Dutch and
the French. All were impelled primarily by the desire to attain wealth.
But whilst our competitors never got much beyond that stage, and for the
most part imagined that the only way to attain wealth was by a crude
exploitation of subject countries and peoples, the British were saved
from similar short-sightedness by the very different spirit with which
the development of their own national institutions had imbued their
rulers at home. By the middle of the eighteenth century a British
Government had a very different sense of its responsibilities to the
British people for the welfare of the nation as a whole from that which
any continental ruler had been taught to entertain in regard to his own
people. That sense of responsibility the British Government and the
British people applied in a modified form to the administration of their
Indian possessions.

So long as British settlements were confined to trading factories on the
shores of the Indian Ocean, the problems of administration were simple.
The three "Presidents" who with their large and rather unwieldy Councils
carried on at the beginning of the eighteenth century the affairs of the
East India Company on the west coast, at Madras and in Bengal were
chiefly concerned with commercial operations, and they provided in their
own way and out of their own resources for the maintenance of the public
peace within the narrow areas subject to their jurisdiction. But matters
assumed a very different complexion when instead of merely taking
abundant tithe of the wealth acquired by the enterprise and ability of
British traders in a far-away land, the British people had to lend
financial and military assistance in order to rescue the East India
Company from destruction at the hands of their French rivals as well as
from the overwhelming ruin of internecine strife all over India. The
grant of the _Diwani_ to the Company by the titular Emperor of Delhi
gave the Company not only the wealth of Bengal, the richest province in
India, but full rights of government and administration, which were at
first ruthlessly exercised with little or no regard for the interests of
the unfortunate population, who alone gained nothing by the change. The
magnitude of the financial transactions between the Company and the
British Government, which was sometimes heavily subsidised by the
Company's coffers and then in turn compelled to make considerable
advances in order to replenish them, and t