Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/157

Rh Dupleix, who had no military commander to match against Clive and Lawrence.

The French leader in India was beginning to find that practice was making the English no worse players than his own side at the game which he himself had introduced. The whole strength of the French had been exerted and exhausted in vain against Trichinopoli; the protracted siege had brought them nothing but disaster. Not only his native allies, but also the French Government at home, were losing their former confidence in Dupleix; for his policy may be said to have broken down when the French candidates for rulership were worsted, and when, after some years of heavy expenditure on these irregular hostilities, the results fell so far short of the expectations that he had raised. Toward the end of 1753, he made overtures for peace, but as soon as the English discovered that he intended to retain in his own person the Nawabship of the Karnatic, they broke off negotiations. As his policy fell into disrepute, he had naturally been led to disguise the real condition of the Company's finances; so when the directors in Paris were suddenly advised from Pondicherri that they were two millions of francs in debt, they determined at once to recall him.

The English Company at home had long been pressing their government to protest diplomatically against this illegitimate system of private war and against all the Indian proceedings of Dupleix, whose manifest object they declared to be the extirpation of their settlements. They urged that "the trade carried on by