[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I should like
to associate myself with Mr. Vincent Smith's regret that the Spectator's reviewer should defend without quali- fication Clive's action in the case of Omichund. The tendency of late years has been for historical writers when dealing with our great Empire-builders to abandon in their favour all the ordinary criteria of ethical judgment. It is sometimes refreshing to turn from the sophistical arguments of the whitewashing school of Indian historians, who so immerse themselves in the documents they study that they lose all sense of perspective, to the pages of the great writer they are so fond of decrying. May I refer to these famous words of Lord Macaulay inspired with his own splendid sanity and insight?—
"The entire history of British India is an illustration of the great truth, that it is not prudent to oppose perfidy with perfidy, and that the most efficient weapon with which men can encounter falsehood is truth. . . . English valour and English intelligence have done less to extend and preserve our Oriental empire than English veracity."
Your reviewer seems to -forget that the Omichund episode was only the culminating incident in a long course of action which was questionable from the beginning. It was a great mistake altogether to enter into a dynastic plot with a usurper to overthrow the Company's own ally. It was deplorable that a man of Clive': natural frankness should be driven to write "soothing letters " to the ruler he had determined to ruin, while he professed to support him. It was a miserable error to enter into a private arrangement with Mir Jafar for large rewards to the Company's servants, if for no other reason, because it probably suggested to the miser- able Omichund (whose infamous avarice stirs the wrath of your reviewer) that he too might make some personal profit out of the crisis. It is really no good to say that men of that time could not be expected to understand the evils of such a course. Burgoyne laid it down in the House of Commons a few years later, and no one now would dream of disputing it, " that it was impossible that any civil or military servant in treating with a foreign prince or state could, while doing so, lawfully bargain for or acquire property for himself." It is no good to talk airily of accident giving Clive so vast a fortune. Clive stipulated for de28,000 for himself in the Treaty with Mir Jafar as a member of Committee, and received in all, partly by donations afterwards, .4234,000. The most sinister thing is, as is clear to all who have read the documents, that Mir Jafar imagined that in paying these sums to individuals he was purchasing immunity from his obliga- tions to the Company stated in the public Treaty. Clive next, on his own admission, suggested to the Nawab (and a suggestion from him was equivalent to a command, that he should be given a jaghire to support his title of Omrah. He thus acquired, acci- dentally I suppose, another .280,000 per annum, and the fact that this sum consisted of the quit rent paid to the Nawab by the Com- pany did not make the transaction any the more delicate. But Clive saw no objection in being the landlord of the Company whose paid servant he was. It is misleading to say that Clive never made any secret about his gains. The private agreement was not divulged, and though Clive afterwards told the Company casually that the Nawab's generosity " had made his fortune easy," he gave no details at all of the huge sums paid to himself and his colleagues in the long despatch in which he reported the facts of the compensation given by Mir Jafar to the Company and the inhabitants of Calcutta. When Clive in his second Governor- ship arrived at Madras he found that the position in India was much better than was supposed at home, and he therefore wrote to his agents in London to invest all his available cash in East India Stook. But I suppose we shall be told that this use of official information by a servant of the Company for his own private gain was another " accident." Clive at any rate thought it expedient to transmit hie instructions in cipher. Finally at the time he accepted the jaghire Clive knew perfectly well that the whole administration of the Nawab was crippled for the want of funds, and he was forced to admit before the Parlia- mentary Commission of 1772 that at the time he accepted this huge sum the troops of Mir Jafar were mutinous for lack of pay. and that the Nawab's goods and furniture were publicly sold to pay the Company the sums due under the Treaty.
That Clive was a very great man I would cordially agree. I am here unfortunately dealing almost entirely with the blemishes on his character because your reviewer denies their existence. With his magnificent merits I am not concerned. But it is useless not to recognize the fact that there was a certain coarseness of fibre in his nature. As Elphinstone well said, he possessed " a high sense of honour with little delicacy of sentiment." I believe the picture painted by Macaulay, so far from being a caricature, was a far truer portrait of this great, virile, courageous, splendid man, with his human failings, frank ambitions, and strong passions, than the whitewashed figure of propriety with all its most charac- teristic lineaments obliterated, in the existence of which your reviewer would have us believe.—I am, Sir, &c., P. E. Rowers.
Trinity College, Glenaimond, Perthshire.
[The " case for the prosecution " could not be better put Than in this very striking and powerful letter by Mr. P. E. Roberts. We shall not go over old ground or attempt to open new by traversing his indictment or answering his arguments. We desire, however, to point out that he has mis- taken our attitude. We defended, and we still defend, Clive's conduct in regard to Omichund, but it was not our intention to describe Clive as a spotless hero. He lived in an age in which the worst men were hopelessly corrupt and the best men had a very different standard about money and public duty from that which we have carefully built up. Oar point was the narrower one, that given the scheme for the overthrow of the Nabob, which had become necessary in order to protect Calcutta from a second destruction, Clive could not have acted otherwise than he did, unless he was willing to yield " hands down " to a blackmailer. We print elsewhere an account of Clive's death which appeared in the Spectator some twenty-five years ago, and was derived from a direct family tradition. The said article also included a general defence of Clive, which we reprint. We cannot publish any more letters for the present in regard to Clive.—ED. Spectator.]
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