indifference to the sufferings of others was tempered by a keen regard for his own interests[1].
Much blame has been cast upon Hastings for the part taken by British troops in such a war. In the letter confirming the Treaty of Benares, the Directors certainly demurred to the employment of their soldiers in a war waged between foreign potentates. But their censure rested on grounds of policy alone, of the policy which had led them so often to arraign the warlike proceedings of their servants in Southern India. It is obviously unfair to judge the statesmen of the days of George III by the ethical standards of our own time. The moral sense of Hastings' contemporaries did not restrain them from employing Red Indians against their own countrymen in North America. Three years after the Rohillá War an English peer declared in the House of Lords, with reference to this very practice, that 'we were justified in using all the means which God and nature had put into our hands;' and Lord Chatham stood nearly alone in denouncing the use made of 'those horrible hell-hounds of savage war[2].' The great bulk of Champion's force were Sepoys of the same race with those who fought for the Nawáb-Wazír. The latter were no more savages than the Rohillá Patháns ; and their excesses were grossly exaggerated by Champion and his friends.
It has been urged by a recent writer of no
