the more enlightened of the directors were beginning to realize, that unless the period which had still to elapse before the expiration of the exclusive privileges they possessed were employed in setting their house in order and coming to an equitable arrangement with the Government, they might see an end put to their monopoly and a corresponding fall in the value of Indian stock, which now stood at a gigantic premium. They also knew that there was an element of uncertainty in the title to a great portion of their present possessions, which made it advisable for them to agree quickly with their adversaries.
The treaties negotiated by Clive had raised the Company from the position of a trading corporation with a monopoly, to that of the sovereign of vast and growing territories. Their income, large in reality, larger yet in popular estimation, consisted of two parts: trade profits on the one hand, territorial revenue on the other. But this increase of wealth had caused no increased sense of responsibility, either in the proprietors at home or in their servants in India. The rapacity of the one was only equalled by the cruelty of the other: the horrors of the Blackhole were only exceeded by the crimes of the English invaders. As far back as 1759 Clive had himself declared to Pitt that it was doubtful if the Company could govern such vast possessions,[1] but since that time those possessions had been more than doubled by Clive himself, who, though the unsparing enemy of the abuses of the Company, had been himself too much implicated in transactions of a doubtful character, justifiable only by the circumstances of time and place, to make it possible for him to appear with advantage as the critic of the shortcomings of others. Nor does he appear to have ever been sincerely desirous of seeing a limit put to the territorial acquisitions of the Company. Thus, although the letter of instructions sent out to him by the Treasury Committee of the India House in September 30th, 1765, stated "that experience had shown that an influence maintained by force of arms is destructive of that commercial spirit which we ought to
- ↑ Clive to Mr. Pitt, January 7th, 1759.
