ration. Its territory in India consisted of but
a few square miles round the factories its agents had established,
and for which they paid an annual rental to the native governments.
They had but a small force, composed principally of the children of
the soil, insufficiently armed, whose chief duties were escort duties
and the manning of the ill-constructed forts which protected the
Company's warehouses. The idea of aggressive warfare had never
entered the heads even of the boldest of the English agents. They
recognized the native ruler of the province in which lay their
factories as their overlord, and they were content to hold their
lands from him on the condition of protection on his part, and of
good behaviour and punctual payment of rent on their own. For the
combative energies of a young man such as Robert Clive there was
absolutely no field on Indian soil. The duties devolving on a writer
were {12}the duties of a clerk; to keep accounts; to take stock; to
make advances; to ship cargoes; to see that no infringement of the
Company's monopoly should occur. He was poorly paid; his life was a
life of dull routine; and, although after many years of toil the
senior clerks were sometimes permitted to trade on their own account
and thus to make large fortunes, the opportunity rarely came until
after many years of continuous suffering, and then generally when the
climate had exhausted the man's energies.

To a young man of the nature of Robert Clive such a life could not be
congenial. And, in fact, he hated it from the outset. He had left
England early in 1743; his voyage had been long and tiring: the ship
on which he sailed had put in at Rio, and was detained there nine
months; it remained anchored for a shorter period in St. Simon's Bay;
and finally reached Madras only at the close of 1744. The delays thus
occurring completely exhausted the funds of the young writer: he was
forced to borrow at heavy interest from the captain: the friend at
Madras, to whom he had letters of introduction, had quitted that
place. The solitary compensating advantage was this, that his stay at
Rio had enabled him to pick up a smattering of Portuguese.

We see him, at length arrived, entering upon those hard and
uninteresting duties to undertake which he had refused a life of far
less drudgery in England in a congenial climate and under a sun more
to be desired than dreaded. Cast loose in the profession he had
{13}selected, separated from re