"Precisely! Why don't they? Why haven't they in the past? Because there is no combined movement amongst them. Because the country is for ever disturbed by jealousies and strife between the various races inhabiting it. That is one of the reasons, and the greatest. England, represented by the Company, has taken advantage of this condition of affairs, and while these struggles have gone on she has slowly and steadily increased her power and standing. Not that she was always prosperous. There have been times when the Company has been in very low water. But I will tell you how British pluck and determination, aided by jealousies of the natives, have succeeded, and how the Company which was formed in England on the 31st of December 1599 finally arrived at its present opulence. "That Company was sanctioned by Queen Elizabeth, and it owed its origin to many facts which are of interest. We hear that India was but a word to the West; that few had ideas of the enormous wealth of the East, and still vaguer knowledge of the vast countries there, with their teeming workers. It was never even suspected that in this India, of which tales had reached our country, there were riches beyond the dreams of westerners, that there were gorgeous courts and palaces beside which the palace of Queen Bess was little better than a hovel. And that ignorance might have persisted had it not been for the energy and enterprise of a few, and those not always of our blood. "That brings me to deal with the men who first invaded this land, and my memory has to carry me back to my school days for that. Very many years before Alexander made his famous invasion the Greeks knew India, and travelled here in search of knowledge. Then came Alexander, with his hordes, marching through the passes in the north (Candahar Route), across the Punjaub as far as the Hydaspes, a tributary of the Indus. That was in B.C. 327. He retired to Persia, and doubtless after he had gone the peoples in the north enjoyed some tranquillity.