ed, still retained a restricted
independence, and for an interval the home authorities declined to
permit any interference with them, even though they were manifestly
giving protection to bands of armed raiders who terrorised and
devastated territories which were under British protection. But the
time came when the Mahrattas themselves broke the peace. Then their
power also was broken; and in 1818 Britain stood forth as the sovereign
ruler of India.

This was only sixty years after the battle of Plassey had established
British influence, though not British rule, in a single province of
India; only a little over thirty years after Warren Hastings returned
to England, leaving behind him an empire still almost limited to that
single province. There is nothing in history that can be compared with
the swiftness of this achievement, which is all the more remarkable
when we remember that almost every step in the advance was taken with
extreme unwillingness. But the most impressive thing about this
astounding fabric of power, which extended over an area equal to half
of Europe and inhabited by perhaps one-sixth of the human race, was not
the swiftness with which it was created, but the results which flowed
from it. It had begun in corruption and oppression, but it had grown
because it had come to stand for justice, order, and peace. In 1818 it
could already be claimed for the British rule in India that it had
brought to the numerous and conflicting races, religions, and castes of
that vast and ancient land, three boons of the highest value: political
unity such as they had never known before; security from the hitherto
unceasing ravages of internal turbulence and war; and, above all, the
supreme gift which the West had to offer to the East, the substitution
of an unvarying Reign of Law for the capricious wills of innumerable
and shifting despots. This is an achievement unexampled in history, and
it alone justified the imposition of the rule of the West over the
East, which had at first seemed to produce nothing but evil. It took
place during the age of Revolution, when the external empires of Europe
were on all sides falling into ruin; and it passed at the time almost
unregarded, because it was overshadowed by the drama of the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

The construction of the Indian Empire would of itself suffice to make
an age memorable, but it does not end the catalogue of the achievements
of British imperialism i