162 THE CONQUEST OF BENGAL

cool observers the idea that the next conquest of India might possibly be made by Europeans. The key-note had indeed been struck earlier by Ber- nier, a French physician at the court of Aurangzib toward the close of the seventeenth century, who writes in his book that M. de Conde or M. de Turenne with twenty thousand men could conquer all India; and who in his letter to Colbert lays particular stress first on the riches, secondly on the weakness, of Bengal. But in 1746, one Colonel James Mill, who had been in India twenty years, submitted to the Austrian emperor a scheme for conquering Bengal as a very feasible and profitable undertaking. " The whole country of Hin- dustan/' he says, " or empire of the Great Moghul, is, and ever has been, in a state so feeble and defenceless that it is almost a miracle that no prince of Europe, with a maritime power at command, has not as yet thought of making such acquisitions there as at one stroke would put him and his subjects in possession of infinite wealth. . . . The policy of the Moghul is bad, his military worse, and as to a maritime power to com- mand and protect his coasts, he has none at all. . . . The province of Bengal is at present under the domin- ion of a rebel subject of the Moghul, whose annual rev- enue amounts to about two millions. But Bengal, though not to be reduced by the power of the Moghul, is equally indefensible with the rest of Hindustan on the side of the ocean, and consequently may be forced out of the rebel's hand with all its wealth, which is incredibly vast."