“Another feature in the character of Tippoo was his religion, with a sense of which his mind was most deeply impressed. He spent a considerable part of every day in prayer. He gave to his kingdom a particular religious title, _Cudadad_, or God-given; and he lived under a peculiarly strong and operative conviction of the superintendence of a Divine Providence. To one of his French advisers, who urged him zealously to obtain the support of the Mahrattas, he replied, ‘I rely solely on Providence, expecting that I shall be alone and unsupported; but God and my courage will accomplish everything.’... He had the discernment to perceive, what is so generally hid from the eyes of rulers in a more enlightened state of society, that it is the prosperity of those who labour with their hands which constitutes the principle and cause of the prosperity of states. He therefore made it his business to protect them against the intermediate orders of the community, by whom it is so difficult to prevent them from being oppressed. His country was, accordingly, at least during the first and better part of his reign, the best cultivated, and his population the most flourishing, in India: while under the English and their pageants, the population of Carnatic and Oude, hastening to the state of deserts, was the most wretched upon the face of the earth; and even Bengal itself, under the operations of laws ill adapted to their circumstances, was suffering almost all the evils which the worst of governments could inflict.... For an eastern prince he was full of knowledge. His mind was active, acute, and ingenious. But in the value which he set upon objects, whether as means, or as an end, he was almost perpetually deceived. Besides, a conviction appears to have been rooted in his mind that the English had now formed a resolution to deprive him of his kingdom, and that it was useless to negotiate, because no submission to which he could reconcile his mind, would restrain them in the gratification of their ambitious designs.”—_Mills._
Tippoo was right. The great design of the English, from their first secure footing in India, was to establish their control over the whole Peninsula. The French created them the most serious alarm in the progress of their career towards this object; and any native state which shewed more than ordinary energy, excited a similar feeling. For this purpose all the might of British power and policy was exerted to expel these European rivals, and to crush such more active states. The administration of the Marquis Wellesley was the exhibition of this system full blown. For this, all the campaigns against Holkar and Scindia; the wars from north to south, and from east to west of India, were undertaken; and blood was made to flow, and debts to accumulate to a degree most monstrous. Yet the admiration of this system of policy in England has shewn how little human life and human welfare, even to this day, weigh in the scale against dominion and avarice. We hear nothing of the horrors and violence we have perpetrated, from the first invasion of Bengal, to those of Nepaul and Burmah; we have only eulogies on the empire achieved:—“See what a splendid empire we have won!” True,—there is no objection to the empire, if we could only forget the means by which it has been created. But amid all this subtle and crooked policy—this creeping into power under the colour of allies—this extortion and plunder of princes, under the name of protection—this forcible subjection and expatriation of others, we look in vain for the generous policy of the Christian merchant, and the Christian statesman.[20]