To check this evil, the Court of Directors, as we have seen, ordered covenants against receiving presents to be entered into by all their servants.
The orders issued regarding the inland trade nearly shut up another great source of gain. During the five years in which the public servants had carried it on with such amazing profit, the export trade, as an inferior branch, had been left chiefly to free merchants and free mariners. The orders excluding the Company's servants from the inland trade now drove them back, once more, to foreign and general trade, but in more unfavourable circumstances.
They complained to the Directors that, by the course of events, which had done so much for the Company, they were placed in a worse situation than ever, and engaged in an unfavourable competition even with the free traders: that, instead of benefiting, they suffered by being in the Company's service, as they were confined to one spot by the Company's concerns, while the others could run over the country, and had nothing to engage them but their own interests. In this representation there was much truth; though the conclusion might have reached farther than either the Company or their servants would have been willing to allow.
Men who had been accustomed to look to great and immediate returns for their capital, or for the mere use of their name, looked upon the restrictions under which they were now placed as the height of tyranny. The habits of indulgence and expense which they had acquired from the rapid influx of wealth, and the golden prospects which their situation had seemed to hold out to them, were bad preparations for returning to, or for acquiring, the patient, sober, and steady habits of business which general commerce requires. Lord Clive found the settlement in a ferment; and all ranks of the Company's servants resolved to throw every obstacle in the way of executing the Company's orders.
How he triumphed over the civil, as well as military, combinations which threatened ruin to the British ascendency in India, we have already seen: but if he triumphed, it was not by firmness alone; it was equally by the justice, the consideration, the policy, which guided all his measures.
He had all the powers of mind necessary for his new situation; but his instruments were very imperfect. He saw that a grand crisis had arrived in the Company's affairs; that their servants were brought into contact with men possessed of the greatest wealth and power, and whose fate they really held in their hands. "Without proposing a reasonable prospect of independent fortunes," says one of his friends[75], "it was ridiculous to hope that common virtue could withstand the allurements of daily temptation; or that men armed with power would abstain from the spoils of a prostrate nation."
Clive was particularly desirous, as we have seen, that the chief men in the administration of affairs, but especially the Governor, should be withdrawn from trade, and from whatever could warp the freedom of their opinions: it is a subject to which he often reverts in his private correspondence.
But to expect that the Directors would directly sanction large salaries to their servants from the profits of the Company's trade, or from their territorial revenues, was vain. It was quite at variance with the old maxims by which they were accustomed to regulate their concerns.
There seemed to be no alternative, therefore, but either to let things proceed in the ruinous course in which they now were, to enforce the covenants, and enter, unaided, on a hopeless struggle between private interest and public duty; or to find means, from such resources of the country as were not yet claimed by the Company, to pay the superior servants in an adequate and ample manner; and this last he resolved to attempt.
"It was not expedient," says Clive himself, in his speech in the House of Commons[76], "to draw the reins too tight. It was not expedient that the Company's servants should pass from affluence to beggary. It was necessary that some emoluments should accrue to the servants in general, and more especially to those in superior stations, who were to assist in carrying on the measures of Government. The salary of a councillor is, I think, scarcely 300l. per annum; and it is well known that he cannot live in that country for less than 3000l. The same proportion holds among the other servants. It was requisite, therefore, that an establishment should take place; and the Select Committee, after the most mature deliberation, judged that the trade in salt, betle-nut, and tobacco, under proper regulations, might effectually answer the purpose."