no more than a part of the general disorderly conflict prevailing all over India, in which the weak fragmentary states that had at first been manufactured out of the provinces of the dismembered empire were now being trampled in their turn under the feet of hardier rulerships. The work of the English had hitherto been mainly destructive, because the exigencies of self-defence compelled them to strike down their antagonists. But the era now opening will introduce their first essays at reconstruction, for in Bengal the English had by this time cleared for themselves a good political building site, and the chronicle of interminable straggling wars is henceforward to be varied by attempts at administrative organization.
In England, although state interference with private enterprise had never been a popular duty, a conviction was growing up that it had become necessary to place the doings of the East India Company under national control. The British people had at this time reached a very high degree of settled civilization under institutions that secured to them almost complete civil and religious liberty. They found themselves involuntarily responsible for a country plunged into violent disorder, where no species of government except illimitable personal despotism, usually of foreigners, had been known for many centuries. Into this country they had to import, from a great distance, the principles of civilized polity; so that their first experiment at regulating the affairs of Bengal may be regarded as the beginning of a vast constitutional innovation that has since been
