After having thus settled the affairs of the Company at Murshidábád, Clive proceeded by way of Patná to Benares, to meet there his friend General Carnac and the suppliant Nawáb-Wazír of Oudh. This interview was, in the eyes of Clive, likely to be fraught with the most important consequences, for he was bent on the securing of a frontier for the English possessions such as would offer the best points of defence against invasion; for, in his view, it was to be permanent.
It ought not to be attributed as a great political fault to Clive that his mind had not realized the fact that to maintain it is often necessary to advance. In a word, it would be most unfair to judge the action of 1765-6 by the lights of the experience of the century which followed. Up to the year 1757 the unwarlike inhabitants of Bengal had been the prey of the Mughal or the Maráthá. But in 1765, so far as could be judged, neither was to be feared. The Maráthá power had suffered in 1761, on the field of Pánipát, near Delhi, one of the most crushing defeats ever inflicted on a people, and Clive had no power of divining that the genius of a young member of one of their ruling families, who escaped wounded from the field, would, in a few years, raise the Maráthá power to more than its pristine greatness. As for the Mughal, his power was gone for ever; the representative prince was at the very moment a fugitive at Allahábád, not possessed of a stiver. What was there to be feared from him or from his family? In the
