yet green in the country, and the country felt uneasy under it.  It had not the advantage of that prescriptive usage, that inveterate habit, that traditionary opinion, which a long continuance of any system of government secures to it.  The only real security which Surajah Dowlah’s government could possess was the security of an army.  But the great aim of this prince and his predecessor was to supply the weakness of his government by the strength of his purse; he therefore amassed treasures by all ways and on all hands.  But as the Indian princes, in general, are as unwisely tenacious of their treasure as they are rapacious in getting it, the more money he amassed, the more he felt the effects of poverty.  The consequence was, that their armies were unpaid, and, being unpaid or irregularly paid, were undisciplined, disorderly, unfaithful.  In this situation, a young prince, confiding more in the appearances than examining into the reality of things, undertook (from motives which the House of Commons, with all their industry to discover the circumstances, have found it difficult to make out) to attack a little miserable trading fort that we had erected at Calcutta.  He succeeded in that attempt only because success in that attempt was easy.  A close imprisonment of the whole settlement followed,—­not owing, I believe, to the direct will of the prince, but, what will always happen when the will of the prince is but too much the law, to a gross abuse of his power by his lowest servants,—­by which one hundred and twenty or more of our countrymen perished miserably in a dungeon, by a fate too tragical for me to be desirous to relate, and too well known to stand in need of it.

At the time that this event happened, there was at the same time a concurrence of other events, which, from this partial and momentary weakness, displayed the strength of Great Britain in Asia.  For some years before, the French and English troops began, on the coast of Coromandel, to exhibit the power, force, and efficacy of European discipline.  As we daily looked for a war with France, our settlements on that coast were in some degree armed.  Lord Pigot, then Governor of Madras,—­Lord Pigot, the preserver and the victim of the British dominion in Asia,—­detached such of the Company’s force as could he collected and spared, and such of his Majesty’s ships as were on that station, to the assistance of Calcutta.  And—­to hasten this history to its conclusion—­the daring and commanding genius of Clive, the patient and firm ability of Watson, the treachery of Mir Jaffier, and the battle of Plassey gave us at once the patronage of a kingdom and the command of all its treasures.  We negotiated with Mir Jaffier for the viceroyal throne of his master.  On that throne we seated him.  And we obtained, on our part, immense sums of money.  We obtained a million sterling for the Company, upwards of a million for individuals, in the whole a sum of about two millions two hundred and thirty thousand pounds for various purposes, from the prince whom we had set up.  We obtained, too, the town of Calcutta more completely than we had before possessed it, and the twenty-four districts adjoining.  This was the first small seminal principle of the immense territorial acquisitions we have since made in India.