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[1773 A.D.] therefore of the bill through the commons, the members of the new council were expressly named, so as to become a part of the enactment.

Warren Hastings, who a year before had assumed the administration of Bengal, was appointed the first governor-general. Another of the new council, Richard Barwell, was already at his post; the new members to be sent from England were General Clavering, the Hon. Colonel Monson, and Philip Francis.

Another clause of Lord North's bill remitted the drawback on the East India Company's teas a step little regarded at its outset, but momentous in its consequences. The directors at the time were but little gratified with this boon or any other when compared with the curtailment of their previous powers. They declared in a petition to the house that they would rather forego the loan which they had solicited than endure the conditions which the minister imposed. But their late misgovernment had been such as to render, in parliament at least, their adherents few and their lamentations disregarded.

CENSURE AND SUICIDE OF CLIVE

In the course of these proceedings, both before the committees and within the house, many a shaft was let fly at Lord Clive. Besides the public wrongs of which he stood accused there was also, it may be feared, a feeling of personal envy at work against him. His vast wealth became a more striking mark for calumny when contrasted with the financial embarrassments of the directors in whose service he had gained it. And his profusion, as ever happens, offended far more persons than it pleased.

Under such circumstances the select committee, over which Burgoyne presided, made Clive their more especial object of attack. They drew forth into the light of day several transactions certainly not well formed to bear it, as the forgery of Admiral Watson's signature, and the fraud practised on Omichund. But at the same time they could not shut out the lustre of the great deeds he had performed. Clive himself was unsparingly questioned, and treated with slight regard. As he complains in one of his speeches: "I, their humble servant, the baron of Plassey, have been examined by the Select Committee more like a sheep-stealer than a member of this house!" And he adds, with perfect truth: "I am sure, Sir, if I had any sore places about me they would have been found: they have probed me to the bottom; no lenient plasters have been applied to heal; no, Sir, they were all of the blister kind, prepared with Spanish flies, and other provocatives!"

On this and some other occasions Clive spoke in his own defence in a frank and fearless spirit with great energy of language, and it would seem with great effect upon the house. It was in May, 1773, that the charges against him, till then vague and undefined, were brought forward as a vote of censure by Burgoyne. In the result, the first resolutions of Burgoyne, alleging certain matters of fact that could scarcely be denied, were carried. But the next, which charged Lord Clive by name with having abused his powers, and set an evil example to the servants of the public, did not pass. At length, as the dawn was slowly breaking on the last of these long and stormy, and in many parts confused, debates, the house agreed almost unanimously to some words which Wedderburn moved: "That Robert Lord Clive did at the same time render great and meritorious services to his country."

Such a vote might perhaps be deemed almost a verdict of acquittal. Certainly, at least, it showed a wise reluctance to condemn. It closed the whole

[1774 A.D.] case, and Clive had no further parliamentary attack to fear. But the previous taunts and injuries appear to have sunk deep into his haughty mind. Nor was a life of ease, however splendid, congenial to his active temper. In his sumptuous halls of Claremont, or beneath the stately cedars of his park, he was far less really happy than amidst his former toils and cares, on the tented plains of the Carnatic or in the council-chambers of Bengal. Moreover, through the climate of the tropics, his health was most grievously impaired. He had to undergo sharp and oft-recurring spasms of pain, for which opium only could afford him its treacherous and transitory aid. At length, on November 22nd, 1774, at his house in Berkeley Square, this great man, for such he surely was, fell by his own hand. He was not yet fifty years of age; and the contest in North America was just then beginning to hold forth to him a new career of active exertion - a new chaplet of honourable fame.

To the last, however, he appears to have retained his serene demeanour, and the stern dominion of his will. It so chanced, that a young lady, an attached friend of his family, was then upon a visit at his house in Berkeley Square, and sat, writing a letter, in one of its apartments. Seeing Lord Clive walk through, she called to him to come and mend her pen. Lord Clive obeyed her summons, and taking out his penknife fulfilled her request; after which, passing on to another chamber, he turned the same knife against himself.b

LORD MACAULAY'S ESTIMATE OF CLIVE

In the awful close of so much prosperity and glory the vulgar saw only a confirmation of all their prejudices; and some men of real piety and genius so far forgot the maxims both of religion and of philosophy as confidently to ascribe the mournful event to the just vengeance of God, and to the horrors of an evil conscience. It is with very different feelings that we contemplate the spectacle of a great mind ruined by the weariness of satiety, by the pangs of wounded honour, by fatal diseases, and more fatal remedies.

Clive committed great faults; but his faults, when weighed against his merits, and viewed in connection with his temptations, do not appear to us to deprive him of his right to an honourable place in the estimation of posterity. From his first visit to India dates the renown of the English arms in the east. Till he appeared his countrymen were despised as mere pedlars, while the French were revered as a people formed for victory and command. His courage and capacity dissolved the charm. With the defence of Arcot commences the long series of oriental triumphs which closes with the fall of Ghazni. Nor must we forget that he was only twenty-five years old when he proved himself ripe for military command. This is a rare if not a singular distinction.

From Clive's second visit to India dates the political ascendancy of the English in that country. His dexterity and resolution realised, in the course of a few months, more than all the gorgeous visions which had floated before the imagination of Dupleix. Such an extent of cultivated territory, such an amount of revenue, such a multitude of subjects, was never added to the dominion of Rome by the most successful proconsul. Nor were such wealthy spoils ever borne under arches of triumph, down the Sacred Way, and through the crowded Forum, to the threshold of Tarpeian Jove. The fame of those who subdued Antiochus and Tigranes grows dim when compared with the splendour of the exploits which the young English adventurer achieved at the head of an army not equal in numbers to one-half of a Roman legion.

[1774 A.D.]

From Clive's third visit to India dates the purity of the administration of our eastern empire. When he landed in Calcutta in 1765, Bengal was regarded as a place to which Englishmen were sent only to get rich, by any means, in the shortest possible time. He first made dauntless and unsparing war on that gigantic system of oppression, extortion, and corruption. In that war he manfully put to hazard his ease, his fame, and his splendid fortune. The same sense of justice which forbids us to conceal or extenuate the faults of his earlier days compels us to admit that those faults were nobly repaired. If the reproach of the company and of its servants has been taken away; if in India the yoke of foreign masters, elsewhere the heaviest of all yokes, has been found lighter than that of any native dynasty; if to that gang of public robbers, which formerly spread terror through the whole plain of Bengal has succeeded a body of functionaries not more highly distinguished by ability and diligence than by integrity, disinterestedness, and public spirit; if we have seen such men as Munro, Elphinstone, and Metcalfe, after leading victorious armies, after making and deposing kings, return, proud of their honourable poverty, from a land which once held out to every greedy factor the hope of boundless wealth, the praise is in no small measure due to Clive. His name stands high on the roll of conquerors. But it is found in a better list, in the list of those who have done and suffered much for the happiness of mankind. To the warrior, history will assign a place in the same rank with Lucullus and Trajan. Nor will she deny to the reformer a share of that veneration with which France cherishes the memory of Turgot, and with which the latest generations of Hindus will contemplate the statue of Lord William Bentinck.h

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WARREN HASTINGS, the first governor-general of India, was born in 1732. He was sprung from a branch, or rather, as they alleged, the main stem, of the great old house of Hastings, from which in another line the earls of Huntingdon descend. But at the time of Warren's birth his branch was fast decaying; and Daylesford, its ancient seat in Worcestershire, was already sold. It was only through the kindness of a kinsman that he obtained his education at Westminster school; and when that relative died, he was shipped off at seventeen as a writer to Bengal. He was noticed by Lord Clive as a man of promise. Under Mr. Vansittart' he had much more opportunity to shine. Thus, through the various gradations of the civil service at that time, he sped with credit and success. Having married, but become a widower, he returned to England in 1765. But four years afterwards he was again sent forth as second in the council of Madras; and early in 1772 he proceeded to a far higher, and, as it proved, more lasting post, as first in the council of Bengal.

Spare in form and shrunk in features, with a mild voice and with gentle manners, Warren Hastings might seem to a casual observer as wanting in manly firmness. It is remarkable that, on his appointment as governor of Bengal, Lord Clive deemed it right to warn him against this, as he imagined, the weak point of his character. Never was an error more complete.

It may be said of Hastings, that tenacity of purpose was not merely the principal feature of his character, but the key and mainspring of the rest. It made him, on the one hand, consistent and courageous. On the other hand, it gave him a certain hardness and insensibility of heart; it made him, [The period of Vansittart's government has been truly described as the most revolting page in our Indian history."]

[1772 A.D.]

on several great occasions in his long career, callous to the sufferings which his policy inflicted, and careless of the means by which his policy might be pursued. He was firm, it may be added, in all his friendships and attachments, but few men have ever been more rancorous and unforgiving.

It was one among the merits of Hastings, that he had made himself thoroughly acquainted, not only with the literature, but also with the temper and feelings of the nations which he came to rule. Their languages he spoke with ease and fluency; their prejudices, whether of religion or of race, he was ever, unless impelled by

some state necessity, studious not to wound. By such means he was at all times, whether in his triumphs or in his hours of danger and distress, a favourite with the native tribes of Hindustan -a favourite, moreover, at a period when in most cases they had little or no sympathy for the island-strangers.

When in the year 1772 Hastings first assumed the administration of Bengal, he found the whole country weighed down by the effects of the recent famine and de

population. The greatest praise perhaps of his able rule is the simple fact that scarce any trace of these effects appears in the succeeding years. He enforced a new system in the land revenue founded on leases for five years; a system indeed far from faultless, yet the best, probably, which at that period could be framed. Under that system nearly

WARREN HASTINGS

(1732-1818)

the same amount of income was collected from the far diminished numbers with less, it would seem, of pressure than before. For the accumulating debt and financial embarrassment of the company more than the common resources seemed to be required. These Hastings strove hard to supply, not always, as will presently be shown, by the most creditable means. At the same time, to the great and manifest advantage of the natives, he put an end to the oppressive tax or duty levied upon marriages. As one of the results of his system of revenue-collection, he established, with signal good effect, district courts for the administration of justice, and district officers to maintain the public peace. Within a few months the provinces were in a great measure cleared of the dacoits or gangs of thieves, and other prowling marauders. These and such like measures of reform, or of public policy, were carried through by Hastings amidst numerous objections in his council and incessant calls upon his time.

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