This formidable coalition was about to come to a head when, in 1798, there landed in India a second man of genius, sent by fate at the critical moment.  In five years, by an amazing series of swiftly successful wars and brilliantly conceived treaties, the Marquess Wellesley broke the power of every member of the hostile coalitions, except two of the Mahratta princes.  The area of British territory was quadrupled; the most important of the Indian princes became vassals of the company; and the Great Mogul of Delhi himself, powerless now, but always a symbol of the over-lordship of India, passed under British protection.  When Wellesley left India in 1805, the East India Company was already the paramount power in India south-east of the Sutlej and the Indus.  The Mahratta princes, indeed, still retained a restricted independence, and for an interval the home authorities declined to permit any interference with them, even though they were manifestly giving protection to bands of armed raiders who terrorised and devastated territories which were under British protection.  But the time came when the Mahrattas themselves broke the peace.  Then their power also was broken; and in 1818 Britain stood forth as the sovereign ruler of India.

This was only sixty years after the battle of Plassey had established British influence, though not British rule, in a single province of India; only a little over thirty years after Warren Hastings returned to England, leaving behind him an empire still almost limited to that single province.  There is nothing in history that can be compared with the swiftness of this achievement, which is all the more remarkable when we remember that almost every step in the advance was taken with extreme unwillingness.  But the most impressive thing about this astounding fabric of power, which extended over an area equal to half of Europe and inhabited by perhaps one-sixth of the human race, was not the swiftness with which it was created, but the results which flowed from it.  It had begun in corruption and oppression, but it had grown because it had come to stand for justice, order, and peace.  In 1818 it could already be claimed for the British rule in India that it had brought to the numerous and conflicting races, religions, and castes of that vast and ancient land, three boons of the highest value:  political unity such as they had never known before; security from the hitherto unceasing ravages of internal turbulence and war; and, above all, the supreme gift which the West had to offer to the East, the substitution of an unvarying Reign of Law for the capricious wills of innumerable and shifting despots.  This is an achievement unexampled in history, and it alone justified the imposition of the rule of the West over the East, which had at first seemed to produce nothing but evil.  It took place during the age of Revolution, when the external empires of Europe were on all sides falling into ruin; and it passed at the time almost unregarded, because it was overshadowed by the drama of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.