Such, then, was India when England, all too tardily, found a champion in Robert Clive.
[ROBERT CLIVE]
A.D. 1751 TO A.D. 1757
Never was the strange susceptibility of India to the influence of personal vitality better exemplified than in the case of Robert Clive.
When, in 1751, he first emerged--a good head and shoulders taller than the general ruck of Anglo-Indians--from the troubled turmoil of conflicting interests, conflicting policies which characterised India in those days, Hindostan was on the point of yielding herself to France; when, in 1767, he finally left the land where he had laboured so long and so well, England was paramount over half the peninsula.
Never in the whole history of Britain was better work done for her prestige, her honour, by one man; and yet that one man died miserably from opium, administered wilfully by the sword-hand which had never failed his country; administered as the only escape from disgrace.
It will always be a question whether Clive was or was not guilty of the charges preferred against him. Those who really know the Indian mind, who fully realise the depth of the degeneracy into which that mind had fallen amongst the effete nobility of the eighteenth century, may well hesitate before denying or affirming that guilt, knowing, as they must, how easy a thing is false testimony, understanding how skilfully an act, innocent enough in itself, may be garbled into positive crime.
Either way, this much may be said. The benefits he had conferred on his country were sufficient surely to have ensured him more sympathetic treatment at the hands of that country than he actually received.
But this is to anticipate.
Clive was born--but what does it matter when, where, and how, a man of deeds comes into the world? All that is necessary is to say what he did. Clive, then, was a writer, or clerk, in the East Indian Company's service. It was not, apparently, a congenial employment. Quiet, reserved, somewhat stubborn, he led a very solitary life, knowing, he writes in one of his home letters, scarcely "any one family in the place." A friend tells a tale of him, characteristic, yet hardly sufficiently authenticated for history. He found young Clive sitting dejectedly at a table, on which lay a pistol. "Fire that thing out of the window, will you?" said the lad, and watched. "I suppose I must be good for something," he remarked despondently, when the pistol went off, "for I snapped it twice at my own head, and it missed fire both times."