canada, sent a commissioner to Boston with proposals for a treaty of neutrality. The General Court of Massachusetts, however, refused to entertain the project, and the war continued with unabated ferocity. A proposal by the English Government, in 1709, to subjugate Canada, with the help of the Northern and Middle colonies, was received by some of those communities with enthusiasm, but was ultimately abandoned, owing to inability to spare any of the troops then engaged on the great battle-fields of Europe. The colonists, nevertheless, made a descent on Fort Royal, in Acadie, which almost immediately surrendered, and was re-named Annapolis after the reigning Queen. Acadie was then once more called Nova Scotia, and has ever since remained beneath the English flag. When, at length, in 1711, the British Ministers made up their minds to send an expedition against Canada, it proved a ridiculous failure, owing to the gross incompetence, if not treachery, of the Admiral, Sir Hovenden Walker. The fleet consisted of fifteen ships of war and forty transports, and the military force included seven veteran regiments from the Duke of Marlborough's army, and a battalion of marines; the whole under the command of Brigadier-General Hill, a brother of Mrs. Masham, and an officer who had previously been refused a colonelcy by the great Duke, on the ground that he was totally unfitted for it. On this occasion, however, he had no opportunity of showing whether he possessed any ability or none; for Sir Hovenden Walker, when approaching the shores of Canada, mismanaged his ships with such astounding folly, though frequently warned as to what would ensue, that eight of his vessels were wrecked, and nearly nine hundred men were drowned. The conquest of Canada, which the French were not permanently to retain, was postponed for nearly fifty years. The remaining incidents of the war on the American continent were unimportant, and hostilities were brought to a close by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. The treaty, in the clauses relating to America, provided that Newfoundland, the Hudson's Bay Territories, and the conquered settlement of Annapolis, together with the whole province of Nova Scotia, or Acadie, should remain in the possession of England; but the French were permitted to retain their settlement at Cape Breton. Supremacy in the fisheries was conceded to the English of America; freedom of trade with the Spanish settlements was specifically secured; six of the most warlike of the Indian tribes were recognised as subjects of Queen Anne, and the French and English Governments bound themselves not to molest, or interfere with, the other Indian nations claimed as the subjects of either. The assignment to an English Company of the right to import negroes into Spanish America has been already described; but it may here be added that Queen Anne engaged that her subjects should, during the period of thirty years over which the privilege extended, transport to the Spanish Indies 144,000 negroes, on certain specified terms, and at the rate of 4,800 a year. The sovereigns of England and Spain were themselves shareholders in this abominable traffic. The English Queen had on a previous occasion interested herself in the slave-trade, by countenancing the operations of the Royal African Company for the transportation of negroes to America; and she and Philip V. now received a quarter each of the common stock created by the Treaty of Utrecht: the remaining half was divided amongst English merchants. One result of the recent war was to give England large accession of territory in North America; but France was left in possession of the great Mississippi valley, and the name of Louisiana was given to that vast region, in honour of the King whose end was then approaching. In the East, as well as in the West, in Asia not less than in America, the future rivalry of France and England was destined to occasion, in the middle of the eighteenth century, results affecting the condition of a large portion of mankind. From the period when we last sketched the course of Indian history to that with which we are now concerned, there had been but one conspicuous sovereignAurungzebe, a son of Shah Jehan, who gained the throne by treachery and hypocritical pretence, and reigned with splendour and success from 1678 to his death in 1707. In the earlier years of the eighteenth century, while the Mogul Empire of India still retained its authority, though be ginning to be undermined by the usurpations of A.D. 1685.] DECAY OF THE MOGUL EMPIRE. 381 other produce of the country, were freely exported. Still, the Bengal settlements, Dutch, French, and English, were denied the same local independence that was enjoyed by those in Southern and Western India. They were forbidden to have fortifications and cannon, and lay rather at the mercy of any Mogul potentate who chose to exact pecuniary contributions from them. The fate of a Portuguese community there, which had been utterly destroyed with tortures and massacre, in 1632, for resisting Shah Jehan when he usurped the throne of his father Jehanghire, was a terrible warning to all the foreigners in Bengal. provincial governors, and to be assailed by warlike | jewellery, with the indigo, spices, saltpetre, and nations arising to shake off the Mohammedan yoke, the modest pretensions of the European settlements allowed them to dwell in peace. The Portuguese at Goa, on the Malabar coast, precursors there, as in other resorts of maritime trade and tropical cultivation, of the Dutch, the French, and the English, had refrained from meddling with the internal politics of the country; and the Dutch, on the Coromandel coast, had followed their example. Commercial jealousy between the Dutch and the English, when they found themselves near neighbours in the vicinity of Madras, was the cause of some acts of ill-will, but did not, as it ultimately did with the French, become associated with a struggle for dominion in India. The English East India Company, which had in 1685 removed its earliest "factory," established at Surat, to Bombay, a former Portuguese port, given on the marriage of a Portuguese princess to Charles II., possessed also two more important establishments, those of Madras and Calcutta. It was in 1639 that the Company purchased from the local native Rajah a diminutive strip of land on the eastern coast, and built Fort St. George, with fifty houses, a Governor's mansion, and a chapel, surrounded by a wall armed with cannon. This was the origin of Madras, the name of which, like that of Bombay, is probably of Portuguese derivation. Many of that nation had been expelled by the Sultan of Golconda from a settlement of their own, and were glad to join the English, whom at first they greatly outnumbered. The Company had to pay a yearly rent or tribute to the Sultan of Golconda, and subsequently to the Nawab of the Carnatic, the feudal ruler of Southern India under the Mogul Empire. The French had a similar footing in their establishment at Pondicherry. Both Madras and Bombay, however, were prepared to defend themselves against hostile attack, to which, in the frequent outbreaks of anarchy between the reigns of different Emperors at Delhi, they were occasionally exposed. The position of the European settlements on the Hooghly, the most accessible port of navigation among the delta branches of the Ganges, was by no means equally secure. There, indeed, at Chinsura, at Chandernagore, and at Kalighat, since famous as Calcutta, the merchant venturers were permitted by the Mogul sovereign, or by his vassal, the Nawab of Bengal, to erect their factories, and to carry on trade in the cities of Patna, Dacca, and Moorshedabad, under very lucrative conditions. The manufactures of Europe, especially hardware and cutlery, found a profitable market, while the fine Indian muslins, silks, shawls, embroidery, and Although, under these circumstances, the time had not yet come for the enterprising ambition of European States to find in India a subject of political contention, the spectacle then presented by India appealed powerfully to the imagination; and some writers of that day were wont to compare Aurungzebe with Louis XIV. A satirical moralist could easily discover points of resemblance in the intolerant zeal for religious orthodoxy, the severe decorum, and the ceremonious pomp, with which a calculating despot, the crowned impersonation of grasping egotism, veils the designs of unscrupulous statecraft; but history can show equally close parallels in the Roman Empire and the Spanish Monarchy, where personal dissimulation has attended the inordinate passion for absolute power. The Mogul Empire in India was largely constructed by Akbar the Great; but every despotism of foreign rulers has within it the seeds of corruption; and its rapid decay, when the rigid official system of Aurungzebe was broken up, in the fratricidal conflicts of his feeble successors, was but a repetition of that which has happened in other Empires subsisting only by military force. Had there been any virtue or real patriotism among the ancient Hindoo princes, or any vital power in their superstitious religion, or any capability of political union among the diverse nations of that vast region, the eighteenth century might have beheld, instead of a British conquest vainly disputed by the French, the rise of a new Oriental monarchy congenial to the sentiments of the native races. But this was not to be; and the advent of direct British rule, the consequences of which are still doubtful, was prepared and rendered inevi table by incessant disorders, intolerable to the view of civilised humanity, during more than fifty years. The new native Power which actually arose, that of the Mahrattas in Western India, was a more cruel scourge, and worse agent of general oppression, than any of the northern invaders, Turk or Tartar, Afghan or Mogul, who had descended on the plains which are still surviving, and are of great historical interest. Mohammedanism, after all, did not change the ideas and habits of the majority of the Indian people, less than one-fifth of whom, and these not of the purest race, profess the creed of Islam. To the wise European observer, Christian or impartial philosopher, who can regard with sympathising compassion, instead of scorn, the many attempts of humanity to reach the altitude and breadth of divine ideas, this constancy of the countless millions of Indian souls to an ancient creed, defaced by monstrous fancies, but originally allied with high spiritual conceptions, is extremely pathetic. The car of Juggernauth, the dark and fearful worship of Siva and Kali, of Death and Destruction, the horrid martyrdom of Suttee widows, the voluntary torments of devotional insanity, were not essential parts of that religion, but were the additions of a corrupting priestcraft, and of ignorance losing the way of moral truth in the despairing gloom of ages of dark and cruel oppression. Thoughtful scholars in our own day have recognised, and the present teachings of the Brahmo-Somaj among the educated classes in Bengal have apparently proved, the germs of a pure and elevated religious doctrine in the commentaries on the Vedas, as well as in Buddhist speculations. It is no disparagement of the Hindoo mind, richly gifted as it was, judging by its literature, with intellectual refinement and vast imaginative capacity, that it refused to accept a religion which, however excellent in some respects, was thrust upon it at the point of a conqueror's sword. When all else is taken from a nation, liberty, dignity, property, and security of common life, it clings fondly to its gods, whose customary worship, after the manner of their ancestors, consecrates the domestic manners of the subject people. The substantial adherence of India to Hindooism, under a Mussulman rule which grew harsh after the liberal Akbar, and was persecution itself in the reign of Aurungzebe, shows the passive pertinacity of the vanquished but mentally superior race. It has doubtless rendered more easy the task of British administrators in governing with an equitable indifference to all forms of popular belief and worship. of the Indus and the Ganges. A powerful confederacy of warrior chieftains, whose sole object was plunder, or the continual levying of money tribute, which they called "chout," from the inhabitants of every province of India within reach of their roving bands of ferocious horsemen, long defied the viceroys of the Mogul Empire, stripped and crushed the timid and unarmed population, and could not be checked, apparently, without some foreign intervention. The founder of this frightful league of hereditary banditti was the famous freebooter Sivaji, who was born in the Western Ghaut highlands, near Poonah, in 1627, and died in 1680, having perpetrated innumerable crimes, one of the least of which was pillaging the English and Dutch factories at Surat. He laid claim to a fourth part of the yearly revenue of every district which his emissaries could visit, sword in hand, and enforced this demand by the slaughter of the inhabitants, the burning of villages, and the devastation of cultivated lands. Aurungzebe, having scarcely the military power required to subdue the Mahratta plunderer, seems to have acquiesced in his malpractices so long as they were not extended to the provinces occupied by Mohammedans; and to have given up Rajpootana especially as a prey to the spoiler. Indeed, the cold-blooded and hateful bigotry of this tyrant, who affected to be a Mussulman saint, was peculiarly gratified in withholding his protection from the Hindoos of the old religion, as idolaters deserving no care of such a pious ruler. The Mahrattas, still growing richer and stronger, and enlisting the most violent and rapacious of the local chiefs in their predatory association, soon formed a permanent Federal State, presided over by a new dignitary, styled the Peishwa, who reigned at Sattara, and whose policy was directed by a Brahmin Ministry, crafty in the pursuit of territorial aggrandisement, for no patriotic object, but for the extortion of a large revenue. Several of the more independent military members of this league, the families of Scindia and Holkar, in the Malwa country, the Guicowar of Baroda, and a branch of the Bhonsla clan in Berar or Nagpore, at a later date became detached from the Peishwa's confederacy; and their descendants were among the princes who submitted to the Imperial suzerainty of the British crown. The effects of these peculiar circumstances on the political condition of Central India, which continue to our own times, will hereafter be considered; and notice will also be taken of the situation of the more ancient Rajpoot principalities, the true representatives of early Hindoo civilisation, The Great Mogul's pageantry Court at Delhi, losing the reality of Imperial power in the feeble reigns of Bahadur Shah and Mohammed Shah and others, continued to dispense titular rank, and to receive ceremonial homage; but its viceroys and vassals, the Nizam of Hyderabad in the Deccan, the Subadar of Oude, including what are now termed the North-Western Provinces, the Nawab of Moorshedabad in Bengal, and the Nawab of the Carnatic, became the actual rulers of the Mohammedan forces in India, and sometimes procured assistance from independent or rebellious Hindoo Rajahs to promote their schemes of ambition. The Empire was falling to pieces very quickly; it was unable to repress the insurrections of the Rajpoots, of the Mahrattas, and of the Sikhs in the Punjâb; and in 1739 it was irretrievably humiliated by a Persian invasion. Nadir Kuli Khan, a Turkoman warrior of notable ferocity, born a slave, had usurped the throne of Persia, had become the famous Nadir Shah, had subdued Afghanistan, and declared war against the Mogul sovereign of India under a religious pretext. He accused Mohammed Shah of infidelity to Islam, in having failed to levy the special poll-tax, or rather fine, which was formerly imposed on the Hindoos and other nonMoslems of the Empire; and in having consented to let the Mahrattas levy for themselves a fourth share of the revenue. Aided by treason on the part of the Nizam, who stood aloof with his troops at the battle of Kurnaul, the army of Persia, comprising Tartars, Turks, and Afghans, defeated that of India, and entered the city of Delhi. The 383 accounts that Eastern historians give of the amount of plunder, and of indiscriminate massacre in the Mogul capital upon this terrible occasion, are beyond reasonable belief. Tens of thousands of citizens, men, women, and children, were slaughtered in one day; and the quantities of treasure, gold and silver, jewels, and costly stuffs or wares, carried off by Nadir Shah and his army, were reckoned worth several millions sterling. But Nadir Shah did not proceed farther in the way of conquering India; he left the Mogul Emperor still reigning, though robbed of his splendid "peacock throne," made of gold, with the bird's figure set in precious gems, the proverbial ornament of the Palace at Delhi. A niece of the Mogul was given in marriage to a son of the Shah of Persia, who then withdrew to his own dominions. India suffered once more, nine years later, a brief Afghan invasion as far as Delhi; but future Chapters of this narrative will relate the manner in which European intervention came to determine the political destiny of that part of the Eastern world, and created in the plains of Southern Asia an Empire which was ruled from England. |