in India. His second administration, which only lasted rather less than two years, was crowded with events which added greater and more lasting lustre to his reputation than his first. He had effected a most necessary reform in preventing any further plundering of the mild and inoffensive Bengalese by the officials of the East India Company, which the character of the one and the rapacity of the other made so easy, and which had heretofore been recognized by both parties as almost akin to prescriptive right. He had put down the most dangerous mutiny that had ever disgraced an army of English soldiers, without having recourse to the desperate measure which his great prototype, Cromwell, on a like occasion, was once compelled to take. The objects which he had most at heart in laying the foundation of the British Empire in India, viz., the possession of the three great provinces of Bengal, had been secured with marvellous ease, and with the voluntary consent of the sovereign representative of the Great Mogul dynasty, which for so long a period had held sway over the millions of Hindostan; and one of his last acts before leaving Calcutta was to put on record a minute of his opinion, but which time and the fate of empires has flatly contradicted, and which makes us wonder at finding such to be the mature judgment of so great a man, that "any further extension of territory in India, on the part of England, would be a scheme so extravagantly ambitious, that no government in its senses would ever dream of it." The state of Clive's health made it necessary for him to return to Europe. At the close of January, 1767, he quitted for the third and last time the country to which he had come Clive's Triumphs. 117 twenty-three years before a friendless and penniless lad, and on whose destinies he had exercised so mighty an influence through the possession of a genius which has rarely been equalled, and in its own peculiar line probably never been surpassed. If we were to draw a comparison between Clive and those to whom history, whether ancient or modern, has conceded the name of "great," there is scarcely one which must not pale before the merits of the founder of the British Empire in India. From his first entrance on the scene of his subsequent fame dates the renown of the English arms in the East. Till he appeared, his countrymen were despised as a lot of mere trading pedlars, while the French were regarded as the only people from the West capable of war, and formed to command Clive's courage and genius, together with his ability to carry out the principles, so tersely expressed by the Roman poet of Carpe Diem, dissolved the charm which had beguiled the native mind. With the brilliant defence of Arcot commences his long series of triumphs, which closes with the crowning victory of Plassey. Nor must we forget the enormous disadvantages under which he won his great military triumphs; compared with those whom the world. considers heroes, whether it be an Alexander or a Napoleon, as tried by this test, their star appears to pale before him. What shall we say of the former ? He ascended the throne at the age of twenty, crossed the Hellespont at twenty-two, at the head of an army of 35,000 men, of the famous Macedonian phalanx, the finest troops which the world had then seen, surrounded by a staff of most able generals, and trained in the science of war from his cradle. He won his crowning victory of Arbela at twenty-five, reached the limit of his conquests by the invasion of the Punjaub, and his triumph over Porus (scarcely a thousand miles distant, by the way, from the battlefield of Plassey), and after being guilty of the most atrocious acts of refined cruelty, which place him on a par with the greatest monsters of ancient or modern times, and which, consequently, make the lines more applicable to him than to the conqueror for whom they were intended : "He left a name at which the world grew pale, Alexander, miscalled "the Great," ended his worthless life as a drunken sot at the early age of thirty-three. Clive, on the other hand, began life as a clerk to a company of traders, without having the slightest knowledge of the rudiments of war; and it was not until the age of twenty-one that he adopted the military profession, and received an ensign's commission in the service of the East India Company, whose army had previously consisted of some native soldiers, armed with bows and arrows, to defend the three or four ill-constructed forts which they then owned on the eastern coast of Hindostan. At twenty-six, Clive was simply a lieutenant, in charge of the commissariat department, during the campaign of Captain Gingen, which ended in such a disastrous fiasco for the commander of a set of poltroons. A few months later he obtained his first command, at an earlier age than that of Napoleon Buonaparte, when he commenced his astonishing career in Italy, and proved, by his brilliant defence of the city and fortress of "A Heaven-born General." 119 Arcot, that he was indeed, as the great Lord Chatham had called him, "a heaven-born general;" and the skilful defence of which became the first step in his grand career, that eventually made him the founder of the British Empire in India. How justly has Macaulay said, in the admirable portrait he has drawn of Clive's character, "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. . . Clive's 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. 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." To I 20 CHAPTER XIV. RISE OF WARREN HASTINGS. FROM HIS APPOINTMENT AS A WRITER TO HIS RETURN TO ENGLAND AS MEMBER OF COUNCIL AT CALCUTTA. THE A.D. 1750-1764. HERE is a remarkable similarity in many points between the two great men, Clive and Warren Hastings, to whom we are indebted more than to any one else for the foundation and consolidation of the British Empire in India. Lord Macaulay, in his account of the duel. between the GovernorGeneral of Bengal and that hostile member of his council, Sir Philip Francis, remarks, “In a very short time it was made signally manifest to how great a danger the Governor-General had on this occasion exposed his country. A crisis had arrived, in which he, and he alone, was competent to deal. It is not too much to say that if he had been taken from the head of affairs, the years 1780 and 1781 would have been as fatal to our power in Asia as to our power in America.” And of Clive's power to preserve our colonies in America to the mother-country, the same great historian gives it as his opinion, when the disputes with the colonists had become so serious that war was inevitable, and ministers were anxious to avail |