All
manner of oppressions and injustices were committed under the powerful
protection of the English name. Hastings declared that the only way of
ending the difficulty was to come to some definite settlement with the
Nawab as to his authority on the one hand and the Company's privileges
on the other. Together with Mr. Vansittart, the Governor, Hastings
visited the Nawab, and a plan of conciliation was made by which the
rights of the Nawab and the rights of the Company were duly apportioned
and declared. But the headstrong Council of the Company refused the
propositions of Warren Hastings and of Vansittart, and refused to make
any concessions to the Nawab. The irritated Nawab retaliated by
abolishing all internal duties upon trade, by which act he deprived the
English of the unjust advantages for which they had contended. It was
now a question which should attack the other first, and Mr. Ellis,
hearing a rumor of intended hostilities on the part of Mir Kasim,
attacked the Nawab, drove him out of his dominions and {253} set up Mir
Jaffier again for a time. Hastings protested against these acts, and
declared that he would have resigned but that he was unwilling to leave
the Company while engaged in a harassing war. But his position was
uncomfortable. His counsels and those of Mr. Vansittart were unheeded.
English aggression continued. Mr. Vansittart left for England in 1764,
and in the December of that year Hastings followed him, glad to leave a
scene of so much disorder, a disorder that was to increase alarmingly,
until in the September of 1765 Clive reappeared in India and set things
straight again.

[Sidenote: 1765-69--Hastings's return to England]

Of no period of Warren Hastings's life is less known than of the four
years which he spent in his native land--from 1765 to 1769. He did not
return to England like the traditional Nabob, with pockets overflowing
with rupees. He had not employed his time and his energies, as so many
other servants of John Company had done, solely to the furthering of
his own fortunes, and the filling of his own pockets. If he had sailed
for India fourteen years earlier as a penniless lad, he returned to
England comparatively a poor man. He had tried his hand at commerce
like every one else in India, but commerce was not much in his line.
He had the capacities of a statesman, he had the tastes of a man of
letters, but he did not in any great degree possess the qualities that
go