Page 320 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

318 EARLY ENGLISH ADVENTURERS IN THE EAST

But when all has been said that can be said of the work
of the early adventurers something is left for explanation
as to the causes which produced the wonderful results
which are seen visibly shaping in the immediately preceding
chapters. England, beaten, humiliated, discredited in
Eastern Asia, turns her face to India. Her resources are
limited, her prestige is lower than at any period in her
recent history, and she has almost lost faith in herself
amid the misfortunes of a period of internal conflict and
subsequent degeneracy of national morals and instincts; and
yet in spite of all she steadily marks out for herself the
lines upon which in the next century she advances—as re­
gards her European rivals—to an impregnable position on
the Indian peninsula. Can we account for this except by
a reference to those higher influences which govern our
lives ? As “ there's a Divinity that shapes our ends,
rough-hew them how we will,” so in the working of that
miracle, the establishment of British rule in India, may
we not see the finger of Providence ?