So long as British settlements were confined to trading factories on the shores of the Indian Ocean, the problems of administration were simple.  The three “Presidents” who with their large and rather unwieldy Councils carried on at the beginning of the eighteenth century the affairs of the East India Company on the west coast, at Madras and in Bengal were chiefly concerned with commercial operations, and they provided in their own way and out of their own resources for the maintenance of the public peace within the narrow areas subject to their jurisdiction.  But matters assumed a very different complexion when instead of merely taking abundant tithe of the wealth acquired by the enterprise and ability of British traders in a far-away land, the British people had to lend financial and military assistance in order to rescue the East India Company from destruction at the hands of their French rivals as well as from the overwhelming ruin of internecine strife all over India.  The grant of the Diwani to the Company by the titular Emperor of Delhi gave the Company not only the wealth of Bengal, the richest province in India, but full rights of government and administration, which were at first ruthlessly exercised with little or no regard for the interests of the unfortunate population, who alone gained nothing by the change.  The magnitude of the financial transactions between the Company and the British Government, which was sometimes heavily subsidised by the Company’s coffers and then in turn compelled to make considerable advances in order to replenish them, and the 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,