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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