arms of these new allies, and that the spoken by the first statesman of the English ascendency in Bengal would age, had passed from mouth to mouth, be exposed to most serious danger. had been transmitted to Clive in BenHe took his resolution with charac- gal, and had greatly delighted and flatteristic boldness, and was most ably se- tered him. Indeed, since the death of conded by his officers, particularly by Wolfe, Clive was the only English Colonel Forde, to whom the most im- general of whom his countrymen had portant part of the operations was in- much reason to be proud. The Duke trusted. The Dutch attempted to force of Cumberland had been generally una passage. The English encountered fortunate; and his single victory, having them both by land and water. On both been gained over his countrymen and elements the enemy had a great supe- used with merciless severity, had been riority of force. On both they were more fatal to his popularity than his signally defeated. Their ships were many defeats. Conway, versed in the taken. Their troops were put to a total learning of his profession, and personrout. Almost all the European soldiers, ally courageous, wanted vigour and who constituted the main strength of capacity. Granby, honest, generous, the invading army, were killed or taken. and as brave as a lion, had neither The conquerors sat down before Chin- science nor genius. Sackville, inferior surah; and the chiefs of that settle- in knowledge and abilities to none of ment, now thoroughly humbled, con- his contemporaries, had incurred, unsented to the terms which Clive dic-justly as we believe, the imputation tated. They engaged to build no fortifications, and to raise no troops beyond a small force necessary for the police of their factories; and it was distinctly provided that any violation of these covenants should be punished with instant expulsion from Bengal.

most fatal to the character of a soldier. It was under the command of a foreign general that the British had triumphed at Minden and Warburg. The people therefore, as was natural, greeted with pride and delight a captain of their own, whose native courage and self-taught skill had placed him on a level with the great tacticians of Germany.

The wealth of Clive was such as enabled him to vie with the first grandees of England. There remains proof that he had remitted more than a hundred and eighty thousand pounds through the Dutch East India Com

Three months after this great victory, Clive sailed for England. At home, honours and rewards awaited him, not indeed equal to his claims or to his ambition, but still such as, when his age, his rank in the army, and his original place in society are considered, must be pronounced rare and splendid. He was raised to the Irish peerage, and en-pany, and more than forty thousand couraged to expect an English title. George the Third, who had just ascended the throne, received him with great distinction. The ministers paid him marked attention; and Pitt, whose influence in the House of Commons and in the country was unbounded, was eager to mark his regard for one whose exploits had contributed so much to the lustre of that memorable period. The great orator had already in Parliament described Clive as a heavenborn general, as a man who, bred to the labour of the desk, had displayed a military genius which might excite the admiration of the King of Prussia. There were then no reporters in the gallery; but these words, emphatically

pounds through the English Company. The amount which he had sent home through private houses was also considerable. He had invested great sums in jewels, then a very common mode of remittance from India. His purchases of diamonds, at Madras alone, amounted to twenty-five thousand pounds. Besides a great mass of ready money, he had his Indian estate, valued by himself at twenty-seven thousand a year. His whole annual income, in the opinion of Sir John Malcolm, who is desirous to state it as low as possible, exceeded forty thousand pounds; and incomes of forty thousand pounds at the time of the accession of George the Third were at least as rare as incomes of a hundred

thousand pounds now. We may safely he had so eminently distinguished him

affirm that no Englishman who started with nothing has ever, in any line of life, created such a fortune at the early age of thirty-four.

self as a soldier and a statesman; and it was by considerations relating to India that his conduct as a public man It would be unjust not to add that of the Company, though an anomaly, in England was regulated. The power Clive made a creditable use of his is in our time, we are firmly persuaded, riches. As soon as the battle of Plassey a beneficial anomaly. In the time of had laid the foundation of his fortune, Clive, it was not merely an anomaly, he sent ten thousand pounds to his but a nuisance. There was no Board sisters, bestowed as much more on of Control. The Directors were for other poor friends and relations, or- the most part mere traders, ignorant dered his agent to pay eight hundred of general politics, ignorant of the pea year to his parents, and to insist that culiarities of the empire which had they should keep a carriage, and settled strangely become subject to them. five hundred a year on his old com- The Court of Proprietors, wherever it mander Lawrence, whose means were chose to interfere, was able to have its very slender. The whole sum which way. That Court was more numerous, Clive expended in this manner may be as well as more powerful, than at precalculated at fifty thousand pounds. He now set himself to cultivate Par-dred pounds conferred a vote. sent; for then every share of five hunliamentary interest. His purchases of land seem to have been made in a great measure with that view, and, after the general election of 1761, he found himself in the House of Commons, at the head of a body of dependents whose support must have been important to any administration. In English politics, however, he did not take a prominent part. His first attachments, as we have seen, were to Mr. Fox; at a later period he was attracted by the genius and success of Mr. Pitt; but finally he connected himself in the closest manner with George Grenville. Early in the session of 1764, when the illegal and impolitic persecution of that worthless demagogue The interest taken by the public of Wilkes had strongly excited the pub- England in Indian questions was then lic mind, the town was amused by an far greater than at present, and the anecdote, which we have seen in some reason is obvious. unpublished memoirs of Horace Wal-enters the service young; he climbs At present a writer pole. Old Mr. Richard Clive, who, slowly; he is fortunate if, at forty-five, since his son's elevation, had been in- he can return to his country with an troduced into society for which his annuity of a thousand a year, and former habits had not well fitted him, with savings amounting to thirty presented himself at the levee. The thousand pounds. A great quantity King asked him where Lord Clive of wealth is made by English functionwas. "He will be in town very aries in India; but no single functionsoon," said the old gentleman, loud ary makes a very large fortune, and enough to be heard by the whole cir- what is made is slowly, hardly, and cle," and then your Majesty will have honestly earned. Only four or five another vote." high political offices are reserved for But in truth all Clive's views were public men from England. The resi directed towards the country in which | dencies, the secretaryships, the seats

The meetings were large, stormy, even riotous, the debates indecently virulent. All the turbulence of a Westminster election, all the trickery and corruption of a Grampound election, disgraced the proceedings of this assembly on questions of the most solemn importance. Fictitious votes were manufactured on a gigantic scale. Clive himself laid out a hundred thousand pounds in the purchase of stock, which he then divided among nominal proprietors on whom he could depend, and whom he brought down in his train to every discussion and every ballot. Others did the same, though not to quite so enormous an extent.

in the boards of revenue and in the chosen annually. At the election of Sudder courts are all filled by men 1763, Clive attempted to break down who have given the best years of life the power of the dominant faction. to the service of the Company; nor The contest was carried on with a can any talents however splendid or violence which he describes as treany connections however powerful ob-mendous. Sulivan was victorious, and tain those lucrative posts for any per- hastened to take his revenge. The son who has not entered by the regular grant of rent which Clive had received door, and mounted by the regular from Meer Jaffier was, in the opinion gradations. Seventy years ago, less of the best English lawyers, valid. money was brought home from the It had been made by exactly the same East than in our time. But it was authority from which the Company divided among a very much smaller had received their chief possessions in number of persons, and immense sums Bengal, and the Company had long were often accumulated in a few months. acquiesced in it. The Directors, howAny Englishman, whatever his age ever, most unjustly determined to conmight be, might hope to be one of the fiscate it, and Clive was forced to file a lucky emigrants. If he made a good bill in chancery against them. speech in Leadenhall Street, or pub- But a great and sudden turn in lished a clever pamphlet in defence of affairs was at hand. Every ship from the chairman, he might be sent out in Bengal had for some time brought the Company's service, and might re- alarming tidings. The internal misturn in three or four years as rich as government of the province had reached Pigot or as Clive. Thus the India House such a point that it could go no furwas a lottery-office, which invited her. What, indeed, was to be exeverybody to take a chance, and held pected from a body of public servants out ducal fortunes as the prizes de- exposed to temptation such that, as stined for the lucky few. As soon as Clive once said, flesh and blood could it was known that there was a part of not bear it, armed with irresistible the world where a lieutenant-colonel power, and responsible only to the had one morning received as a present corrupt, turbulent, distracted, ill inan estate as large as that of the Earl formed Company, situated at such a of Bath or the Marquess of Rocking-distance that the average interval beham, and where it seemed that such a trifle as ten or twenty thousand pounds was to be had by any British functionary for the asking, society began to exhibit all the symptoms of the South Sea year, a feverish excitement, an ungovernable impatience to be rich, a contempt for slow, sure, and moderate gains.

tween the sending of a despatch and the receipt of an answer was above a year and a half? Accordingly, during the five years which followed the departure of Clive from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to a point such as seems hardly compatible with the very existence of society. The Roman proconsul, who, At the head of the preponderating in a year or two, squeezed out of a party in the India House, had long province the means of rearing marble stood a powerful, able, and ambitious palaces and baths on the shores of director of the name of Sulivan. He had conceived a strong jealousy of Clive, and remembered with bitterness the audacity with which the late governor of Bengal had repeatedly set at nought the authority of the distant Directors of the Company. An apparent reconciliation took place after Clive's arrival; but enmity remained deeply rooted in the hearts of both. The whole body of Directors was then VOL. II.

of

Campania, of drinking from amber, of feasting on singing birds, of exhibiting armies of gladiators and flocks of camelopards; the Spanish viceroy, who, leaving behind him the curses Mexico or Lima, entered Madrid with a long train of gilded coaches, and of sumpter-horses trapped and shod with silver, were now outdone. Cruelty, indeed, properly so called, was not among the vices of the servants of the I

Company. But cruelty itself could government. But the English governhardly have produced greater evils ment was not to be so shaken off. than sprang from their unprincipled That government, oppressive as the eagerness to be rich. They pulled most oppressive form of barbarian desdown their creature, Meer Jaffier. potism, was strong with all the strength They set up in his place another Na- of civilisation. It resembled the governbob, named Meer Cossim. But Meer ment of evil Genii, rather than the Cossim had parts and a will; and, government of human tyrants. Even though sufficiently inclined to oppress despair could not inspire the soft Benhis subjects himself, he could not bear galee with courage to confront men of to see them ground to the dust by op- English breed, the hereditary nobility pressions which yielded him no profit, of mankind, whose skill and valour nay, which destroyed his revenue in had so often triumphed in spite of the very source. The English accord- tenfold odds. The unhappy race never ingly pulled down Meer Cossim, and attempted resistance. Sometimes they set up Meer Jaffier again; and Meer submitted in patient misery. Sometimes Cossim, after revenging himself by a they fled from the white man, as their massacre surpassing in atrocity that fathers had been used to fly from the of the Black Hole, fled to the do- Mahratta; and the palanquin of the minions of the Nabob of Oude. At English traveller was often carried every one of these revolutions, the new through silent villages and towns, which prince divided among his foreign mas- the report of his approach had made ters whatever could be scraped to- desolate. gether in the treasury of his fallen The foreign lords of Bengal were predecessor. The immense population naturally objects of hatred to all the of his dominions was given up as a neighbouring powers; and to all the prey to those who had made him a haughty race presented a dauntless sovereign, and who could unmake him. front. The English armies, every The servants of the Company obtained, where outnumbered, were every where not for their employers, but for them- victorious. A succession of commandselves, a monopoly of almost the whole ers, formed in the school of Clive, still internal trade. They forced the na-maintained the fame of their country. tives to buy dear and to sell cheap. They insulted with impunity the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal authorities of the country. They covered with their protection a set of native dependents who ranged through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared. Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master; and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. They found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins of Surajah Dowlah. Under their old masters they had at least one resource: when the evil became insupportable, the people rose and pulled down the|

"It must be acknowledged," says the Mussulman historian of those times, "that this nation's presence of mind, firmness of temper, and undaunted bravery, are past all question. They join the most resolute courage to the most cautious prudence; nor have they their equals in the art of ranging themselves in battle array and fighting in order. If to so many military qualifications they knew how to join the arts of government, if they exerted as much ingenuity and solicitude in relieving the people of God, as they do in whatever concerns their military affairs, no nation in the world would be preferable to them, or worthier of command. But the people under their dominion groan every where, and are reduced to poverty and distress. Oh God! come to the assistance of thine afflicted servants, and deliver them from the oppressions which they suffer."

It was impossible, however, that