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WARREN HASTINGS

mies, the wild onslaughts of party orators and writers, and the misconceptions of one-sided critics. One pamphleteer of his day coolly affirmed that 500,000 Rohillá. families were driven across the Jumna, and that Rohilkhand had become a barren and unpeopled waste. Mill himself asserts that 'every one who bore the name of Rohillá was either butchered or found his safety in flight and in exile.' And Macaulay, improving on Champion, tells how 'more than a hundred thousand people fled from their homes to pestilential jungles,' away from the tyranny of him to whom a Christian Government had 'sold their substance and their blood, and the honour of their wives and daughters;' Hastings looking on with folded arms 'while their villages were burned, their children butchered, and their women violated.' The truth, as we have seen, was widely different. The 'extermination' of the Rohillás — a word no longer used in its original sense — meant only the expulsion of a few Pathán chiefs with 18,000 of their people from the lands which they or their immediate predecessors had won by the sword. Some thousands of these Patháns stayed behind with Faiz-ullá Khán and other chiefs of the same stock. Behind also remained nearly a million Hindu husbandmen, who, says Hamilton, were 'in no way affected' by the change of masters, but who would certainly have starved if the whole country had been laid waste. Instead of looking carelessly on at scenes of untold outrage, Hastings did his best to stay the hand of a conqueror whose