Warren Hastings had to stand a prolonged trial on his return home for what almost certainly were acts of exceeding harshness in his dealings with some of the native rulers. He was acquitted; and it is not possible for us now to try him over again. Almost certainly he dealt very hardly; but almost as certainly no man who did not deal very hardly could have done what he did to bring a large part of India under a government which gave its subjects greater peace and happiness than they had known before.
As we know, there was another power besides the French with which Great Britain came into collision in the East—the Dutch. Ever since the middle of the eighteenth century there had been much ill-will in Holland against England. Holland only a little while before had been the chief naval power in the Northern seas. Her ships had even come conquering and destroying far up the Thames. And now the Dutch saw that supremacy gradually taken from them; the British Government actually passing resolutions to restrain their free right of traffic on the high seas. And at the same time Great Britain was taking much, and constantly more and more, of the carrying trade away from Holland; Great Britain was trading more and more, on her own behalf and on that of other nations, with the East; Great Britain was bringing to the West, from her ever-growing Eastern possessions, the produce of the East which used to be brought from the Dutch colonies in Dutch ships; some of these colonies and trading settlements themselves were being taken from the Dutch by the British; and where the Dutch rights were not very firmly established British traders set up settlements to compete with them.
A state of actual war between the countries existed from 1780 to 1784. The terms of the treaty which put an end to that active warfare could not put an end to their constant trade rivalry in the East in which Great Britain was usually the gainer and Holland the loser. By the date of the great convulsions caused by the French Revolution we find Holland so diminished in power as to be ready to do the bidding of Great Britain and of Prussia.
It was thus that Britain's star rose higher and brighter in the East even as it sank in the West, and if we look to the far southern quarter of the world stage we find it in the ascendant there also, for in 1787 New Zealand was declared a British possession, and that declaration was followed in the next year by the colonisation of New South Wales. The beginning of the British occupation of the west coast of Africa dates from the same time. On every side therefore, except along that eastern fringe of the American continent where the colonists had gloriously won their independence, the British, the Anglo-Saxons, were extending their sway.
Poyning's Act Repealed
There was one people, British yet not Anglo-Saxon, very, much nearer the home centre, who made a bold claim, and in part a successful claim, at this moment for their independence—the Irish. By a law of George I., known as Poyning's Act, from its proposer, no measure passed by the Parliament of Ireland could become law until it had received the assent of the King of England. It was this law of which the Irish, under the lead of Grattan, their great orator, obtained the repeal in the year 1782, taking advantage of the dire straits in which England then found herself. It needs but a moment's thought to show that this repeal meant all the difference between a dependent and an independent Parliament in Ireland. It put Irishmen into the position that they were free to legislate in all Irish matters without interference from England. Irishmen in large numbers had before this emigrated to America, and naturally had been active in inflaming the anti-English feeling in the colonies. Besides all political reasons, and the real grievances under which the Irish had suffered from the English, the fact that the great majority of them were Catholics was an added occasion why these people of a Celtic origin could not be at rest under the government of the Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Church of Rome in Ireland
The political power of the Church of Rome, that is to say, the power of the Pope to interfere in the government, had received some severe checks even in the countries where Roman Catholicism was the religion of the State. As early as 1753 the Pope had yielded to the King of Spain the power to make appointments to the high dignities in the Church; but still the Romish Church meddled with politics abroad. Such interference was resented by the despotic kings of the Bourbon branch of the great Capet stock, both in France and Spain. The political activities of the very able and energetic order of Jesuits gave special offence to the Governments. Portugal had commenced the campaign against them by driving them out as early as 1759. In France their activities were suppressed five years later. In 1767 they were expelled from Spain, and within a very few years such pressure was put upon the Pope that he was obliged to break up their order in Italy itself. We have seen how Spain was ground beneath the heel of the Inquisition—not acting under orders from Rome but on its own initiative. Now, that is to say, in 1774, the Spanish Government asserted itself to confine the judicial power of the Inquisition to ecclesiastical cases; that is to say, that its officials might only arrest and try and punish the people guilty, or suspected of guilt, against the laws of the Church. Before that, it had been in the habit of arresting and trying and punishing persons suspected of breaking the common law of the land, the civil law. The Inquisition's claim to try these civil cases had been without legal warrant, but the Government had not till now found the courage to resist it. And this withdrawal of all such cases out of the hands of the Inquisition gave a blow that was really deadly to the power of that cruel and dreaded institution, though it was not finally abolished until nearly half a century later.