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CHAPTER IV.
OUR RIVALRY WITH FRANCE.
IF rivalry with the Portuguese and Dutch marked the early period of English enterprise in India, the more serious rivalry and struggle with France that followed will always attract greater historical attention because it was associated with the first assertion of British political and military power in the peninsula. That assertion would inevitably have come sooner or later. Sixty years before the French won the battle of St. Thome the English had fearlessly thrown down the gage to the Mogul himself and defeated his armies. Only a qualified assent can therefore be given to the view eloquently expressed by Macaulay and Malleson that Dupleix pointed out for our ancestors the road to conquest in India. If Dupleix could have controlled the sea as at one moment he did control the Carnatic everything would
