consent to pass the best years of life in exile, under a burning sun, for no other consideration than these stinted wages.  It had accordingly been understood, from a very early period, that the Company’s agents were at liberty to enrich themselves by their private trade.  This practice had been seriously injurious to the commercial interests of the corporation.  That very intelligent observer, Sir Thomas Roe, in the reign of James the First, strongly urged the Directors to apply a remedy to the abuse.  “Absolutely prohibit the private trade,” said he; “for your business will be better done.  I know this is harsh.  Men profess they come not for bare wages.  But you will take away this plea if you give great wages to their content; and then you know what you part from.”

In spite of this excellent advice, the Company adhered the old system, paid low salaries, and connived at the indirect gains of the agents.  The pay of a member of Council was only three hundred pounds a year.  Yet it was notorious that such a functionary could not live in India for less than ten times that sum; and it could not be, expected that he would be content to live even handsomely in India without laying up something against the time of his return to England.  This system, before the conquest of Bengal, might affect the amount of the dividends payable to the proprietors, but could do little harm in any other way.  But the Company was now a ruling body.  Its servants might still be called factors, junior merchants, senior merchants.  But they were in truth proconsuls, propraetors, procurators, of extensive, regions.  They had immense power.  Their regular pay was universally admitted to be insufficient.  They were, by the ancient usage of the service, and by the implied permission of their employers, warranted in enriching themselves by indirect means; and this had been the origin of the frightful oppression and corruption which had desolated Bengal.  Clive saw clearly that it was absurd to give men power, and to require them to live in penury.  He justly concluded that no reform could be effectual which should not be coupled with a plan for liberally remunerating the civil servants of the Company.  The Directors, he knew, were not disposed to sanction any increase of the salaries out of their own treasury.  The only course which remained open to the governor was one which exposed him to much misrepresentation, but which we think him fully justified in adopting.  He appropriated to the support of the service the monopoly of salt, which has formed, down to our own time, a principal head of Indian revenue; and he divided the proceeds according to a scale which seems to have been not unreasonably fixed.  He was in consequence accused by his enemies, and has been accused by historians, of disobeying his instructions, of violating his promises, of authorising that very abuse which it was his special mission to destroy, namely, the trade of the Company’s servants.  But every discerning and impartial