VI.] PHASES IN THE CONQUEST OF INDIA. 269 
modem trade refer to the years after 1813, and especially 
to those after 1833. In other words, so long as India was 
in the hands of those whose object was trade, the trade 
remained insignificant; the trade became great and at last 
enormous, when India began to be governed for itself and 
trade-considerations to be disregarded. This might seem 
a paradox, did we not remember that in dismissing trade- 
considerations we also destroyed a monopoly. But there 
is nothing wonderful in the fact that an exclusive 
Company, even when its first object is trade, carries on 
trade languidly, nothing wonderful in a vast trade spring 
ing up as soon as the shackles of monopoly were removed. 
On the other hand we do not find that the increase of 
trade corresponds at all to the augmentation of our terri 
torial possessions in India. 
There have been four great rulers in India to whom 
the German title of Mehrer des Reichs or Increaser of the 
Empire might be given. These are Lord Clive, the 
founder, Lord Wellesley, Lord Hastings and Lord Dalhousie. 
Roughly it may be said that the first established us along 
the Eastern Coast from Calcutta to Madras ; the second 
and third overthrew the Mahratta power and established 
us as lords of the middle of the country and of the Western 
side of the peninsula, and the fourth, besides consolidating 
these conquests, gave us the northwest and carried our 
frontier to the Indus. There were considerable intervals 
between these conquests, and accordingly they fall into 
separate groups. Thus there was a period of conquest 
between 1748 and 1765, which we may label with the 
name of Clive, a second period beginning in 1798, which 
may be said to have lasted, though with a long pause, till 
about 1820; this period may bear the names of Wellesley 
and Lord Hastings; and a third period of war between