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120 to accept the office of President, and to exercise its functions, until the pleasure of the Court should be known. Clive could not but accede to their request.

For, indeed, it was no time for weak administration and divided counsels. Again had the French attempted to recover the position in Southern India which Clive had wrested from them. Count Lally, one of the brilliant victors of Fontenoy, had been sent to Pondicherry with a considerable force, and the news had just arrived that he was marching on Tanjore, having recalled Bussy and his troops from the court of the Súbahdár of the Deccan. With the news there had come also a request that the Government of Bengal would return to the sister Presidency the troops lent to her by the latter in the hour of the former's need to recover Calcutta.

Clive felt all the urgency of the request; the possible danger of refusing to comply with it; the full gravity of the situation at Madras. He also was one of those who had been lent. If the troops were to return, it was he who should lead them back. But he felt strongly that his place, and their place also, was in Bengal. Especially was it so in the presence of the rumours, already circulating, of great successes achieved by Lally, and by the French fleet. Such rumours, followed by his departure, would certainly incite the nobles of Bengal and Bihár, with or without Mír Jafar, to strike for the independence which they felt, one and all, he had wrested from them.

Matters, indeed, in the provinces of Bengal and