Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/222

182 ing more surely leads to misrule than the degradation of a civil government to subserve the will of some arbitrary force or faction within the state; and in Bengal the evils of precarious and divided authority were greatly heightened by special aggravations.

In the first place, the Company and the Nawab were equally hard pressed for money. The Company was making large and emergent remittances to Madras for sustaining the war against the French, and it was obliged, at the same time, to maintain an army of more than six thousand men in Bengal. The Nawab, who did not choose to place himself entirely at the mercy of his foreign allies by disbanding his own forces, was beset by mutinous bands claiming arrears that he could not pay. Meanwhile, he wanted troops to put down disorder within his territories and to repulse attacks from without; for some of the principal landholders were in revolt against him; the Marathas were threatening Bengal on the west; and the heir apparent of the Delhi emperor had appeared with a force in the northwestern districts, on the pretext of reclaiming a province of his father's empire.

Secondly, the Company was not merely the Nawab's too powerful auxiliaries, demanding a large share of his revenue as the price of their annual support; nor were they, like the Marathas or the Afghans, an army of occupation that might be bought out by disbursement of one huge indemnity. They represented an association which insisted upon regular remittances to Europe; their primary interests and objects were