Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/22

12 our Indian history up to that time, which appears in the records as &quot; firmauud from the King Shah Aalum, granting the dewany of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa to the Company, 1765.&quot; The date was the 12th August, the place Benares, the throne an English dining-table covered with embroidered cloth and surmounted by a chair in Olive s tent. It is all pictured by a Mahometan contemporary, who indignantly exclaims that so great a &quot; transaction was done and finished in less time than would have been taken up in the sale of a jackass.&quot; By this deed the Company became the real sovereign rulers of thirty millions of people, yielding a revenue of four millions sterling. All this had been ac complished by Olive in the few brief years since he had a/enged &quot; the Black Hole&quot; of Calcutta. This would be a email matter, or might even be a cause of reproach, were it not that the Company s, now the Queen s, undisputed sovereignty proved, after a sore period of transition, the salvation of these millions. The lieutenant-governorship of Bengal, with some additions since Olive s time, now contains sixty millions of people, and yields an annual revenue of twelve millions sterling, of which eight goes every year to assist in the good government of the rest of India. But Olive, though thus moderate and even generous to an extent which called forth the astonishment of the natives, had all a statesman s foresight. On the same date, he obtained not only an imperial charter for the Company s possessions in the Carnatic also, thus completing the work he began at Arcot, but a third firmaun for the highest of all the lieutenancies or soubaships of the empire, that of the Deccan itself. The fact has only recently been discovered, by distinct allusion to it in a letter from the secret committee of the court of directors to the Madras Government, dated 27th April 1768. Still so disproportionate seemed the British force, not only to the number and strength of the princes and people of India, but to the claims and ambition of French, Dutch, and Danish rivals, that Olive s last advice to the directors, as he finally left India in 1777, was this, given in a remark able state paper but little known : &quot; We are sensible that, since the acquisition of the dewany, the power formerly belonging to the soubali of those provinces is totally, in fact, vested in the East India Company. Nothing remains to him bat the name and shadow of authority. This name, however, this shadow, it is indispensably necessary we should seem to venerate.&quot; On a wider arena, even that of the Great Mogul himself, the shadow was kept up till it obliterated itself in the massacre of English people in the Delhi palace in 1857 ; and the Queen was proclaimed, first, direct ruler on the 1st November 1858, and then empress of ludia on the 1st January 1377. Having thus founded the empire of British India, Olive s painful duty was to create a pure and strong administration, such as alone would justify its possession.by foreigners. The civil service was de-orientalized by raising the miserable salaries which had tempted its members to be corrupt, by forbidding the acceptance of gifts from natives, and by exacting covenants under which participation in the inland trade was stopped. Not less important were his military reforms. With his usual tact and nerve he put down a mutiny of the English officers, who chose to resent the veto against receiving presents and the reduction of batta at a time when two Mahratta armies were marching on Bengal. His reorganization of the army, on the lines of that which he had begun after Plassy, and which was neglected during his second visit to England, has since attracted the admiration of the ablest Indian officers. He divided the whole into three brigades, so as to make each a complete force, in itself equal to a&amp;gt;jy single native army that could be brought against it. His one fault was that of his age and his position, with so small a number of men. He lacked a sufficient number of British artillerymen, and would not commit the mistake of his successors, who trained natives to work the guns, which were turned against us with such effect in 1857. It is sufficient to say that Government has returned to his policy, for not a native gunner is now to be found save in a few unhealthy and isolated frontier posts. Olive s final return to England, a poorer man than he went out, in spite of still more tremendous temptations, was the signal for an outburst of his personal enemies, exceeded only by that which the malice of Sir Philip Francis after wards excited against Warren Hastings. Every civilian, whose illicit gains he had cut off, every officer whose con spiracy he had foiled, every proprietor or director, like Sulivan, whose selfish schemes he had thwarted, now sought their opportunity. He had, with consistent generosity, at once made over the legacy of 70,000 from the grateful Jaffier AH, as the capital of what has since been known as &quot; the Olive Fund,&quot; for the support of invalided European soldiers, as well as officers, and their widows, and the Company had allowed 8 per cent, on the Bum for an object which it was otherwise bound to meet. Burgoyne, of Saratoga memory, did his best to induce the House of Commons, in which Lord Olive was now member for Shrewsbury, to impeach the man who gave his country an empire, and the people of that empire peace and justice, and that, as we have seen, without blot on the gift, save in the matter of Omichund. The result, after the brilliant and honourable defences of his career which will be found in Almon s Debates for 1773, was a compromise that saved England this time from the dishonour which, when Warren Hastings had to run the gauntlet, put it in the same category with France in the treatment of its public bene factors abroad. On a division the House, by 155 to 95, carried the motion that Lord Olive &quot;did obtain and possess himself &quot; of 234,000 during his first administration of Bengal ; but, refusing to express an opinion on the fact, it passed unanimously the second motion, at five in the morning, &quot; that Robert, Lord Olive, did at the same time render great and meritorious services to his country.&quot; The one moral question, the one stain of all that brilliant and tempted life the Omichund treaty was not touched. Only one who can personally understand what Olive s power and services were will rightly realize the effect on him, though in the prime of life, of the discussions through which he had been dragged. We have referred to Warren Hastings s impeachment, but there is a more recent parallel. The marquis of Dalhousie did almost as much to complete the territorial area and civilized administration of British India in his eight years term of office as Lord Olive to found the empire in a similar period. As Olive s accusers sought a new weapon in the great famine of 1770, for which he was in no sense responsible, so there were critics who accused Dal housie of having caused that mutiny which, in truth, he would have prevented had the British Government listened to his counsel not to reduce the small English army in the country, Clive tells us his own feelings in a passage of first importance when we seek to form an opinion on the fatal act by which he ended his life. In the greatest of his speeches, in reply to Lord North, he said, &quot; My situation, sir, has not been an easy one for these twelve months past, and though my conscience could never accuse me, yet I felt for my friends who were involved in the same censure as myself I have been examined by the select committee more like a sheep-stealer than a member of this House.&quot; Fully accepting that statement, and believing him to have been purer than his accusers in spite of temptations unknown to them, we see in Olive s end the result merely of physical suffering, of chronic disease which opium failed to abate, while the worry and chagrin 