Clive committed great faults; and we have not attempted to disguise them.  But his faults, when weighed against his merits, and viewed in connection with his temptations, do not appear to us to deprive him of his right to an honourable place in the estimation of posterity.

From his first visit to India dates the renown of the English arms in the East.  Till he appeared, his countrymen were despised as mere pedlars, while the French were revered as a people formed for victory and command.  His courage and capacity dissolved the charm.  With the defence of Arcot commences that long series of Oriental triumphs which closes with the fall of Ghizni.  Nor must we forget that he was only twenty-five years old when he approved himself ripe for military command.  This is a rare if not a singular distinction.  It is true that Alexander, Conde, and Charles the Twelfth, won great battles at a still earlier age—­ but those princes were surrounded by veteran generals of distinguished skill, to whose suggestions must be attributed the victories of the Granicus, of Rocroi and of Narva.  Clive, an inexperienced youth, had yet more experience than any of those who served under him.  He had to form himself, to form his officers, and to form his army.  The only man, as far as we recollect, who at an equally early age ever gave equal proof of talents for war, was Napoleon Bonaparte.

From Clive’s second visit to India dates the political ascendency of the English in that country.  His dexterity and resolution realised, in the course of a few months, more than an the gorgeous visions which had floated before the imagination of Dupleix.  Such an extent of cultivated territory, such an amount of revenue, such a multitude of subjects, was never added to the dominion of Rome by the most successful proconsul.  Nor were such wealthy spoils ever borne under arches of triumph, down the Sacred Way, and through the crowded Forum, to the threshold of Tarpeian Jove.  The fame of those who subdued Antiochus and Tigranes grows dim when compared with the splendour of the exploits which the young English adventurer achieved at the head of an army not equal in numbers to one half of a Roman legion.

From Clive’s third visit to India dates the purity of the administration of our Eastern empire.  When he landed in Calcutta in 1765, Bengal was regarded as a place to which Englishmen were sent only to get rich, by any means, in the shortest possible time.  He first made dauntless and unsparing war on that gigantic system of oppression, extortion, and corruption.  In that war he manfully put to hazard his ease, his fame, and his splendid fortune.  The same sense of justice which forbids us to conceal or extenuate the faults of his earlier days compels us to admit that those faults were nobly repaired.  If the reproach of the Company and of its servants has been taken away, if in India the yoke of foreign masters, elsewhere the heaviest of all yokes, has been found