No doubt the war on the Rohillas, or the so-called spoliation of the Begums of Oude, together with more or less magnified incidentals, formed famous themes in after years for the inflated eloquence and grandiloquent over-statements of Edmund Burke and Sheridan, and for the far less comprehensible or excusable special pleading of Lord Macaulay. It was, no doubt, very affecting to see the patched and powdered fine ladies who paid their fifty guineas a seat in Westminster Hall to watch the men of words mangling the reputation of the man of deeds, weeping and fainting at the harrowing pictures they drew--mostly on their own imaginations--of the sufferings which he had _not_ caused; but we of to-day are sufficiently far removed from the personal spite and the passion and rivalry which inspired the enemies and accusers of the great Governor to be able to look at things as they actually were, and in doing so we shall see that, however heavy was the hand that Warren Hastings laid upon the subject peoples, it was but as a caress to a blow when compared with the oppression and extortion with which conqueror after conqueror, Mohammedan and Hindoo, Sikh, Afghan, and Mahratta, had ground down and despoiled the helpless races which successively passed under their sway. Order, however dearly bought, is always less expensive than anarchy, and the impassioned periods of Burke and Sheridan look somewhat silly when we compare them with the sober facts. It never seems to have struck them or their audience to make any comparison between the English gentleman and loyal servant of his country whom they would have handed down to history as a monster of iniquity, and those real tyrants of the type of Surajah Dowlah, Hyder-Ali, and Nana-Sahib, whose brutal rule and ruthless wars of conquest and extermination must have been, under the circumstances, the only possible alternative to the strong and steady control of the Englishman. The first thing that Warren Hastings did on his return was to reorganise the trade of the Province, and in this he succeeded so well that the Directors rewarded him in 1772 with the Governorship of Bengal; and if they could have stopped there, leaving him to do the rest, the immediately subsequent history of India might have been very much more creditable to the rulers and more pleasant reading for the descendants of the ruled than it was. But unhappily a body of traders and shareholders became possessed with the idea that they were the proper sort of people to rule a country divided by political and religious factions, with a history of almost constant warfare stretching back for centuries, and situated fifteen thousand miles away. This, on the face of it, was an impossibility. When they had found their Governor they should have trusted him to govern, instead of sending out his personal enemies to sit at his council-table to spy upon his actions and hamper and oppose him in everything that he did.