The Life of Robert, Lord Clive, Vol. 3 (of 3) / Collected from the Family Papers Communicated by the Earl of Powis

by John Malcolm

As insinuations had been used regarding his conduct in acquiring the property which he had devoted to establish a fund for relief of the Company's disabled officers and soldiers, and their widows,—a subject which, he remarks, he would have been ashamed to touch on, as carrying with it an appearance of vanity, were not his honour and reputation so much at stake,—he proceeded to show, that, by the opinions of the first lawyers in England, and, among others, of the Speaker of the House, his acceptance of the legacy of Meer Jaffier in no respect interfered with any of his covenants or engagements; that the amount was his own sole and indisputable property; and that the Court of Directors acknowledged, confirmed, and acted upon that right: in short, that the donation which he had made for improving the Company's military service, so far from being an object of blame, was a free gift of upwards of 70,000l. out of his private purse.

Having thus triumphantly concluded his defence against the charges that referred more immediately to himself, he expressed a fear of encroaching on the patience of the House, in what he had to say on the important business more immediately before them; but was loudly called upon to go on. He then took a view of the general accusations brought against the Company's servants; accusations in which the Court of Directors had loudly joined. The justice of many of these he did not deny, but argued that the offences arose in general less from the characters of the individuals, to which they had been ascribed, than from the unfortunate circumstances of their situation, which exposed them to temptations that it was nearly impossible for human nature to resist: that a change of system was the remedy, and that that must proceed from the Court of Directors and the Government: that in the richest country in the world, where the power of the English had become absolute, where no inferior approached his superior but with a present in his hand, where there was not an officer commanding his Majesty's fleet, nor an officer commanding his Majesty's army, nor a Governor, nor a member of Council, nor any other person, civil or military, in such a station as to have connection with the country Government, who had not received presents, it was not to be expected that the inferior officers should be more scrupulous. The abuses to which, in a country containing fifteen millions of inhabitants, a revenue of 4,000,000l., and trade in proportion, such a practice gave rise, he described in the liveliest terms; as well as the artifices by which the wily native gradually draws on the inexperienced and unthinking youth, on his first arrival in the country, till he gets him in his power: and to the natives, protected by such men, he ascribes the acts of violence and oppression that had been committed; not to the masters, who were for the most part ignorant of them. He reminded the House that as to the conduct of these young men, on whom the Directors were desirous of shifting the blame, neither their parents nor the Directors themselves were guiltless. "The advantages arising from the Company's service," said he, "are now very generally known, and the great object of every man is to get his son appointed a writer to Bengal, which is usually at the age of sixteen. His parents and relations represent to him how certain he is of making a fortune; that my Lord Such-a-one and my Lord Such-a-one acquired so much money in such a time, and Mr. Such-a-one and Mr. Such-a-one so much in such a time. Thus are their principles corrupted at their very setting out; and, as they generally go a good many together, they inflame one another's expectations to such a degree, in the course of the voyage, that they fix upon a period for their return, before their arrival." After describing the career of luxury and extravagance into which they are seduced by their artful banyan[176], who takes advantage of the influence he acquires to commit acts of violence and oppression, he adds, "Hence Sir, arises the clamour against the English gentlemen in India. But look at them in a retired situation, when returned to England, when they are no longer nabobs and sovereigns of the East: see if there be any thing tyrannical in their dispositions towards their inferiors; see if they are not good and humane masters. Are they not charitable? Are they not benevolent? Are they not generous? Are they not hospitable? If they are, thus far, not contemptible members of society, and if in all their dealings between man and man their conduct is strictly honourable, ... may we not conclude, that if they have erred, it has been because they were men placed in situations subject to little or no control?...

"But if the servants of the Company are to be loaded with the demerit of every misfortune in India, let them also have the merit they are entitled to. The Court of Directors, surely, will not claim the merit of those advantages which the nation and the Company are at present in possession of. The officers of the navy and army have had great share in the execution; but the Company's servants were the Cabinet Council who planned every thing, and to them also may be ascribed some part of the merit of our great acquisitions."

After having shown that the system was more to blame than the men, that much of the defect of regulation and control which rendered abuses inevitable in India was owing to the very persons who were loudest in their complaints, he next turned the attention of the House to the state of India itself; a country which, he affirmed, yielded a clear produce to the public and to individuals of between two and three millions sterling per annum. He asked what could be substituted for this, were it lost; and pointed to the dangers it actually ran, during a recent difference with the French Court. But it was certain, that our affairs in Bengal were in a very deplorable condition. This he ascribed to mismanagement. The public trade he showed, from official returns, to have more than doubled since the acquisition of the dewannee; while the inland trade, upon which the happiness and prosperity of the people must chiefly depend, had, by a change of system, and under pretence of freedom of trade, been thrown into total confusion, as the Company's servants and their agents had in reality taken it into their own hands, and, by trading not only as merchants but as sovereigns, had taken the bread out of the mouth of thousands of native merchants, whom they reduced to beggary. By official returns he proved that, since the acquisition of the dewannee, the revenues had suffered but a very inconsiderable decrease; while in every year since he left Bengal there had been a rapid increase in the military and civil charges, which threatened to consume the whole of the collections, and leave no surplus whatever. "Here," says he truly, "lies the danger. The evil is not so much in the revenues falling short, as in the expenses increasing. The best means of raising the revenues is to reduce the civil and military charges.... It is not the simple pay of officers and men upon the civil and military establishment which occasions our enormous expense, but the contingent bills of contractors, commissaries, engineers, &c., out of which, I am sure, great savings might be made.... Every man now, who is permitted to make a bill, makes a fortune. These intolerable expenses have alarmed the Directors, and persuaded them to come to Parliament for assistance. And, if I mistake not, they will soon go to the Administration and tell them they cannot pay the 400,000l., and that they must lower the dividends to the Proprietors."

The distressed state of the Company's affairs he attributed to four causes:—a relaxation of Government in his successors; great neglect on the part of his Majesty's Administration; notorious misconduct on the part of the Directors; and the violent and outrageous proceedings of General Courts, including contested elections.

While he bestowed the highest and most merited praise on Mr. Verelst's honour, worth, and disinterestedness, he asserts that the too great tenderness of his disposition had made him govern with too lenient a hand; that he himself, by his farewell letter to the Select Committee, had done all in his power to guard him against this error, and to prompt him to vigorous measures. But he adds, that had his successor kept the tightest rein, he could not have done much service to the Company, as neither he nor any man could have long guarded against the mischiefs occasioned by the Directors themselves, when they took away the powers of the Select Committee.

Nor was the Administration itself free from blame. When the Company had acquired an empire more extensive than any kingdom in Europe, France and Russia excepted, with 4,000,000l. of gross revenue, and trade in proportion, it might have been expected that such acquisitions would have invited the most serious attention of Ministers, and that some plan would have been devised, in concert with the Court of Directors, adequate to the occasion. Did they take it into consideration? "No, they did not."—"They thought of nothing but the present time, regardless of the future; they said, 'Let us get what we can to-day; let to-morrow take care for itself:' they thought of nothing but the immediate division of the loaves and fishes: nay, so anxious were they to lay their hands upon some immediate advantage, that they actually went so far as to influence a parcel of temporary proprietors to bully the Directors into their terms. It was their duty, Sir, to have called upon the Directors for a plan; and if a plan in consequence had not been laid before them, it would then have become their duty, with the aid and assistance of Parliament, to have formed one themselves. If Administration had done their duty, we should not now have had a speech from the throne intimating the necessity of Parliamentary interposition, to save our possessions in India from impending ruin."

He next proceeded to animadvert on the misconduct of the Directors, who after having, in the highest terms, applauded the conduct of the Select Committee, who had extricated their affairs from anarchy and confusion, and raised them to a degree of prosperity never before enjoyed nor anticipated, had counteracted the beneficial effects of their exertions by dropping the prosecutions against those gentlemen whose conduct the Committee had censured: that from that instant they destroyed their own power; their servants abroad looked upon all covenants as so many sheets of blank paper; and then began that relaxation of Government so much complained of, and so much to be dreaded. That this step they followed up by destroying the powers of the Committee, by dividing them between the Committee and Council. The natural consequence was an uninterrupted series of disputes, to the detriment of the service. That not content with this, the Court restored almost every civil and military transgressor who had been dismissed. "And now," continued his Lordship, "as a condemnation of their own conduct, and a tacit confession of their own weakness, they come to Parliament with a bill of regulations, in which is inserted a clause to put such practices as much as possible out of their power for the future."

He lastly censured the violent proceedings of General Courts, as concurring with the acts of the Directors, in removing all dread of responsibility from their servants abroad. He argued, that the whole of these evils were aggravated by the system of annual elections; that one half of the year was employed by the Directors in freeing themselves from the obligations contracted by their last election; and the second half wasted in incurring new obligations, and securing their election for the next year, by daily sacrifices of some interest of the Company. The orders sent out had, in consequence of the unsettled state of the Direction, been so fluctuating, that the servants (who say the truth have generally understood the interest of the Company much better than the Directors,) in many instances followed their own opinion, in opposition to theirs.