these weary months were not passed in utter idleness by the youth whose dreams at Churchill had borne him company through years of profitable work at Westminster. That dreamy turn of mind, which so often unfits a man for the hard realities of his daily lot, seemed to act upon Warren Hastings, as it did upon Luther and Cromwell, like a powerful tonic, steeling his heart against all discouragements, and spurring him on to yet bolder efforts, with its never-failing visions of the success to come.

CHAPTER II.

1750-1753.

WHEN Hastings landed in India he was not quite eighteen years old, and the famous Company whose service he had entered was still, to all seeming, little more than a chartered body of "merchants trading to the East Indies." For a century and a-half from its birth in 1600 down to the year 1750, that Company had played the part of a busy trader, on such conditions as the jealousy of rival merchants and the prudence or the greed of native rulers might allow. At Surat, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, and a few other places on the coast or up the great rivers, the Company's servants carried on a trade which, spite of untoward checks and interruptions, brought much profit alike to their masters and themselves. The task of upholding their chartered monopoly against "interlopers" from England in the days of Charles I. and Cromwell had grown lighter with the return of the Stuart dynasty to power. With the cession of Bombay

by Charles II. and the new rights lately secured to it by a new charter from the Crown, the Company continued to enlarge its trade, to found new settlements; to win by prayers, or gifts, or timely services, fresh powers and privileges from the officers of the Great Moghal. Its earliest forts at Madras and Surat had been built for the protection of its factories alone. The successful defence of Surat in 1664 taught Sivaji and his Maráthas a lasting lesson of respect for English valour, and earned from the politic Aurangzib a large remission of the duties hitherto levied on the Company's trade with that port.

In the twenty years that followed the Restoration the Company's Indian trade grew in value from £100,000 to a million sterling a year. Then came a time of wantonness and armed aggression, when the Company's servants in Bombay and Bengal, with the help of an English fleet and English soldiers, defied the might of Aurangzib, one of the ablest and most powerful princes of Bábar's Imperial line. In spite of some partial successes at sea, the Company's fortunes suffered for some years a perilous eclipse. But Aurangzib had no mind to press too hard on the turbulent traders who increased his

THE EAST INDIA COMPANY.

13

revenue and brought wealth to his subjects; nor did it suit him to wage a lingering war with foes who might still blockade his ports, and seize Indian vessels laden with merchandise, or worse still, with Mussulman pilgrims bound for Mecca. The East India Directors also, having learned with the loss of nearly all their factories to see the folly of their late doings, were now humbly suing for the peace which the Moghal Emperor was not slow to grant. In 1690 the forfeit factories were restored to their late owners, and Job Charnock once more hoisted his country's flag at Chatanatti, one of the three villages which afterwards grew into the capital of British India.

From that time for more than half a century the Company's servants in India kept clear of all perilous embroilments with the ruling powers. The old plague of interlopers, licensed and unlicensed, continued to vex them for a few years longer, and a new Company threatened for a moment to extinguish the old. But fortune still smiled upon the latter. In the first year of Queen Anne the rival Companies merged into one whose sole aim for many years afterwards was to increase its dividends and guard its own interests, amidst the clash of arms in either Con

tinent, and the peaceful rivalry of Dutch, French, and other traders from the west.

Guarded by the guns of Fort William, the new settlement grew and prospered in the troublous days that followed the death of Aurangzib. Neither the exactions of an unfriendly Viceroy in Bengal,* nor the raids of plundering Marátha horsemen, availed to hinder the steady growth of a trade which the Viceroy's own officers found their profit in furthering, while the English entrenchments on the Hughli became an isle of shelter for thousands of natives flying, whether from Moghal oppression or Marátha greed. Nor did the wars that divided Europe ruffle the smooth course of our Indian trade. While Marlborough was beating the French in Flanders and on the Rhine, while "dapper little" George II. was adding at Dettingen to the laurels he had won at Oudenarde, the French and English merchants on the Hughli and the Coromandel coast still followed in peace the business which had brought them so many thousand miles away from their cool western homes.

But events were about to happen which would

* Murshid Kuli Khan, Subhadar or Viceroy of Bengal from 1702 to 1725, founded the city of Murshidabad.