But even that long period of irresistible expansion was a period of almost constant co-operation between British and Indians.  The East India Company extended its authority quite as much by a system of alliances with indigenous rulers, who turned to our growing power to save them from destruction at the hands of Haidar Ali or of the Mahratta confederacy, as by mere force of arms, and, when it had to use force, its most decisive victories in the field were won by armies in which Indian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with British troops.  At Plassey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, when the destinies of India were still in the balance, the British, though the backbone of the Company’s forces, formed only a tithe numerically of the victorious armies that fought under Clive and Munro.  The traditions of loyal comradeship between the Indian and the British army, only once and for a short time seriously broken during the Mutiny of 1857, can be traced back to the earliest days of British ascendancy, just as the map of India to-day, with hundreds of native States, covering one-third of the total area and nearly one-fourth of the total population under the autonomous rulership of their own ancient dynasties, testifies to the wisdom and moderation which inspired the policy of the East India Company in preferring, wherever circumstances made co-operation possible, co-operation based upon alliances to submission enforced by the sword.

In the same spirit there grew up at home with the extension of British dominion in India a definite determination on the part of the British Government and the British people to control the methods by which British dominion was to be exercised and maintained.  So when the British in India ceased to be mere traders and became administrators and rulers, they had behind them not only the driving power, but the restraining force also, of a civilisation which was producing in England new conceptions of personal rights destined profoundly to affect the relations between those who govern and those who are governed.  Those conceptions which underlay both the great Cromwellian upheaval and the more peaceful revolution of 1688 were at first limited in their application to the free people of Britain, but they began before long to influence also the attitude of the British people towards the alien races brought under their sway.  The motives which prompted English colonial enterprise in its earliest stages did not differ materially from those which prompted the Spanish and the Portuguese, the 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.