Thus England's star went setting in the West; but in the East coincidentally it rose continuously to greater glory. Plassey had given Bengal into her hands; Wandewash had made her authority dominant in Southern India. But as yet it was not England, the nation and the King of England, that held this scarcely defined authority. It was the great trading concern known as the East India Company. "Some have greatness thrust upon them"; and this was remarkably true of the empire of India which Great Britain was really compelled by the force of circumstances to assume. The trading company did not desire to govern the country: they wished to fulfil their original purpose of trade, of making money. It was the aggression of the French and the oppression of the native ruler of Bengal, as we have seen, which obliged them to fight for the very liberty to trade. Further, they were compelled to maintain some kind of order in the districts in which they thus became supreme. It was not easy for them to do this under their charter as traders. The government of the native princes of Bengal was inefficient and corrupt and the people under them were in misery. An Act of the British Parliament in 1773 appointed a Governor-General with powers over all the British possessions in {146} India. Warren Hastings, a civilian in the Company's service, was the first to hold that high post, and with a strong hand he reduced to nothing the powers of the worst of the native rulers and made the government of the better among them less ineffective and corrupt. With the rulers of some of the independent States he entered into treaties and alliances. The idea of Britain's Indian Empire seems to have been born in the brain of Warren Hastings. [Sidenote: Warren Hastings]