he splendour of the fortunes
amassed by many of the Company's servants who returned from India to
spend them in ostentatious luxury and in political intrigue at home,
combined with the brilliant achievements of British arms on Indian soil
to focus public attention on Indian affairs. They became one of the live
issues of British party politics.

There was much that was squalid and grossly unjust in the rancorous
campaigns conducted first against Clive and then against Warren
Hastings. But behind all the personal jealousies and the greed of
factions there was a strong and healthy public instinct that the
responsibilities assumed by the East India Company were greater than a
trading association could safely be left to discharge uncontrolled, and
that the State could not divest itself of the duties imposed upon it by
the acquisition of vast and populous possessions. It would be idle to
pretend that the British people already entertained any definite
conception of a tutelary relationship towards the peoples of India, or
were animated by purely philanthropic solicitude for the moral welfare
of India. But the passionate oratory of Fox and Burke and their fervid
denunciation of oppression and wrongdoing in India awoke responsive
echoes far beyond the walls of Westminster. In 1762, when France had
claimed, in the course of the peace negotiations which led to the Treaty
of Paris, the restitution of the possessions she had lost to the East
India Company, the British Government pleaded the absence of "any right
of the Crown of England to interfere in the legal and exclusive property
of a body corporate." Only eleven years later, the House of Commons
passed resolutions to the effect that "all acquisitions made under the
influence of military force or by treaty with foreign princes do of
right belong to the State," and the Commons had the country behind them.
From 1773 onward British public opinion never hesitated to support
Parliament in claiming and exercising supreme control over Indian
affairs.

A very brief survey of the long series of enactments in which
Parliament, asserting the right of "eminent dominion over every British
subject in every country," gradually established its authority over
Indian administration and moulded it to the shape which it virtually
preserved until the Crown assumed direct sovereignty in 1858, shows how
steadily the strengthening of Parliamentary control kept pace with the
extension of British domin