te.
Only by the sufferance of England can that idolatry prosper. Thou,
therefore, England, when Delhi is swept by the ploughshare and sown
with salt, build a solitary monument to us; and on its base inscribe
that the last and worst of the murderous idolatries which plagued and
persecuted the generations of men was by us abolished; and that by
women and children was the pollution of caste cleansed from the earth
for ever!

[Footnote 57: 'A sight to dream of, not to tell.'--_Coleridge._]

[Footnote 58: Twenty-three and twenty-eight thousand of these two
orders we have in our Bengal army.]

* * * * *

Now let us descend into the circumstantialities of the case,
explaining what may have been obscure to the general reader. By which
term _general reader_ is meant, that reader who has had no reason for
cultivating any acquaintance whatever with India; to whom, therefore,
the whole subject is unbroken ground; and who neither knows, nor
pretends to know, the merest outline of our British connection with
India; what first carried us thither; what accidents of good luck and
of imminent peril raised us from a mere commercial to a political
standing; how we improved this standing by prodigious energy into the
position of a conquering state; prospered rapidly by the opposition
which we met; overthrew even our European competitors, of whom the
deadliest were the French; pursued a difficult war with an able
Mahometan upstart, Hyder Ali--a treacherous and cruel prince; next
with his son, Tippoo Sahib, a still more ferocious scoundrel, who, in
his second war with us, was settled effectually by one thrust of a
bayonet in the hands of an English soldier. This war, and the
consequent division of Tippoo's dominions, closed the eighteenth
century. About 1817 we undertook the great Mahratta war; the
victorious termination of which placed us, after sixty years of
struggle, in the supreme rank amongst Indian potentates. All the rest
of our power and greatness accrued to us by a natural and spontaneous
evolution of consequences, most of which would have followed us as if
by some magnetic attraction, had we ourselves been passive. No
conquering state was ever yet so mild and beneficent in the spirit of
its government, or so free from arrogance in its demeanour. An
impression thoroughly false prevails even amongst ourselves, that we
have pursued a systematic course of usurpations, and have displaced
all the _anc