A.D. 1772.]

council of Madras seized him and imprisoned him, expelling every member of the council that had supported him. This most daring proceeding once more astonished and aroused the public feeling of England. An order was sent out to reinstate lord Pigot, but, before it arrived, his grief and mortification had killed him. Sir Thomas Rumbold, a most avaricious man, was appointed to succeed him, and arrived in Madras in February, 1778, major-general Hector Munro being commander-in-chief; and the army of Hyder, one hundred thousand in number, already again menacing the frontiers.

But we have far overshot the cotemporary history of Bengal. The presidency thought it had greatly benefited by the reforms of Clive; yet it had since been called upon to furnish large supplies of men and money to support the unprincipled transactions at Madras, which we have briefly detailed, and the India House, instead of paying the usual dividends, was compelled to reduce them. In 1769 India stock fell, within a few days, above sixty per cent. This state of things compelled parliament to turn its attention to the causes of this depression. Neither the reports of the embarrassments in India, nor of the unrighteous acts of the Madras presidency, prevented government granting to the East India Company, the same year, a guarantee of the revenues of the countries they had conquered, for five years, on condition of their paying to government four hundred thousand pounds per annum, and of exporting to India certain quantities of British manufactures. To examine into the state of their affairs at Calcutta, the board of directors appointed three commissioners to go out thither. There were Mr. Vansittart, who had so miserably governed Bengal before; Mr. Scrafton, a man of far superior knowledge and abilities; and colonel Forde, the conqueror of the Northern Circars, and of the Dutch at Bedarra. These gentlemen set sail for India, towards the close of that year, in the frigate Aurora; but, after leaving the Cape of Good Hope, they never were heard of again, the vessel, no doubt, having gone down at sea.

Of

What these gentlemen might have effected at Calcutta, therefore, remains unknown; but there was need enough of such an inspection as they were empowered to make. Mr. Cartier was the head of the council in Bengal till Warren Hastings was appointed to that office in 1772. Matters were bad enough there, and they were not better in the India House at home. There Sullivan had again acquired the chief influence, being elected deputy chairman. course, everything that Clive had done it was his endeavour to undo, and the consequence was a condition of anarchy at the India House, at Calcutta, which produced the most disastrous consequences. Whilst Orme, the friend of Clive, who had just published his first part of his History of our Transactions in India, was blazoning abroad the glory of Clive, other writers were busy demonstrating that this wonderful new empire was in danger of being destroyed by the boundless rapacity of the company's servants employed there. They pointed justly to the monstrous anomaly of fifteen millions of people and so splendid an empire being governed by a trading company, managed by a little knot of directors and a few hundred shareholders. The conclusion was, that plunder, extortion, and misery could be

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the only results to the unfortunate people of India, and ruin to the company at home; and, in truth, everything appeared to bear out these prognostics. The directors, early in 1772, were compelled to go again to government with fresh demands for a loan.

In order to remove the odium of mismanagement from the directors at home to the company's servants in India, Sullivan moved for leave to bring in a bill for the better regulation of the affairs of the company, and especially of its servants in India. In such a movement it was not likely that he would spare his old enemy, Clive. And in making such an attempt, he was sure to be zealously supported by a large body of the shareholders of the India House, who had been diligently taught that all the failure of revenue in India was the direct consequence of Clive's reforms when last in Bengal. There was now a very numerous body of men in England who had made enormous fortunes in India by every species of crime and oppression. These men, called nabobs, who had grown monstrously rich by Indian plunder, were all ready to unite in hunting down the man whom, after enriching himself, they charged with endeavouring to prevent all others, except a favoured few, doing the same at the expense of the natives. These employed newspapers, by large bribes, and even set on foot such papers, to blacken the man who, having served his own turn, had done his best to restrain the whole great flock of harpies which was continually flying eastward to the same great field of rapine and oppression. It was easy to engage the sympathies of the philanthropic and religious, by representing the evils which were devouring India as originating in Clive; whilst the object of the denouncers was really to prevent this same wondrous scene of aggrandisement being closed to their friends, and children who had to come after them. What those evils were which India suffered then, and so long as the company continued to rule, are described in full by a host of writers of the most unimpeachable authority. The letters of Sir Frederick Shore, a judge, are a record of them such as no other region could furnish. Mr. Vansittart himself, when president of the council in Bengal, wrote that the very members of the council were deriving vast emoluments from this state of things, and audaciously denied its existence. Under such sanction, every inferior plunderer set at defiance the orders of the president and the authority of his officers. When the native collectors of the revenuc attempted, under the express sanction of the governor, to collect the usual duties from the English, they were not only repelled, but seized and punished as enemies of the company and violators of its privileges. The native judges and magistrates were resisted in the discharge of their duties, and their functions were even usurped. Everything was in confusion, and many of the zemindars and other collectors refused to be answerable for the revenues. Even the nabob's own officers were refused the liberty of making purchases on his account, and one of them, of high connection, for purchasing some saltpetre from the nabob, was seized, was sent in irons to Calcutta, where some of the council proposed to whip him publicly, and cut off his ears. Mr. Vansittart mentions an officer of the nabob whom he had ordered to send away any Europeans who were committing disorders in the province, but who sent him word

that they threatened the most horrible things to him if he dared to interfere. The officer then added, "Now, sir, I am to inform you what I have obstructed them in. This place, Backergunge, was formerly of great trade; it is now ruined, and in this manner :-A gentleman sends a gomastah here to buy or sell. He immediately looks upon himself as sufficient to force every inhabitant either to buy his goods, or to force them to sell him theirs. If they refuse, they are flogged and thrown into prison. They compel the people to buy or sell, just at what rate they please. These,

to us in any other light than that of the worst species of robbers." But, when speaking of the government of Warren Hastings, we shall have again to touch on this point.

The reader may now see why such a storm of vengeance was raised against Clive, because he had endeavoured to set some bounds to this unexampled system of robbery. Clive, though he had done things disgraceful enough, had also done magnificent things for the nation, and without him these cormorants would not have had an India to ravage. Clive had his virtues and his sense of honour; he had served

and many other oppressions, are daily practised. Before, justice was administered in the public cutcheree; but now every gomastah is become a judge; they even pass sentence on the zemindars themselves, and draw money from them on pretended injuries." Such continued to our own time the system by which all over India the natives, and even men of the highest stations were ground by our traders and collectors, and tortured in pretended courts of justice when they resisted. Sir Henry Strachey says, "The great men formerly were the Mussulman rulers and the Hindoo zemindars. These two classes are now ruined and destroyed. Exaction of revenue is now, I presume, and always was, the most prevailing crime throughout the country and I know not how it is that extortioners appear

himself, but he was desirous to serve his country too. The great tribe, now up in arms against him, had done nothing but help themselves at the cost of the reputation of their country, without one pang of remorse or shame for the rapine and insult which they had heaped on the natives of Hindostan. Worst of all, Clive had dared to declare to the king and lord North, the prime minister, that the directors at home sanctioned all this, and that every reform was useless, unless it commenced with them. For this, they spared no means to blacken his character, and exasperate the country against him.

Sullivan, in moving for an inquiry, announced that the company had received heavy charges against Clive's administration in India. These papers were anonymous, and

adopted, "That Robert, lord Clive, did, at the same time, render great and meritorious services to this country."

This terminated the attack on this great though faulty man. Clive, like most men who took the lead in the extraordinary circumstances of the early acquisition of India, committed serious faults; but he also displayed, at the same time, wonderful talents for conquest and government, and, what is more, great and eminent virtues. He was naturally frank, generous, and just. In private life, he was most kindly unassuming and benevolent. He made many wise regulations during his administration in India, and gave both the company and the government here wise advice. The circumstances which led to his sudden aggrandisement were enough to overcome the virtue of most men, and prompted him, on one occasion, when reviewing, in the select committee, the elevation of Meer Jaffier, the bankers offering enormous sums for his favour, the vaults of the vizier piled with heaps of gold, and crowned with diamonds and rubies, all of which he might have seized, to exclaim, "By God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!"

His enemies made him pay the full penalty of his wealth. They had struck him to the heart with their poisoned Javelins. From a boy he had been subject to fits of hypochondriacal depression; as a boy, he had attempted his own life in one of these paroxysms. They now came upon him with tenfold force, and in a few months he died by his own hand.

From Clive, events cause us to pass at once to one accused of much greater misdemeanours, and one whose administration terminated in a more formal and extraordinary trial than that of Clive; a trial made for ever famous by the great abilities and eloquence of Burke and Sheridan, and the awful mysteries of iniquity, as practised by our authorities in India, which were brought to the public knowledge by them on this great occasion. Warren Hastings was of an old, decayed family, a branch of that of the earls of Huntingdon. The ancient seat of his ancestors, Daylesford, in Worcestershire, was sold, and he received his education at Westminster school. There Cowper, the poet, and Elijah Impey, the latter destined to figure in his Indian concerns, were his schoolfellows. He went to India as a cadet at the age of seventeen. He attracted the notice of Clive, and was much employed by Vansittart. Steadily advancing, he was appointed chief of the council of Bengal in 1772, and, in the following year, the first governor-general of India.

It is singular that the tender-hearted Cowper, and, in fact, all who knew Hastings as a youth, were astonished at the accounts of his oppressions and cruelties charged against him on his trial, and many, spite of all the evidence, would never believe them. All who knew him when young regarded him as particularly humane and gentle. Clive, who saw him in India, and beheld only a man of spare form, shrunken features, of particularly gentle manners and mild voice, thought him in danger from a too easy disposition, which might lead him to be governed by others. No doubt, had Hastings had his future career suddenly displayed to him by an Indian prophet, as Jehu had his by a Hebrew one, he would have replied, in horror, "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do these things?" No man can be judged of,

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perhaps no man can estimate himself, so as to predicate what he will do under wholly new and extraordinary circumstances. But under the mild and gentle outside of Warren Hastings lay a most dogged and determined will, and a disposition to rule, which, when called into action, and opposed by obstacles, converted him into the astonishing tyrant.

Hastings commenced his rule in Bengal under circumstances which demanded rather a man of pre-eminent humanity than of the character yet lying undeveloped in him. In 1770, under the management of Mr. Cartier, a famine broke out in Bengal, so terrible that it is said to have swept away one-third of the population of the state, and to have been attended by indescribable horrors. The most revolting circumstance was, that the English were charged with being the authors of it, by buying up all the rice in the country, and refusing to sell it, except at the most exorbitant prices. There have not been wanting zealous defenders of our countrymen from this awful charge, and we should have rejoiced if so dread an opprobrium could have been removed from our national character. It has been contended that famines are, or have been, of frequent occurrence in India; that the natives had no providence ; and that to charge the English with the miserable consequences of this famine, is unreasonable, because it was what they could neither foresee nor prevent. Of the drought in the previous autumn, there is no doubt; but there is, unhappily, as little, that the regular rapacity of the English, as we have described it, had reduced the natives to that condition of poverty, apathy, and despair, in which the slightest derangement of season must superinduce famine; that they were grown callous to the sufferings of their victims, and were as alive to their gain by the rising price through the scarcity, as they were in all other cases. Their object was sudden wealth, and they cared not, in fact, whether the natives lived or died, so that that object was effected.

Amongst the foremost defenders of the English has been lord Macaulay, in the famous Edinburgh Review article already mentioned. He says, "These charges we believe to have been utterly unfounded. That servants of the company had ventured, since Clive's departure, to deal in rice, is probable. That, if they dealt in rice, they must have gained by the scarcity, is certain. But there is no reason for thinking that they either produced or aggravated the evil which physical causes sufficiently explain." But, unfortunately, there is every reason for thinking that they assisted these physical causes, and, if we take into consideration that since the experience of these horrors, though droughts have been frequent in India, famines have been rare, this conclusion acquires much force. Let us see what men, well acquainted with India at that time, have to say. The author of the "Short History of the English Transac tions in the East Indies" thus boldly states the facts. Speaking of the monopoly just alluded to, of salt, betelnut, and tobacco, he says:—