mstantial falsehood, chicanery, perjury,
forgery, are the weapons, offensive and defensive, of the people of the
Lower Ganges. All those millions do not furnish one sepoy to the armies
of the Company. But as usurers, as money-changers, as sharp legal
practitioners, no class of human beings can bear a comparison with them.
With all his softness, the Bengalee is by no means placable in his
enmities or prone to pity. The pertinacity with which he adheres to his
purposes yields only to the immediate pressure of fear. Nor does he lack
a certain kind of courage which is often wanting to his masters. To
inevitable evils he is sometimes found to oppose a passive fortitude,
such as the Stoics attributed to their ideal sage. A European warrior
who rushes on a battery of cannon with a loud hurrah will sometimes
shriek under the surgeon's knife, and fall into an agony of despair at
the sentence of death. But the Bengalee who would see his country
overrun, his house laid in ashes, his children murdered or dishonored,
without having the spirit to strike one blow, has yet been known to
endure torture with the firmness of Mucius, and to mount the scaffold
with the steady step and even pulse of Algernon Sydney.

In Nuncomar the national character was strongly and with exaggeration
personified. The Company's servants had repeatedly detected him in the
most criminal intrigues. On one occasion he brought a false charge
against another Hindoo, and tried to substantiate it by producing forged
documents. On another occasion it was discovered that, while professing
the strongest attachment to the English, he was engaged in several
conspiracies against them, and in particular that he was the medium of a
correspondence between the court of Delhi and the French authorities in
the Carnatic. For these and similar practices he had been long detained
in confinement. But his talents and influence had not only procured his
liberation, but had obtained for him a certain degree of consideration
even among the British rulers of his country.

Clive was extremely unwilling to place a Mussulman at the head of the
administration of Bengal. On the other hand, he could not bring himself
to confer immense power on a man to whom every sort of villainy had
repeatedly been brought home. Therefore, though the Nabob, over whom
Nuncomar had by intrigue acquired great influence, begged that the
artful Hindoo might be entrusted with the government, Clive, after some
he