vi ] PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 261 
Rulers’ compares the increase of the foreign trade of 
India between 1820 and 1880 with that of the foreign 
trade of Great Britain itself in the same period. This 
last increase has often excited astonishment: English 
foreign trade rose from about 80 to about 650 millions 
sterling. But Mr Cunningham points out that the 
increase of Indian trade in the same period has been even 
greater, and, as of course the foreign trade of India is 
principally with England, it follows that the tendency to 
commercial union between the two countries is pro 
digiously strong, so that fifty years hence, if no catastrophe 
takes place, the union will be infinitely closer than it is 
now. 
If we combine all the facts I have hitherto adduced 
in order to form a conception of our Indian Empire, the 
result is very singular. An Empire similar to that of 
Rome, in which we hold the position not merely of a 
ruling but of an educating and civilising race (and thus, as 
in the marriage of Faust with Helen of Greece, one age is 
married to another, the modern European to the medieval 
Asiatic spirit) ; this Empire held at arm’s length, paying no 
tribute to us, yet costing nothing except through the 
burden it imposes on our foreign policy, and neither 
modifying nor perceptibly influencing our busy domestic 
politics ; this Empire nevertheless held firmly and with a 
grasp which does not slacken but visibly tightens ; the 
union of England and India, ill-assorted and unnatural as 
it might seem to be, nevertheless growing closer and closer 
with great rapidity under the influence of the modern 
conditions of the world, which seem favourable to vast 
political unions ; all this makes up the strangest, most 
curious, and perhaps most instructive chapter of English 
history. It has been made the subject of much empty boast-