LORD CLIVE.* PRospEno's instruction to Ariel, "Bring a corollary, rather
than want a spirit," might have supplied a maxim for the decision to include Clive among the Rulers of India, in this series of Indian Historical Retrospects, of which Sir William Hunter is the editor. The decision was right, beyond all question ; and yet Clive cannot be called a "Ruler of India" in the same sense as is Akbar, or Aurungzebe, or Wellesley, or Dalhousie. Clive was the founder, not the ruler, of what we now call our Indian Empire, the Empire which had to be rebuilt after it had fallen into rain at the death of Aurungzebe. We might again quote Prospero's words, and say that while the Court of Directors could but make Olive master of a full poor cell when they gave him the reversion of the Governorship of Madras, and afterwards made him Governor-General of their factory at Fort William at Cal- cutta, yet he was all along showing himself to be a ruler of men, and of the spirits of men, in war and peace alike,— breaking the power of the French and the Dutch in their rivalries with the English ; making the Native Princes submissive, at incredible odds, to his army and his policy; and controlling no less completely the mutinous spirit of his own countrymen, whether civilians or officers in his little army. Colonel Malleson's volume, now before us, is the fifth Life of Clive, properly so-called; while the histories of Orme, Mill, Stanhope, and others, the Parliamentary inquiries and debates, and the contemporary records, may be said to be so many more accounts of the same life. And yet the story seems always new ; no one is tired of hearing it again. When the Great Mogul, Emperor Akbar, wise and strong, temperate and tolerant, was ruling over India, the civilisation, the social peace and prosperity, and civil order of his dominions might have seemed as real and as stable as that of his contemporary, Queen Elizabeth, in her little island- kingdom. Bat the germs of decay, no doubt, were in the one, and those of life and growth in the other ; and not only was the little kingdom destined to expand to a material as well as moral and intellectual power far more than that of the greater Empire, but actually to include it, and restore it to new life within its own bounds. The present writer remembers a con- versation on the subject, in which Mountetuart Elphinstone took part, and agreed in the opinion that the decay of the one, and the constant growth of the other, were to be explained by the fact that the Christian Faith lay at the foundation of the one, and the Faith of Mahomet at that of the other. The fact, at least, all recognise. In a land where the burning sun is looked on as the enemy rather than the friend of man, and as the type of intolerable oppression and wrong, the great Akbar might rejoice to appropriate to himself and his reign the lan- guage in which the Persian poets delight topicture such a reign —as a great shadow, in which a man may travel for a whole year. How much more truly might this be said of that secular oak of British rule which spreads its protecting shade over two hundred and fifty millions of men,—dwellers in the plains watered by the Indus, the Ganges, and the Irrawaddy, and extending from the snows and forests of the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean.
The real power of the Mogul Empire came to an end, as we have said, early in the eighteenth century, though its forms lasted on for a hundred and fifty years more. The internal disintegration of the state had been going on during the * Rulers of Indio ; Lord Oliva, By Colonel Cl. B. Malleson, 0.6.1. Oxford ; The Clarendon Press. 1893. long reign of Aurungzebe, who died in 1707; and it afforded the opportunity for the rise of the Mahrattas, whom India produced from the lowest of her native races,--for they were Swims in caste,—hordes of spoilers as rapacious and as ruth- less as the old Tartar invaders; and the general anarchy and misery were still further aggravated by the Persian invasion and devastations of Nadir Shah. Meanwhile, there were signs, which we recognise now, though they were not then visible to mortal eyes, that a new power was coming from the West, greater than any which bad come before it. But was this power to be French or English P It had been already decreed, by what Carlyle calls "the Destinies," that it was not to be Portuguese nor Dutch. The French and English merchants trading in the East Indies were not only rivals as traders, but also as belonging to two nations very frequently at war with each other in Europe ; but as long as the authority of the Mogul rulers was unimpaired, these rivals were kept under control, and in their own places as traders, by a strong hand. But when the days of anarchy came, there was nothing to hinder the factories of Madras and Pondicherry from flying at each other as often as news arrived from Europe that war had been declared between England and France; and then the rival Mahommedan Subandars and Nawabs, who were contending among themselves for the power which had fallen from the hands of the Emperor at Delhi, were eager to enlist on either side these French and English, who now began to show a capacity for fighting as great as that for trading. Two or three hundred Europeans, it was said, were more than a match for twenty times that number of the most war- like races ; and even the native Sepoys, under European dis- cipline, put on a courage and steadiness no longer to be found elsewhere among the descendants of the men whom Mahmoud or Baher had led. Madras and Pondicherry, and the country round, were the chief battle-grounds; and though the fighting might in one sense seem worthy only to be called that of kites and crows, it was this that decided whether the future Empire of India was to belong to France or to England.
It all looks plain enough now ; but there was a time when it would not have been unreasonable to question whether Dupleix, and not Clive, might prove to be the founder of the new Empire. And even at the close of the century, the actual power and future prospects of the French in India seemed very threatening to our statesmen, until Wellesley had broken it at Seringapatam and Hyderabad. A great American authority on the subject has said that it was the sea-power of England that decided for us; and no doubt this was so. Yet we cannot help saying to ourselves : "It was dogged did it." We contrast the vainglorious hurry in which Dupleix thought to create an empire, with the reso- lution of the English Directors at home and their servants in India, including Clive himself, to stick to their trade, and not to take a step towards the acquisition of empire till it was thrust upon them. Orme has given us, in a few simple words, a great historical picture of Olive on the morrow of the victory of Plessey :— " In the hall of audience was fixed the afasnad or throne, in which Burajah Dowlali used to appear in public, 3a...flier, after the first salutation at the entrance, returned towards the inner part of the hall with Colonel Clive, and seemed -desirous to avoid the Mutorad, which Clive perceiving, led him to it, and, having placed him on it, made obeisance to him, as Nabob of the provinces, in the usual forms, and presented a plate with gold rupees. He
then, by an interpreter, exhorted the great men to be joyful that fortune had given them so good a prince, in exchange for such a tyrant as Surajah Dowlah ; on which they likewise paid homage
and presented gold."—Orme's History, vol. ii., p. 181, How different would have been the description if Dupleis had been there instead of Olive ! And even when Ciive's policy of giving back to Mir Daffier the government which he had taken away from Surajah Dowlab, and withdrawing the English again into the position of traders, had failed, and he was sent out again to set the matter right, he still held back from the assumption of regal power for the Company, and preferred to obtain for it the humbler office of Dewan, or minister of finance. The next step was left for others. Such was the method, and such the work, of building up our Indian Empire. Of the actual details of this work Colonel Malleson has given us a careful and clear narrative,—how the son of a Shropshire squire became a clerk in the Madras factory of the East India Company ; how he exchanged the counting-house and the pen for the camp and the sword ; how the soldier became a statesman, with a foremost place, not only in the Company at home and in India, but in the House of Com- mons. Every one knows how Olive won the battle of Plassey ; but Colonel Malleson reminds us of the suppression of the mutiny among the English officers on the stoppage of their " batta " allowances, which was so important in itself, and so characteristic of his hero, that we give so much of our author's account of it as our space allows :— " Formidable as was the situation, no living man was so well qualified to deal with it as was Clive. In the hour of danger he soared above his fellows. The danger here was greater than the danger of Arcot ; than at the surprises of KG,veripfik and of Samifiveram; than during the hour of doubt at Plessey. His opponents were his own men,—men whom he had led to victory. They possessed all the fortified places, the guns, the material of war. From the frontier came rumours of the advance of a MartIthli army, 60,000 strong, to wrest Allalabtid and Karra from his hand. But there he was, the same cool, patient, defiant man he had been when confronted by the bayonets of the French at Ktveripdk and SamitIscram. He knew that the Government he represented was in the most imminent danger, that if the muti- neers should move forward, he had not the means to oppose them. The manner in which Clive met this danger is a lesson for all time. Not for an instant did he quail. Never was he more resolved to carry out the orders he had issued regarding batta' than when he was told that, in the presence of the enemy on the frontier, the officers would resign their commissions if the order were not withdrawn."
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