uiry
into his official conduct resulted (1773) in his practical
vindication. Whatever the truth in the case may be, Clive must ever
hold his place among the "builders of Greater Britain."

In 1753 Clive returned to England, and two years later went back to
India as governor of Fort St. David, in the Madras presidency. Of
his proceedings in this government and his further successful
military enterprises, which went so far to win India for England,
Arbuthnot, late member of the Council of India, gives an
authoritative account, based on the fullest information available at
the close of the nineteenth century.

Clive returned to the Madras Presidency at a critical moment. War with
France was imminent, and broke out in the course of a few months. The
very day that Clive assumed the government of Fort St. David, Calcutta
was captured by the Nawab[40] of Bengal, and the tragedy of the Black
Hole took place. The acquisition of Calcutta by the East India Company
was somewhat later than that of Madras. It dates from 1686, when the
representatives of the company, driven by the Mogul authorities from
Hugli, where they had established a factory, moved under the leadership
of Job Charnock some twenty-six miles down the river to Satanati, now
one of the northern suburbs of Calcutta. Ten years afterward they built
the original Fort William, and in 1700 they purchased the villages of
Satanti, Kalikata, and Govindpur from the son of the Emperor.

In 1707 the East India Company declared Calcutta a separate presidency.
Here, surrounded by the richest districts in India, amid a teeming
population, on the banks of a river which was the chief highway of
Eastern commerce, the servants of the company drove a thriving trade,
threatened only, but never actually assailed, by the raids of the
Mahrattas, the memory of which is still kept alive by the famous
Mahratta ditch. They were in the same relation to the Nawab of Bengal as
the servants of the company at Madras were to the Nawab of the Carnatic.
In April, 1756, Aliverdi Khan, who was a just and strong ruler, died,
and was succeeded by his grandson, Suraj ud Daulah, a youth under twenty
years of age, whose training had been of the worst description. One of
the whims of this youth was hatred toward the English, and he had not
been two months on the throne when he found a pretext for indulging this
sentiment in the fact that the English, in anticipation