ing still greater influence unless some decided measures
should be taken to prevent them.

At this juncture Robert Clive, a young man who had been employed as
clerk in the service of the English East India Company, but who had
obtained a humble position in the army, obtained permission to try his
hand at driving back the enemy. It was a work for which he was
fitted. He met with success from the first, and he followed it up by
the splendid victory of Arcot, 1751, which practically gave the
English control of southern India. Shortly after that, Clive returned
to England.

During his absence the native prince of Bengal undertook an expedition
against Calcutta, a wealthy British trading post. He captured the
fort which protected it (1756), and seizing the principal English
residents, one hundred and forty-six in number, drove them at the
point of the sword into a prison called the "Black Hole," a dungeon
less than twenty feet square, and having but two small windows.

In such a climate, in the fierce heat of midsummer, that dungeon would
have been too close for a single European captive; to crowd it with
more than sevenscore persons for a night meant death by all the
agonies of heat, thirst, and suffocation. In vain they endeavored to
bribe the guard to transfer part of them to another room, in vain they
begged for mercy, in vain they tried to burst the door. Their jailers
only mocked them and would do nothing.

When daylight came the floor was heaped with corpses. Out of the
hundred and forty-six prisoners only twenty-three were alive and they
were so changed "that their own mothers would not have known them."[1]

[1] Macaulay's "Essay on Clive."

When Clive returned he was met with a cry for vengeance. He gathered
his troops, recovered Calcutta, and ended by fighting that great
battle of Plassey, 1757, which was the means of permanently
establishing the English empire in India on a firm foundation. (See
map opposite.)

545. The Seven Years' War in Europe and America, 1756-1763.

Before the contest had closed by which England won her Asiatic
dominions, a new war had broken out. In the fifth year, 1756, of the
New Style[2] of reckoning time, the aggressive designs of Frederick
the Great of Prussia caused such alarm that a grand alliance was
formed by France, Russia, Austria, and Poland to check his further
advance. Great Britain, however, gave her support to Frederick, in
hope of humbling her old enemy