circumstances of the
time than to the object of his policy--he gave peace, security,
prosperity and such liberty as the case allowed of to a people now
reckoned at nearly three hundred millions, who had for centuries been
the prey of oppression, while Napoleon's career of conquest was inspired
only by personal ambition, and the absolutism he established vanished
with his fall. During the three years that Clive remained in England he
sought a political position, chiefly that he might influence the course
of events in India, which he had left full of promise. He had been well
received at court, had been made Baron Clive of Plassey, in the peerage
of Ireland, had bought estates, and had got not only himself, but his
friends returned to the House of Commons after the fashion of the time.
Then it was that he set himself to reform the home system of the East
India Company, and began a bitter warfare with Mr Sulivan, chairman of
the court of directors, whom in the end he defeated. In this he was
aided by the news of reverses in Bengal. Vansittart, his successor,
having no great influence over Jafar Ali Khan, had put Kasim Ali Khan,
the son-in-law, in his place in consideration of certain payments to the
English officials. After a brief tenure Kasim Ali had fled, had ordered
Walter Reinhardt (known to the Mahommedans as Sumru), a Swiss mercenary
of his, to butcher the garrison of 150 English at Patna, and had
disappeared under the protection of his brother viceroy of Oudh. The
whole Company's service, civil and military, had become demoralized by
gifts, and by the monopoly of the inland as well as export trade, to
such an extent that the natives were pauperized, and the Company was
plundered of the revenues which Clive had acquired for them. The court
of proprietors, accordingly, who elected the directors, forced them, in
spite of Sulivan, to hurry out Lord Clive to Bengal with the double
powers of governor and commander-in-chief.

What he had done for Madras, what he had accomplished for Bengal proper,
and what he had effected in reforming the Company itself, he was now to
complete in less than two years, in this the third period of his career,
by putting his country politically in the place of the emperor of Delhi,
and preventing for ever the possibility of the corruption to which the
British in India had been driven by an evil system. On the 3rd of May
1765 he landed at Calcutta to learn that Jafar Ali Khan had died,
leaving