consisted of only three thousand men. But of these nearly one thousand were English; and all were led by English officers and trained in the English discipline. Conspicuous in the ranks of the little army were the men of the Thirty-ninth Regiment, which still bears on its colors, amidst many honorable additions won under Wellington in Spain and Gascony, the name of Plassey, and the proud motto, Primus in Indis.* The battle commenced with a cannonade in which the artillery of the Nabob did scarcely any execution, while the few field-pieces of the English produced great effect. Several of the most distinguished officers in Surajah Dowlah's service fell. Disorder began to spread through his ranks. His own terror increased every moment. One of the conspirators urged on him the expediency of retreating. This insidious advice, agreeing as it did with what his own terrors suggested, was readily received. He ordered his army to fall back, and this order decided his fate. Clive snatched the moment, and ordered his troops to advance. The confused and dispirited multitude gave way before the onset of disciplined valor. No mob attacked by regular soldiers was ever more completely routed. The little band of Frenchmen, who alone ventured to confront the English, were swept down the stream of fugitives. In an hour the forces of Surajah Dowlah were dispersed, never to reassemble. Only five hundred of the vanquished were slain. But their camp, their guns, their baggage, innumerable waggons, innumerable eattle, remained in the power of the conquerors. With the loss of twenty-two soldiers killed and fifty wounded, Clive had scattered an army of near sixty thousand men, and subdued an empire larger and more populous than Great Britain. Macaulay. * Primus in Indis, first among the Indians, i. e. the Anglo-Indian regiments. WARREN HASTINGS (1774-1785). THE first Governor-General of India must be "the observed of all observers," and his period of rule must be a marked era in the history, not only of the dependency itself, but of the country to which it belonged. If it must necessarily be so from the excitement of the public mind at home, under the agitating and disgusting news from Bengal in 1773, there was something in the mind and manners of the first Governor-General which rendered the crisis more marked, and the national interest more intense. His was a countenance not to be forgotten by any one who had ever seen it, full of intellectual serenity, thoughtful, somewhat melancholy, but resolved and confident. His figure was small, yet anything but insignificant, in connection with a demeanour of natural dignity, a complexion which revealed a life of toil, and a head which proved a capacity for it. When he sailed for India the second time, in 1769, he left the impression of this countenance on the minds of the first men of a day of great men, and with it a high respect for his literary and political cultivation. Johnson looked up to him for the philosophy he quoted from his Oriental learning, and our great scholars for that Oriental learning itself. Our statesmen could hardly have given him credit, then or at any time, for comprehensive political views, but his constant adequacy to the occasion, his evident familiarity with the native mind and modes of life, and his strong convictions of what ought to be done at a time when the responsible parties were only too thankful to be told what they ought to do, pointed out Warren Hastings as one for whom an office of high authority ought to be created at such a time, if it did not otherwise exist. He at once took in hand, as has been seen, the mischief which had arisen at Madras from the conversion of traders into military and political officials; and his being promoted to the highest post followed almost as a matter of course. It should be borne in mind, in studying the history of this time, that the worst things we know of the miseries of the inhabitants are told in the form of lamentation and remonstrance expressed by the directors to their servants in India. The letters are extant in which they complained that every attempt they had made to reform abuses had increased them, and that the industrial classes were more oppressed for every effort to protect them. "Youths" were suffered to domineer over whole communities, even as sovereigns, and to enrich themselves by monopolies, at the expense of the natives on the one hand, and of the Company on the other. The native merchants no longer appeared in the markets; the products found their way to Europe through every channel but the British, and the Company must be ruined unless an able head and hand could inaugurate on the spot a new system, first legalised at home. Such are the complaints of the directors in their correspondence of April, 1773. Who were these terrible "youths" who excited so much indignation in high quarters? They were the supervisors, afterwards collectors, a body of officials whose advent marked the transition of British India from being a new field of commerce to being a possession requiring political administration. The failure of Clive's plan of double government, under which all the old evils remained, while the authority to deal with them was abstracted, compelled a resort to some new method of obtaining the dues of the British establishment. The native collectors declared that they could not obtain money; the Mogul governors declared that they could not get their commands obeyed in the administration of criminal and civil justice; and the people meantime pleaded for protection from every kind of spoliation. In 1769 it was decided that servants of the Company should be dispersed throughout the country, each superintending a district from a central station whence he could observe and control the native officers in their work of collecting the revenue, and also of administering justice. As these overlookers were soon found to need overlooking themselves, two councils were appointed for the purpose, to sit at Moorshedabad and at Patna. No benefit being observable at the end of two years, and the supervisors' reports disclosing a fearful state of corruption and misery, the directors at home decided to take the whole affair into their hands, dispensing with all native intervention. Unaware that they were thus destroying the whole political structure of India, and causing a greater revolution than any invaders of the country were ever answerable for, they announced their decision, and desired their agents in Bengal to carry it out. The Council at Calcutta, of which Mr. Hastings was then the most active member, undertook the business, set aside old modes of letting lands and levying revenue, determined in three days what new one would answer best, and converted their supervisors into collectors, with power which enabled them to do what the directors complained of so bitterly in the spring of 1773. Their offices were now as much political as commercial, and the institution of the new scheme may be regarded as the halfway station between the commercial objects with which the Company entered the country, and the time (in 1834) when their commercial function had dissolved under the action of free trade principles, and they remained a body with purely territorial functions and attributes. H. Martineau. POLICY OF HASTINGS. THE internal administration of Warren Hastings, with all its blemishes, gives him a title to be considered as one of the most remarkable men in our history. He dissolved the double government. He transferred the direction of affairs to English hands. Out of a frightful anarchy he educed at least a rude and imperfect order. The whole organisation by which justice was dispensed, revenue collected, peace maintained throughout a territory not inferior in population to the dominions of Louis XVII. or of the Emperor Joseph, was formed and superintended by him. He boasted that every public office, without exception, which existed when he left Bengal, was his creation. It is quite true that this system, after all the improvements suggested by the experience of sixty years, still needs improvement, and that it was at first far more defective than it now is. But whoever seriously considers what it is to construct from the beginning the whole of a machine so vast and complex as a government, will allow that what Hastings effected deserves high admiration. To compare the most celebrated European ministers to him seems to us as unjust as it would be to compare the best baker in London with Robinson Crusoe, who, before he could bake a single loaf, had to make his plough and his harrow, his fences and his scarecrows, his sickle and his flail, his mill and his oven. The just fame of Hastings rises still higher when we reflect that he was not bred a statesman, that he was sent from school to a counting-house, and that he was employed during the prime of his manhood as a commercial agent, far from all intellectual society. Nor must we forget that all, or almost all, to whom, when placed at the head of affairs, he could apply for assistance were persons who owed as little as himself, or less than |